YEARS AGO, I was tutoring a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl named Ryann. Ideal kid. Wide-awake, responsive, ready for anything. She had an assignment to write a poem for school, so I was gonna show her how to write poetry. I suggested we do one together.
I had this insight. Find something she likes, make her imitate that. Good. I told her: “Now, you’re gonna have to be honest with me. I’m gonna read you a poem out of this book, and I need to know if you genuinely like it. Don’t say you like it if it’s just OK.” She agreed.
I redd her Smart’s “To His Cat Jeoffry,” thinking it was a medical certainty she would love it. Not so. It was just OK. I tried something else. Just OK. Something else. OK. Something else…. I was starting to sweat. It was starting to look like maybe this wasn’t gonna work after all. See, I thought every one of these poems was going to knock her dead. It was all stuff I’m in love with. But anyhow, we did finally hit it….
Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.” That one, who knows why, she leapt at. Literally. She was across the table: “That—that.” Glowing.
Good. So we talked about the Auden for a while, comparing notes. And I told her: “We could do something like that—only not that long. Lemme explain to you what an epigram is….” So, I explained. I showed her how the rhyme at the end of an English epigram makes the poem seem to snap shut like a metal box. I told her we were going to go for eight lines, XAXA XBXB, in the same rhythm as the Auden. I drew a diagram. I asked her if she had anybody in her life she would like to make fun of. She goes: “That’s easy. My sister Lily. We all make fun of her at my house, ’cause she’s missing her front baby teeth.” Perfect.
(Just a reminder that all this is building to a point I want to make about literary translation, a theme I know I have not touched upon yet. We’ll get there.)
And so I set about showing her the Way of the Patient Rhymer. How the rhyme thing, which looks at first glance like a mere pain in the ass, can be turned to the poet’s advantage. How it can prompt new thoughts, surprising associations. I also showed her how to do the rhythm. We started talking, trancily, in it (“As I walked out one evening / Walking down Bristol Street, / You see it’s not that difficult. / The thing just needs three beats…”). And I wrote the first line of what was to be our poem:
Tell you about my sister Lily.
Ryann instantly chimes in:
Her mouth has a gaping hole.
I’m all, “Good! Good! That’s especially good, ’cuz there are lots of words that rhyme with hole….” And I made her write ’em all out….
Long story short, here’s the poem. Easily reproduced from my memory:
Tell you about my sister Lily.
Her mouth has a gaping hole.
Her teeth may never come in.
She may have to play the role
Of the girl with the tragic lisp.
But tragical though she may be,
She is safe from the Macintosh apple
That sabotaged Adam and Eve.
That took around ninety minutes for the two of us to produce, and I know for a fact the last words installed were Macintosh and sabotaged. We had hit upon the Adam and Eve joke relatively early, but we were seriously stumped by what to put before apple. She kept coming up with stuff like “crisp, juicy” which is fine for the rhythm, but sounds like filler. I was showing her how the solution to this kind of problem often comes from rooting around in the sound structure of whatever you already got. Hence, tragic and tragical eventually prompted Macintosh. Took a long time, but we got it. However, once we had Macintosh, the gods basically handed us sabotaged on a tasseled pillow.
Those last two pieces falling into place was an exhilarating thing. And there’s more to this story, and I’ll email it to you if you want, but for right now let me get to the point about translation.
It’s this. The word sabotaged. That’s not really the right word, if you think about it. Sabotaged makes it sound like the apple had agency, and that’s kind of awkward and wrong. Except it’s not. Because sabotaged fits so neatly into the sound fabric of the stanza, everything that’s wrong with the word simply disappears from view. The word takes on a status for which we have no name in our poetics. I want to call it “the right wrong word.” The word is wrong—but it’s better than whatever would have been right.
But now suppose some Russian translator were to try to turn the poem into Russian. Everyone knows the first thing to go is the sound structure. And so look what happens. Stripped of its sonic context, sabotaged merely becomes the wrong word. The Russian will produce something like:
She is secure from the Macintosh apple
That {undermined by subterfuge} Adam and Eve.
And what I’m trying to say is: I’ll bet you anything it is this phenomenon, or anyhow some version thereof, that partly explains why, in reading (say) Mandelshtam poems in English, we constantly meet with words that simply seem offbeat or wrong. I bet in Russian, they are right wrong words. In English they are merely oddball.
