[ Cheers and applause ] -Hello.

Hello.

Um... What's up?

Yeah, you guys packed this out.

Talking about poetry on a Friday -- or Saturday.

Let's give ourselves another -- for you guys.

Thank you for coming through.

Thank you for coming through.

You guys are a whooping and whooing.

Wild.

Um, Emily, I want to get this out of the way and ask you about an adaptation of the "Odyssey."

[ Laughter ] Um, you were in primary school, right?

Um, were you in it?

-I was Athena, yes.

-You were Athena?

-Before Zendaya did it, I did it!

-Oh, wow.

Tell me about it.

Tell me about it.

You were, like, what, eight years old at this point?

-I was eight years old.

So I went to my local elementary school.

I grew up in Oxford, and the teachers there were sick of putting on the Nativity play every year, and they wanted to mix it up.

So they did the "Odyssey" instead.

-Said, "Out with Jesus, in with Athena."

-In with Athena, yes.

-Okay, nice.

High production value, I'm guessing.

-High production values, and the headmaster was very game and volunteered to be Polyphemus.

And we constructed a papier-mâché mask and we got to gouge out his eye, which was fantastic.

-Oh, nice.

-Yeah, it was really fun.

-Was that like a, um... -That was the spider bite.

Yes.

-Was it?

It was.

-It was the spider bite.

-Did you know that you had gotten bitten by the spider at that point?

-I knew there was a spider.

Yes.

I mean, I didn't know that I would get to have a day job that would continue with the spider path.

I thought, you know, most -- in the case of Spider-Man, he has to work at night, go to high school during the day.

And I thought it was going to be like that.

But I feel very lucky that I get to continue this passion throughout my career.

-Yeah.

Arthur, what about you?

When did you first start translating literature?

What was the first translation that you ever did?

-I first started translating when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley, and I was reading classical Chinese poems and reading translations in English that I felt like the voice and language was from another era and another time.

And I thought, well, it was presumptuous of me as a young poet.

And I thought, "Well, why not?

I can try my hand at this."

-Man, to be young, to have that... Did you think it was, like, bad?

The stuff that you were reading was poor translation or just, like, not up to the times?

-The language felt stilted.

It felt -- the diction felt really out of another era.

And sometimes there were sort of cultural references that were overlaid onto the Chinese poems, and I thought, for instance, reading a poem by Li Bai, there was -- which has the moon and the shadow and the speaker and I read a translation, and it turned the speaker and the shadow into a master-slave relationship.

And I thought, "Wow, where did that come from?"

And I thought, again, I should try my hand at this.

-Yeah, yeah.

Um, Emily, in your new book, there's a -- I think it's the second essay.

It's called "The Pleasures of Translation."

And it's -- a lot of it is an overview of the internal arguments within the field about the ethics of doing it.

You name-check a book called, like, "Against World Literature," you know, the argument being that translating into English sort of like homogenizes the untranslatable or something like that.

Um, and I kind of want to get into all of that thickness and messy question with you guys, but at the core of it, like, why bother translating, for you?

-Mm-hmm, I think it's -- I mean, I love that Arthur brought up just that, in a way, there has to be a kind of chutzpah about it, especially if you're retranslating, as we both have, texts that there already are translations.

Why do it again?

I think it's very easy to see why should there be a translation of a text where there is no translation into a particular language.

Because I want -- I'm curious about the whole world, and I know that in a single lifetime I'm not going to get to read most of world literature, because I do not have time to learn most languages.

And I'm so grateful to the people who bring Arabic and Mandarin literature to people who can't read those languages.

But in the case of retranslation, there's an extra pressure on, why do this?

Because there already are perfectly adequate, good translations out there.

But I think, for me as for Arthur, there's this sense of there's something else about this text that I think I can convey in different ways.

And it's not that that's then saying all of the others were no good, but there's some other vision of this text, some other version of "What does it feel like to read the original?"

that I think isn't there in what's out there.

And if I think I can do some different experience which is authentically engaged with the original, I want to try to provide that, even if it's more or less -- I think it's also inevitably impossible to create the exact same experience, but I can do perhaps something else that's equally responsibly engaged with the original and also different.

And that seems to me really worthwhile.

-Limbong: Yeah.

Um, Arthur, that kind of leads me to a question about -- I want to ask about the cover of your book.

I believe it's a piece called -- the cover to your book "Transient Worlds."

It's a piece -- the art is "Moon Jar Dialogue," right, yeah.

So it's a bunch of, like, smaller jars and a larger jar in front of it.

And I don't know if this is what you intended, but this is what I got out of it is that, is there a danger when one translation of a thing takes up all the oxygen and it is the primary thing that people know that thing of, and there are no other options?

-Yes, absolutely.

I think, um, the sort of equivalent of the big jars, that can be valuable as a point of entry for people who don't know a particular poem or text, but if it becomes the only source of looking at that, then of course it's dangerous and dominant.

And one of my ideas in putting the book together -- it's called "Transient Worlds" -- is the idea that translations are by nature ephemeral because language is changing, or vocabulary is changing over time, or syntax -- the way we use language.

And so each translation has an ephemerality to it.

But I was also thinking, on the way coming to DC, in a way, these great texts -- and ultimately I think you have to love the poem that you translate, and there's a trust and commitment involved -- but that isn't it great that a work of art can be sort of reborn again and again through multiple translations, and it's never exhausted?

So you can have a large or foundational translation, but that's, of course, not the only way to see it.

That is, hopefully, a gateway into seeing multiple ways.

-Limbong: Yeah.

For people who haven't read the book, so, in it, um, you know, Arthur presents these original poems and there's different and various translations of said poem.

Um, and I think, when I was reading, there are multiple times in the book where you point out that, like, being accurate was worse, right, in the "poetic" sense.

So before we get into some of the nitty-gritty, I just want to ask, is the goal of translation to write an "accurate" poem or a "good" poem?

[ Laughter ] -One of the endless discussions.

My commitment... -We got 20 minutes.

[ Laughter ] -...is, um, to the good poem.

I want a voice that's contemporary.

I want a shape of language that's alive and vital and has a kind of urgency to it that really speaks to the reader.

I do want some sense of accuracy.

And of course that can be, um, very nebulous.

I have an example of a Pablo Neruda poem where, line by line, the Spanish is totally accurate, and yet when you assemble all the pieces together, the voice, the translation itself is somehow stiff and doesn't come alive.

And so if forced to choose, I, as a poet, am choosing the good poem.

But I want it to have some sense of accuracy or fidelity.

I don't want the reader to say, "Oh, this is so different from the poem that they have nothing to do with each other."

I want that sense of -- grounded sense of, okay, the translator really believes in this work and is trying, with their configuration of language, with their voice and vision, trying to do, in the service of translation, bring that, to carry it over alive into this other language.

-Emily, where are you on the on the accurate-to-good meter?

-False binary.

[ Laughter ] Totally false, because if it's a good poem in the original, how can it be accurate if you translate it in a way that makes it feel totally dead?

That's not accurate.

Right, so I think it's about thinking through what -- accuracy has to involve multiple different types of truth because a poem is not just one thing.

A poem is how it makes you feel, how it sounds, how its rhythms are, as well as what the words mean when you look them up in the dictionary.

And I think, especially with ancient poetry, people very often have this idea that I just look all the words up in the dictionary and bung something down, and I've understood the syntax and I've demonstrated to my teacher that I did my homework -- that's accuracy -- and it's not, if what the original is, is more than that and conveys -- It has rhythm.

It has meter.

It has vivid images.

It gives you goosebumps.

It's exciting.

It has a particular kind of pacing.

It has a particular kind of voice and emotion and whatever other things it's doing.

If you don't -- if you ignore all of that, that's not accuracy.

-Limbong: Mm-hmm.

On the hand of if you're changing something like, say, the meter of a poem and you're changing -- you're changing kind of like the core of the music.

So it goes beyond a cover song and more into an interpretation, no?

I guess, is that necessarily bad?

-I mean, of course there's got to be an interpretive element, right?

'Cause you're never going to be able to say, okay, this thing which exists in thousands of words, none of which I'm gonna use because I'm not gonna use any of the same words.

I'm gonna use 100% different words, and yet I'm gonna try to make it somehow the same.

And so this question of "What is equivalence?"

is something that translation theorists wrestle with endlessly.

That's what the whole field is about.

There are multiple kinds of equivalence, and we just have to recognize that and understand that you're gonna have to make choices about the priorities in terms of maybe I will use a different meter, but I'll use metricality.

Or maybe I won't use meter at all.

Most translators of Homer in the 20th century have used no meter.

I'm sort of trying to push back against that by using meter, but I'm not using the same meter because the whole tradition of Anglophone poetics is different from the tradition of archaic Greek poetics.

That kind of thing is gonna come up with any language pair.

-Right.

I guess, to make this a little bit more concrete, I want to ask you both if there was a time where you were translating a poem where the -- I feel like I'm setting up a false dichotomy here -- but where the "accurate" word sucks, but like a -- the "good" word doesn't completely convey the meaning of a thing?

Arthur, do you want to take that first?

-Um, I'm gonna give you a long response.

I hope that's okay.

I'm currently working on a four-line poem from a Tang dynasty poet, Li Shangyin.

And, um, like many of his poems, it draws on Chinese mythology.

So I need to give you a little background to answer your question.

In Chinese mythology there were 10 suns, and the Earth was overheating and having fires everywhere.

And in the mythology, Hou Yi, one of the archers, shoots down nine of the ten suns so that we have the one son that we have today.

And as a reward, he's given an elixir of immortality.

And in the legend, his apprentice shows up at the house and storms in and wants to find that elixir and become immortal.

And Hou Yi's wife, Chang'e, knows where the elixir is, and to prevent him from getting it, she drinks it.

And she doesn't know what's gonna happen, but she floats to the moon and she becomes the moon goddess, and she's trapped there forever.

In this short four-line poem, the first three lines are fairly easy to translate.

And then the last line, which is seven characters in Chinese -- it's two and then two and then three -- the first two are like, um, "jade green seas, blue skies," and that's fairly easy to make the choices there in terms of interpretation.

In classical Chinese, there's no distinction between singular and plural, but it makes sense intuitively to think of plurals -- "jade green seas" -- and then another color, "blue skies," rather than "heaven."

And then Li Shangyin ends the poem with the very simple three characters -- yè yè xin -- which is "night, night," and then xin is "heart and mind."

In ancient Chinese, there's no distinction between the two, so... And there's the sense of longing, because if you think about the meaning of it, the green seas and the blue skies, that's an image of the Earth.

And she is trapped on the moon forever.

And "night, night" and the "heart," there's this sense of longing and loss that she is trapped there and can't ever get there.

So in terms of accuracy, you could say, "Jade green seas, blue skies, night after night in the mind," but that doesn't quite -- or "night after night in the heart."

And then if you want to make it poetic, you could think like, "Night after night, imbued in the heart and mind," but then that's too long, because one of the great things about Li Shangyin is the compression.

So it's actually a thing I'm struggling with and I haven't decided how to find -- how do you balance the two, right, yeah.

-You can't just, like, flip a coin.

"All right, I guess it's 'mind' we're going with," yeah.

-I have to think of another way to do it.

-Yeah, yeah.

Emily, what about you?

-Uh, I mean, pretty much every line can be -- can be an example of this, right?

So I'll just -- I'll talk a little bit about the final line of the proem of the "Odyssey," the sort of introduction to the poem.

Ton hamothen ge, thea, thygater Dios, eipe kai hemin.

And so it starts with, "Of these..." So it's just one word.

Of these "things," of these "events," of these "adventures," of these "travels," of this "story," of whatever has just been described about everyone else is gonna die except for Odysseus on the journey home.

All of that stuff.

Um, hamothen ge -- so from "somewhere," from "anywhere," from "some kind of starting point" within all of this stuff -- "something" as a starting point.

Um, then the relatively easy address to the goddess, the goddess daughter of Zeus, but it alliterates.

Ideally I want to alliterate.

How can I alliterate when I'm using different words?

And then eipe kai hemin -- "speak also to us."

So there's both an echo of the beginning -- there's "tell" at the beginning in the first line, "tell" again in that last line of the passage.

So, ideally, those two words should echo each other -- "tell" and "tell."

But then who are "us"?

Who are "we"?

This is a poem that's designed for oral performance, so it's designed to create a sense of iterability of every time this line is spoken it's "us."

And so what I did in my 2017 translation is, "Tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning."

And "find the beginning" is, in a way, a sort of gloss on, "From somewhere, from anywhere, Goddess, please find this place within all of this.

Find that place and start there, and then we'll go on from there in this poem."

I'm actually doing a translation of the "Odyssey."

I have no idea what I'm gonna do with that line now.

So I think there's an infinite things one can do with it because it's such a rich starting point, which problematizes the whole idea of, what even is a starting point in this complex narrative?

-Do you remember what was on the drafts?

-I went through a hundred different drafts, and I'm doing it all again.

-[ Laughing ] Yeah, yeah.

Um, Arthur, in the -- in -- you know, I had alluded to this, you know, arguments that, like, translation changes, like, a lot, right?

Changes, like, stuff that's untranslatable, you know, stuff that sort of stands on the edges.

I think it's the first poem in your new book, "Drinking Wine (V)," right?

Number five, not five wines.

You write a little bit about how, um, in Chinese poetry from this time, it's rare that a poet will use the word "I," right, will rarely center themselves.

And yet, in all of the translations that you include, including your own, you use the word "I."

-Yes.

-Are you not like fundamentally changing something at the very core of that poem by doing that?

-I don't think so.

I think, um, you know, it's fascinating to think of the structures of languages, but I think, with English, you're really forced to choose a pronoun 'cause it's, you know, "Build house near where people live."

And if you just say, okay, "Build house near where people live," then it sounds like an imperative, a command, or it can totally distort it.

So then you're sort of forced to choose.

Well, what if it's a "you" or an "I" or a "he" or... But ultimately I think English makes you make certain choices.

And I think Emily has mentioned, really, as a translator, we're all working as interpreters.

And I like to think of it as like we're interpreters of a song.

So I think English is asking me, as a translator, to choose a pronoun.

And because it's an intensely personal poem, it makes sense for me to use an "I."

It doesn't feel obtrusive to me.

But if I were to use the "I" repeatedly, again and again and again in the translation, then I would say, "Well, wait a minute.

This really is maybe overdone."

But that initial assertion of just this is an "I" speaking personally, to me it didn't feel like a violation of what's there in the Chinese.

And just as an aside, I want to say, of course, there are these generalizations, and then there are the great moments when they're broken.

So Li Bai is the famous poet who puts an "I" into a poem.

And in one particular poem, he's got this great line that says, "With the stroke of my pen, I shake the Five Mountains" -- which is north, south, east, west, center -- the known world -- with a pen, with a poem, the speaker is saying.

And this is a society where the "I" is rarely used, right?

So that power of suddenly inserting the self and the voice and the confidence of the poet is really a great moment in Li Bai's poetry, where the speaker says, "With a stroke of my pen, I shake the Five Mountains."

I mean, it's just, like, stunning.

So when something unexpected happens like that, it can be so powerful.

-Limbong: Yeah.

Um, speaking about stuff that's untranslatable, Emily, um, I think there are a couple essays in your book that deal with comedy.

And I think when it comes to, like, love and death and desire, a lot of that is somewhat universal.

We all know how it feels to feel, like, grief or to feel in love or, you know, hopefully, all that stuff.

But comedy is such a funny and difficult thing because it relies on expectations, it relies on norms, it relies on us agreeing that, you know, this is a thing, and then I'm gonna make a left turn here.

Um, and so, for you, what do you think are the challenges in translating humor?

-Yeah, I mean, I actually think there are parallel challenges in translating serious literature, in translating lyric as well as comic genres, including satire as well as dramatic comedy.

I think actually the gaps between both languages and social values and social assumptions and even syntactical assumptions about, for instance, Greek has a dual and English doesn't.

So if you're writing in ancient Greek, you're always gonna be deciding, okay, is it two people or is it many people?

Does the two-ness matter?

That kind of thing happens all the time, even if it's not, um, questions about comedy.

But, yes, I have essays about both Greek and Roman comedy and also about the very often comic poetry of Catullus and the issues of translating obscenity and just how the assumptions about, what is norm-breaking enough to get a laugh but not so norm-breaking that it's actually horrible?

And in terms of Roman comedy, "Oh, yes, we're gonna beat up the slave again.

Ha ha!"

That clearly gets a laugh if you're a Roman audience.

Doesn't really get so much of a laugh from most modern audiences.

Rightly not, because that's actually horrific and not funny.

And so part of what I tried to wrestle with in those essays is just how comedy -- I think you're right to point to how there can be something very, very culturally specific both about values and assumptions in terms of power, because comedy is sort of very often about how can social hierarchies cause misunderstandings and breaks in culture, which then can get resolved by the end of the play or the end of the text.

And then also these -- both the comedy of let's put some bad words in there and get a laugh line through the bad words, which will then rely on social assumptions, which may well be debatable and different across cultures.

And then also these sort of questions about what assumptions about, um, about rape or about how people control each other might be present in jokes, and which things count as funny and don't count as funny across different cultures.

And then also these other kinds of questions about, within current comedy or stand-up, Very often comedy is very local, right?

And it's let's make a joke about a particular individual who's in the news cycle right now.

That's the case for fifth-century Athenian comedy too.

And if you end up having to spend three hours with the footnotes, then you've kind of lost the joke.

So that's also an issue.

-Yeah, if they were doing late-night comedy back then, just like, "Hey!

[ Speaking gibberish ]" -"How about so-and-so?"

-Yeah.

It's funny.

I think, sort of like in those essays there's this point that, like, comedy -- I guess it's not that different -- like, sort of brags about being anti-establishment or whatever and like goes against the status quo, whereas like by virtue of doing it, it's sort of kind of establishing a status quo, right, and sort of reinforcing the power.

-Very often it's much more conservative than tragedy or epic is, while having this affect of being, "Look how rebellious we are."

-Yeah.

And so do you think, when translating comedy, the responsibility of the translator is to get a laugh, or accurately portray what they were laughing at?

-I mean, I think, again, it really depends on the specific goals of a particular translation.

I mean, if you're doing an adaptation for the stage, you've got to be entertaining, right?

You've got to have the laugh lines.

Whereas if you're doing the kind of translation that might be printed next to the original and you're allowed to have very long end notes, that's a very different kind of author function.

So I actually think there isn't a right answer.

It just depends, which kind of translation is that?

So I think it also -- I mean, going back to this question of, in fact, there should not just be one vase.

There should be multiple different vases.

And the vases have different author functions because they have different goals in terms of, what are we doing for the readers?

-In "Hamlet" there's the great passage when the players come and there's gonna be the play within the play, and Hamlet turns to the actors and says, I think, "Do not saw the air."

Meaning, "Don't make it melodramatic.

Don't go for the cheap laughs."

The laughs will be there, but trust the text, trust the experience that's gonna be there, and the laughs -- the sort of light and the dark, or simultaneously, they coexist and they will be there, and trust the language.

I've always liked that, where he's like, inside of the play, the play within the play, he's instructing these actors.

-Yes, he's both an actor and a director.

-Yes, yes.

-Um, in terms of trusting the language, Arthur, you write in the book about translating even if you don't know the language, right?

And you write in the book about Carol Moldaw, who translated a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva from Russian.

Um, and she didn't know any Russian.

Can you tell him a little bit about how that all went down?

-So Carol Moldaw doesn't know a single word of Russian, but her best friend in Santa Fe grew up in Moscow, knows Russian poems by memory and loves Russian poetry.

And one day they were having coffee, and Irina Ross said, "I love Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva," and they decided to translate one poem by each poet.

And Irina Ross read the poem in Russian, and Carol recorded it.

And she went through the Cyrillic line by line, phrase by phrase, with Irina Ross.

So they had the Cyrillic, then they had Irina Ross's crib, and then Carol Moldaw wrote clusters of words under each Russian word, and then she started to string words together in English.

She did not want to see other translations in English to be influenced by them, but she would periodically call Irina and say, "Okay, I'm thinking about this phrase.

What do I do?"

And then together, through collaboration, they made a beautiful translation of a poem from Russian.

And I know it's provocative, but, um, I always feel like even if you know another language -- I've spent decades studying classical Chinese poetry -- I always feel like I have more to learn, that there's someone who has a fresh perspective, and the more conversation I have is better.

So it's provocative, but I think risk-taking and worth it to invite a reader to say, look, you may not know another language, but maybe your parents, a relative, a friend, a teacher knows another language, has a poem that they love.

Why not take that risk and build a bridge and work together toward creating a translation through collaboration?

-Yeah, I guess that raises questions of sort of authorship a little bit over there.

And like in this instance, like, who there is the translator?

Is it Carol?

-I would say it's Carol because she's making the choices as to how that translation is going to look in the end.

Irina can say, "Oh, I think that word is wrong," or, "I'd question this phrase," but ultimately Carol Moldaw is making the translation.

-Yeah, I mean, and there's also a couple other.

One could fairly criticize a sort of game of telephone there, right, where things are changing in each translation and you're ever changing it.

I don't know, just like when we were chatting in the in the green room, we were talking about Ezra Pound.

Shout out Ezra Pound.

-[ Laughs ] Maybe not.

[ Laughter ] -And, you know, he was -- he famously translated a poem from Chinese and, you know, didn't know the language, and people, you know, criticized him for that.

But it's like, I don't know, do you guys think -- should we give him a break on that one?

-It's a great poem.

That's the challenging thing about it, right?

Because in some ways, it's really disturbing that somebody should sort of claim this heritage which is not his heritage and did not belong to him and he had no qualifications for this.

And yet the result was kind of a good poem.

-Yeah.

I mean, I think in Ezra Pound's case, he was working off of the notes of Ernest Fenollosa.

So there was another kind of collaboration, even though it wasn't two people talking face to face.

Ezra Pound had notes by a Japanese scholar of ancient Chinese poems.

And he -- it's been said that the 19 poems he translated into English under the title "Cathay" was one of the most influential books of poetry in the 20th century.

It was a revelation to American readers to discover ancient Chinese poetry.

And in the particular poem "The River-Merchant's Wife," which is his most famous translation, there are things no scholar has, to my knowledge, pointed out that the Chinese place names are transliterated into Japanese.

So I always find that really jarring.

Like at the end, it's a beautiful love story, and the woman is saying, "I will follow you all the way to" -- and in Chinese it's "Long Wind Sands," which is like infinitely far away on the Silk Road.

But instead you get the English letters for the spelling of a Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese place name.

It's like, wait a minute.

What's going on here?

On the other hand, it's also the story of an arranged marriage in the voice of the woman -- "At 14 this happens... At 15 this happens..." And then she says, basically, "Willing to be buried with you, and I want my ashes to be mingled with yours."

Ezra Pound is such a good poet.

He's got this line, "Forever and forever, and forever," and it's just stunning.

It, like, stops the time of the poem, and the emotion is so powerful.

Nobody faults that.

It's like, this is an amazing moment in a translation.

-Yeah.

-I mean, in some ways it's comparable to -- I have an essay in this book about Christopher Logue's "War Music."

And Logue, of course, knew no ancient Greek whatsoever, but he collaborated with a classicist called Donald Carne-Ross, who originally hired him to do a sort of version of bits of the "Iliad" based on existing translations and advice by this classicist as a radio play.

And then he ended up doing multiple different sort of poetry collection, retelling narratives.

And some of the passages in it are amazing just as English poetry.

-Yeah, yeah.

-And it didn't rely on having read the original.

And it actually, in some ways, sort of brings out things that are true about the vividness of Homeric simile in ways that I think are more persuasive as a translation of how does Homeric simile sound than most of the sort of contemporary English translations are, even though it's not -- I wouldn't exactly say it's a translation, but it's a version that's doing something very interesting with the original.

-It's interesting.

You were like, you wouldn't call it a translation.

It's like, why not, though?

At this point I feel like we've -- I don't want to say stretched it beyond meaning, but it's like if this is a loose enough phrase that we can apply it to that then, like, why not just call it a translation?

At what point do you say, like -- do you hop off the translation train and onto like adaptation or something bigger or something different?

-I mean, there's a huge gray area and maybe the trains are sort of -- there are no tracks in some of that area.

-Yeah.

-[ Laughs ] -Yeah, at some point it becomes something else, right?

-I don't know where.

Somewhere.

-Yeah.

Um, anyone here from Baltimore?

Yo, shout out Baltimore.

Right.

Hell yeah.

Shout out from Baltimore.

Um, Emily, you, in your book, you write an essay about Edith Hamilton.

-Baltimore!

-From Baltimore, who taught at Bryn Mawr, I believe it was?

-Yes.

-And popularized the classics and also popularized the idea that, like, "West is best," democracy comes from... -Yes.

That was already quite a popular idea.

-Yeah, sure, yeah.

But can you tell the audience a little bit about her story and what she did, for good and ill?

-For good and ill, yes, so she was a high school teacher at a girls' school in Baltimore for most of her career.

And then she retired and got -- and made friends with various people who were big in publishing and got hired to do, first, some translations of some ancient Greek plays, and then her huge bestseller -- which is still a huge bestseller and still taught in high schools, including in Baltimore, but around the world as well -- retelling of Greek myths called "Mythology."

And she was very much influenced both by the educational ideas of John Dewey and individualization and individual empowerment, but then linking that to American exceptionalism, "West is best," and the precursors to the West were -- the American West were, of course, the ancient Greeks, who were totally enlightened and had understood capital-C Civilization in a way that no other ancient culture, including the classical Chinese -- absolutely not!

So it was a sort of foundation of really quite racist ideas but then promoted as if it was these are the ideas of liberty, and this is the authentic telling of what classics is all about for the population -- for the general public, and sort of presented as this is inarguable -- because none of her books have any footnotes, so it's not like you can debate and say, "She got that out of nowhere."

-That's the key to do it.

-"Totally made it up."

And yet it has this -- I mean, I think part of it is related to what we're saying about Ezra Pound and Christopher Logue.

If you're a good enough writer, then you can have this extraordinary sense of authority and persuasion even if you pause and say, "Uhh, that didn't really come from where you say it did, and actually it's kind of toxic," but it has this beautiful sense of rhetorical authority and beautiful prose style, which I think is part of the secret of Hamilton's success and continuing to be so, as well as, obviously, the enduring popularity of racism.

-Yeah, very popular.

[ Laughter ] -As we've been talking a lot, and I've noticed the theme running throughout is that in order to do this work, this work of translation, you have to have a healthy amount of hubris, right?

You have to have -- a healthy amount, not too much, or else you'll go crazy.

But you have to have a certain amount of gumption to say, "What this person wrote, other people translated it.

I can do a better job or I can do a more, you know, up to date job," or whatever.

And because there are so many -- there can be so many naysayers, haters, if you want to call them that, say like, oh, this was inaccurate or this is problematic that you're doing this, um, have you ever struggled to find that hubris?

-Wilson: Mm.

-Sze: Hmm.

Yeah, I think, um, on the one hand, it requires what I like to call imaginative risk.

You have to take that step and say, "Okay, this is -- I'm gonna try it."

And maybe that is a moment of hubris.

But at the other hand, I also find translation incredibly humbling.

I feel like I'm working in the service of something really wonderful and powerful, and I'm trying to the best of my ability to make that alive and present in English.

And in that sense, instead of actually being hubris, it's actually being very humbling.

And ultimately it makes me think of translation as -- or that a good translation really isn't just about finding lexical equivalents -- How do I take this line and "impossibly" try and transfer it over to the other language?

But it's -- a really good translation is tapping into a kind of mystery that is the sort of soul of the poem, the text at hand.

And then suddenly it's -- if there is hubris, yes, it's like, okay, I'm gonna try and do this, but it's simultaneously humbling to say, okay, I'm trying to do this, but I'm also doing it in the service of something larger.

-That was a beautiful answer.

I completely agree with that.

There are always both, I'm trying to do something completely impossible and that, in a way, of course you take -- that takes some kind of courage to do something impossible.

But it's always a kind of midwifery.

It's not that -- I'm not gonna be either the baby or the mother.

I'm going to be this transient character who will enable a different relationship for other readers than some other translation will enable that in some years' time.

It's never going to be the one, only true translation.

-I love the midwifery image and metaphor because it's also like, obviously, giving birth and you don't -- you can't quite -- it's sort of beyond your control.

The child is alive and -- -You don't know what's going to be born.

That's the source of its excitement.

It's the excitement about any creative venture.

-And also that sense of terror too.

Yes.

A bit of like, "Uh-oh, what..." [ Laughter ] -Um, speaking of humility and humbling, Arthur, in the first zone of your book, you invite readers -- you assign some homework, right?

You, you know, take a poem and you give us like the language, and you invite us to translate, to be the third party, or however many parties involved, of this poem.

And I took a crack at it.

It's awful.

-I want to see it.

I want to see it.

-No, dude.

-No, you have to send it to me.

-Send it to the moon.

Yeah.

But it was invigorating.

You know, it's been a minute since I've tried my hand at poetry, and I was like, "Oh, okay."

It gave -- it was like having training wheels or something to, like, rest on.

And if it turned out awful, it's not my fault, it's not my poem.

-[ Laughs ] -Um, can you -- why did you assign this homework in the first chapter of your book?

And I should stop calling it homework.

Why did you invite readers to perform poetry um, in the book?

-I want "Transient Worlds" to be an invitation for readers to not just read, but to be empowered to explore language and see what they can do with their own voices and visions.

So in the first zone, I'm showing three different translations to show there's no definitive translation.

I'm presenting a crib.

I'm talking about what can be translated.

And then I turn to the reader and invite the reader to make their own translation, because I oftentimes feel like poetry unfairly has this, um, sort of baggage, like it's going to be difficult, it's esoteric, it's intimidating.

And I personally experienced that in junior high school, where a teacher was like, "Analyze the symbolism of the albatross in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'"

It was like, "Oh, my God.

What am I supposed to do with this?"

So, you know, it's there in a lot of school teaching that poetry is difficult.

And I wanted to say, look, you can try this.

You have nothing to lose.

There's no way -- no one way to do this, but I'm giving you a crib.

I'm showing you three out of many different possibilities.

You too can use your voice and vision.

I'm trying to empower the reader to take that chance.

And I just want to add, as an anecdote, um, a woman who's the head of a literary organization in Hawaii was on the airplane from Honolulu to Seattle, and she had five hours and she had "Transient Worlds" in her pocket.

And she read it and she thought, "Well, what the hell, I've got three more hours.

I think I'll make a translation."

And she was so excited, when she landed in Seattle at baggage claim, she e-mailed me and said, "I made the first translation of a poem in my life.

I wrote the first poem in my life.

I never thought I would do this, but it's totally changed how I look at language, how I think about poetry."

And I mean, that made my day.

So that's the idea.

-Emily... [ Applause ] -Do you remember the first poem you translated?

-Uh... -Do you remember early -- like early baby translator?

You know, just like... -No, you know, I never thought I was gonna be a translator.

I mean, I thought I was gonna to be a classicist of some kind or other, and I was gonna be a reader and a writer, but I didn't think I was gonna be a translator.

That's really late in my life that I started being a translator.

I mean, I was asked to consider publishing some translations of Seneca, and then I started trying it.

I thought, this is really, really fun, and this allows me to sort of let out my inner poet a little bit and hiding behind another author, so that's fun.

And then it's this very, very intensive kind of reading and intensive kind of writing.

And it has all of this stuff that I already knew I was fascinated by, but you can do it all at once as a translator.

But I didn't think that was gonna be something I did professionally until 15 years ago.

-Yeah.

You'd mentioned before that you're retranslating the "Odyssey."

Um, like, why?

[ Laughter ] I mean, you did it.

-I know.

I can't stop.

I'm addicted!

That's part of it, but it's also that -- so with my "Odyssey" translation, I was -- I'd already talked about how there are many things that are true about an original poem, not all of which any single translation can convey experientially and in terms of what is it doing on the page or in the ear.

And with my "Odyssey" translation, 2018, I felt one of the big things that I was constantly frustrated about with existing translations that I'd used in the classroom was that the vast majority of them are both non-metrical, don't convey the musicality and rhythmicality of the original, and also, I thought, much too long because they were very often twice as long as the original, or at least half as long again as the original.

And so the students would show up and say, "Oh, this is kind of boring."

And I'd think, "Aah!

Can't possibly be bored by Homer."

And then I would realize, no, it's not the students' fault.

It's because the translation was boring because it had too many words.

And so I thought, I'm just gonna force myself not to do that by setting this very tight limit on -- not gonna use a single word more than the original -- a single line more than the original does.

And I also used regular meter.

That was a very tight constraint, and I ditched it for the "Iliad" because I thought actually it was slightly too tight.

And if I'm going from a hexameter poem to a pentameter poem, I'm constantly wanting one or two more syllables to play around with.

And so with the "Iliad," it's closer to the word count, but not close to the line count of the original, and I like that better.

So the new "Odyssey" translation is not line for line anymore.

And that changes everything.

Because once you've changed one technical craft thing -- everything else.

I mean, the first line is gonna be the same.

All of the other lines are different.

-Okay.

-[ Laughter ] -I want to just add that, in both cases, though, there is a commitment to the kind of pulse and rhythm to the line which is really important.

-Because, I mean, part of what I'm trying to do is remind 21st-century listeners and readers, this is oral poetry.

It's designed for oral performance.

Oral performance of a poem is different if it has a beat.

-And yeah.

-It really matters.

-And that's so important.

I think poems, oftentimes, they communicate through sound and rhythm before intellectually you can understand what's going on.

It's communicating viscerally through the body, and you experience that through the pulse.

And one of the things I really like about your translation is you can feel that moving through the language.

-That's very much what I wanted to do, yes.

And I think you do it both as a poet and a translator too, and just thinking about things like assonance and alliteration also do those things, yes.

-Um, I think we can start lining up for questions if anybody in the crowd -- golly, she... Yeah, just start lining up here.

Let's not run folks over.

Come on, y'all.

[ Laughs ] Um, you know, try to keep it tidy.

Uh, I don't know, don't be weird.

Whatever.

[ Laughter ] -We're gonna run out of time here.

-I'll go back and forth.

We're starting here.

-Woman: Yeah, hi.

My name is Katerina.

Thank you so much for speaking with us today.

It was a really interesting panel.

Um, I was wondering how many languages each of you know, and if you -- when you're doing translations, if you find yourself drawing on languages outside of the language of the original text and then the target translation language.

-Oh, that's a good question.

-That's such an interesting question.

I mean, I personally wouldn't translate from languages other than Latin and ancient Greek because I would feel like -- even though I love Arthur's, um, homework exercise, I would feel, like, completely unqualified.

And even the languages that I can sort of -- I have a reading knowledge of French, Italian, German, Spanish, those kinds of languages, that you need to have as a classical scholar to read what did German scholars say about Homer, that kind of thing, I'm not going to, you know, translate Kafka because I just don't think I'm qualified for it.

But I like the question about other languages infecting.

With my "Odyssey" translation, I played around a little bit with, for instance, using "mercurial" as an epithet of Hermes, which I thought was funny.

I'm not gonna do it in the second translation, but I thought it was kind of cool to play around with, how might Latin infect Greek?

Because of course there are so many Latinate words in English that I could play around with using both Anglo-Saxon words and Germanic words and French/Latinate words in English, and actually far fewer Hellenic words because English isn't like that.

-Obviously I translate from Chinese to English, but I've lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for 50 years, so I have enough Spanish where I can read the Spanish.

And a couple of years ago I was in China and met a poet from Puebla, Mexico -- Gustavo Osorio de Ita -- and he gave me a book of his poems in Spanish.

And when I read of the last poem, an elegy for his father, seemed really moving to me.

And I thought, okay, I'm gonna try translating it into Spanish.

And I made a draft, and then I sent it to a friend of mine who teaches at Stanford, and she said, "Arthur, good try, and here are like 15 things to think about."

And I was like, "Oh, great.

This is great."

And then I rewrote it and I sent it back to her, and, again, sort of through collaboration she helped me refine and see things in the Spanish I hadn't seen.

And so for me, that was very exciting.

It's not like I'm pretending I'm fluent in Spanish, but it was a way, again, to sort of have that risk and to stretch and grow from it.

-Woman: Thank you.

-Man: Professor Wilson, I'm sure you're aware of Joyce's "Ulysses."

Uh, turn of phrase on your "Wine-Dark Sea."

-Yes.

-You know there's a character called Buck Mulligan in chapter one, comes down the stairs, and he utters in Greek, which I can't pronounce, but roughly it means the "wine-dark sea."

-Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

-Man: You know what he says?

He looks at the bay -- Dublin Bay.

And he says the "snotgreen sea."

-Yes, it's very funny.

Love that.

-Man: So my question is, do later writers like Joyce influence how a modern translator like you can hear or translate Homer?

-That's a great question.

Yes, I mean, I think on some level, yes.

I mean, I already talked about how I found, even though I don't think of Logue exactly as a translator, some of what he's doing I found influential and usable in terms of, what could I do with Homer?

And similarly, I mean, I wouldn't say I'm wanting to be Joycean -- in fact, I'm very much not.

I think that's a very particular set of things that Joyce is doing in that book.

But I absolutely think there are ways that a translator of an ancient text can borrow from both modern and early modern literature and use phrases.

I mean, I found that in my Homer translations, I was constantly thinking, "I need to not be too Miltonic here."

Even though I want it to sound like epic verse, but it needs to not be sub-Shakespearean, sub-Miltonic.

But then every so often I would think, okay, that is from Milton, I know it's from Milton.

I'm gonna use it anyway.

It's gonna be okay.

And people maybe -- maybe won't notice.

I hope they don't.

[ Laughs ] -Great.

Thank you.

-Woman: So the world of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are both really dense with references to other pieces of mythology, to names, to genealogies, to histories, wars, and I've been loving reading the endnotes along with, and I think you could write probably 3,000 pages of endnotes for each.

And so I'm just curious about how you chose which bits to endnote and which bits could be set aside without a footnote, without an end note.

-That's a great question.

Yes.

And I wonder if you can maybe talk about some of your comments as well.

So with my "Odyssey" translation, the publishers very much didn't want it to be too long and look too daunting.

So they told me really need to scale it back on the endnotes, and so I was very good.

But then with the "Iliad," they let me go to town a bit more.

And then with this new "Odyssey" translation, I'm definitely probably gonna quintuple the endnotes, and I'm very excited about it.

I love writing endnotes.

I mean, there's always that art of -- or art -- or the judgment call about what is -- both what is necessary but also what is fun for the reader to learn about, 'cause not every reader is gonna go to the endnotes, but if they do, I want there to be some Easter eggs.

I want them to be some fun discoveries where it's not just, yes, I will gloss what that name is, but also let's go down a little rabbit hole together and that'll be an exciting little journey.

-Yeah, I think the judgment call is you want the note to be intriguing and interesting.

You don't want it to be overwhelming.

With many Chinese poems, they don't need commentary, but poets like Li He and Li Shangyin draw a lot on Chinese history, Chinese mythology, and it's really important to be able to know what's going on because they are using allusion.

They are deliberately referring to sometimes earlier poems, sometimes earlier histories or myths as a way of bringing into conversation something.

They're like tips of icebergs.

And so if there isn't a glossary or some guide at least to point a reader somewhere -- I don't want the footnote to be so long it's like becomes an essay or something, but enough to show a reader, to give a reader a sense of what's at stake there, then that's really helpful.

-Woman: Thank you.

-Woman: Hi, um, you mentioned earlier sort of how culture obviously plays into all sorts of communication in translating work.

And, um, I was wondering, with your cultural awareness and, like, curiosities ranging from different cultures, how do you guys both define culture and if that's different on a professional versus personal level how that ties into your translation work.

-Wow, that's... -Yeah, that's a very difficult question.

I guess I'm thinking of language as a kind of matrix that's part of the culture at large.

So you have a poem, but rather than just sort of like -- it used to be -- the approach used to be, let's just look at this poem in isolation like it's this pure construction of language, and we don't need to know anything about the author, the environment, the history.

We're just looking... I like that there's a need to sort of provide some of that cultural context to give some of the background.

Not saying that's essential to the poem, but it helps sort of ground the poem.

And so the poem is in a matrix of culture, if that helps.

And sometimes that understanding is really important to appreciating the poem itself.

-I mean, I think cultures are always multiple, right?

I mean, there's never been a -- we talk about a multicultural society, but in fact there has never been any other kind of society.

And so part of what I'm -- one of the themes of this "Wine-Dark Sea" book is just the ways that, um -- the changes and also diversities of later post-ancient cultures have led to different reinterpretations of ancient literature, ancient texts, and those ancient literatures, ancient texts were themselves interacting with different threads within their own cultural moments, and that there wasn't just one monolithic antiquity and one monolithic modern culture, that there's always this multiplicity and diversity on both sides, and that we can't actually understand either translation or interpretation of either modernity or antiquity without taking on board how multiple both of those things are.

-Woman: Thank you.

-Woman: Hi.

So my question is actually along a similar line.

So we learn a lot about ancient culture through their texts and their stories.

Um, and so when translating those works for a modern audience, how do you balance making them emotionally legible for us while also preserving, like, the cultural values and traditions that might be foreign to modern audiences?

And is there a point where making ancient texts accessible risks making them too modern and losing that insight into ancient culture?

-Wilson: Mm-hmm.

Um, I would say to the last bit, yes, absolutely.

I mean, I definitely want to be -- I don't actually see myself as a modernizer.

I see myself as trying to convey some elements that are quite alien about ancient poetry, I mean, including it's metrical.

Most modern poetry is not metrical.

It's very long.

It's designed for oral performance.

Most people don't tune in to a poetry reading that's gonna be 24 hours long.

It's not actually part of our culture usually.

And then the people in these poems do weird things.

They sacrifice animals all the time.

They burst into tears and start wailing and slapping their thighs and ripping out their hair.

All of these ways of experiencing emotion are very odd, and how people interact with each other are very odd.

I want all of those things to be legible, and I ideally want to be locating the strange in the interesting places.

I mean, part of what I'm trying to do as a translator is to not sort of forefront the boring kinds of obscurity, like the word order in ancient Greek is different from natural word order in English.

I think that's true, but not that interesting.

So if I can change the word order around and take you faster to -- this is a time machine to a very alien poetic form and very alien world.

I want to go in that time machine rather than let's really fixate on, yes, this sentence sounds kind of clunky in English because the translation is enabling a clunk.

In my opinion, unnecessary.

-Yeah, I'm not sure I have much to add other than I guess I want to say that when you're looking at those ancient texts and you have these moments that are singular, that seem very sort of distant, you're trying to honor that sort of singularity.

But at the same time, I also feel like it's a form of a mirroring too, because if you're really good, you're also, without explicitly saying it, you're making a reader look at their own world, thinking about, "Well, maybe there are similar things that are odd or strange or that I haven't seen or paid particular attention to."

So it can have very a very powerful effect when you do that.

But you do want it to be legible, obviously, because if it's unintelligible, then it's sort of like the rock below ground.

You don't know it exists.

You want enough to sort of appear above the surface where the reader senses you're giving the reader enough to go by, but to feel what's sort of below the surface, that there's something much larger there too to develop and explore.

-Woman: Thank you.

-I think we could squeeze one more in 'cause I'm getting yelled at.

-Man: I'll be quick.

Um, Arthur, good to see you again.

I just want to say, before I ask my question, on behalf of all the poets laureate, we're so glad you're this country's poet laureate right now.

-[ Cheers and applause ] -Well, thank you.

-Man: I think your work on translation in a time of polarization is exactly what we need.

Um, at the risk of lighting a whole bomb to this conversation, as y'all were speaking, I thought about code switching, and I thought about translation and sort of that print bias and also how temporally bound an ancient civilization, a contemporary moment, but the act of translation that is code switching and being bicultural.

You mentioned multiculturalism, but then diaspora children who speak Mandarin and English, in my case, Spanish and English.

And so how do you situate this idea of code switching?

Like, all the beautiful conversations we had and you all shared about lexical equivalence and the spirit of a poem and collaboration, but what do you do with those individuals who are constantly dancing between languages and have, in my case, poetry, which combines different languages in one play as opposed to, from the conversation you all had, you ostensibly just take one language and you sort of recreate it in another.

So, I guess, how do you all sort of jive or think about that other world or universe that some of us -- for us it's an everyday reality?

-Wilson: Mm-hmm.

-I guess I think there are certain key phrases that, in a language, that are untranslatable.

So like if you're writing or thinking in Spanish and English, you might be code switching back and forth.

So an interesting phenomenon would be writing in English but thinking in Spanish, for instance.

Or you might get to a moment where you have a word in Spanish and you think, "Yeah, I could translate it into English, but it doesn't have that power, that force."

Then I say that word in Spanish has earned its place in the English-language poem.

-Mm-hmm.

-So I've been learning about a term -- translanguaging.

Do you know about translanguaging?

So it's both -- it's a way of sort of teaching in the language classroom, but that incorporates the student's original language along with the language that's being taught.

And there are -- I think part of what you're talking about is there's this really rich field for poetic composition of maybe you don't have to code switch.

If you're writing an original poem, maybe you can do a poem that uses two different languages.

And I think that's actually somewhat different from what I'm trying to do is create a translation that's 100% in English out of a poem that's 100% in ancient Greek or Latin.

But I also think there's so much potential.

I mean, I know of some poems that already do this, but I think there's so much potential for someone like you to write more poems that are multilingual or translanguaged that have, you know -- that invite a reader who might be bilingual or might -- might only be monolingual, but the poem is teaching that reader how to read it, and that there is opportunities for creative expression that aren't necessarily having -- indulging in that pressure to code switch.

Maybe you can create a world on the page, or for the voice that isn't having to switch and that can be both.

-I think it's not a barrier if you're using a word from another language, and it enters the poem in English because it's essential for it to be there, and rather than sort of dumb everything down, I think, why not invite the reader to discover a new word, to say, "Okay, I don't know this word in Spanish or French or German or Chinese or Greek, but I can learn from that.

I can -- and if I investigate that, it's like opening worlds."

It's like flowers opening.

-All right, we can chit-chat all day, but thank you guys so much.

And thank you guys all for being here.

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