“The New Colossus” Translation Project [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

“The New Colossus” Translation Project (spearheaded by Alicia Ostriker, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Tess O’Dwyer and to be hosted by AJHS)

This past summer, faculty and students in the M.F.A Program at Drew University honored the formidable Alicia Ostriker for her work as poet, mentor, scholar, feminist, activist, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and New York State Poet Laureate. As part of the celebration, we had translated and read some of her poems in our native, heritage, or acquired tongues. Something magical happened within the walls of the room as it gradually filled with Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Sicilian, French, German, Russian, Romanian. Afterwards, Alicia and I decided that we needed to replicate and extend that experience. It didn’t take much to realize how that polyphony was about more than sound and multilingualism. As we left the celebration, we stepped back into a world steeped in inflammatory nationalist rhetoric, a world that had incorporated monolingualism into its mechanisms of oppression.

I proposed we choose a poem and reach out to poets willing to give it life in other languages. Brilliantly, Alicia suggested “The New Colossus,” which had been resonating, for more than a century, with millions of people. Written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, as part of an effort to raise funds for the Pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, it was etched on a plaque and attached to the pedestal in 1903, seven years after the statue was erected. Alicia’s personal involvement with "The New Colossus" was lifelong. She knew the poem as a child, because her mother would quote it to her, along with poems by Tennyson and Browning. Like so many immigrants, her mother believed in America as "the melting pot," and the Statue of Liberty poem and its symbolism fit into that understanding. Alicia’s mother, and in fact all her grandparents, arrived in the New World at the turn of the 20th century.

I arrived from Romania in 1996, just a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and although my point of entry was not Ellis Island, but the Newark International Airport (NJ), I thought I had caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty before landing. I wanted to believe so anyway, as I had spent the last leg of the trip peering out of the small window, searching.

A month after Alicia and I first spoke of the “The New Colossus,” in an interview with NPR, Principal Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli argued that the Lazarus poem should be amended to convey that immigrants are welcomed only if “they can stand on their own two feet, be self-sufficient, [and] pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” This, he argued, was in line with the “American tradition.” Such rhetoric rendered our project particularly timely. “The New Colossus” was written in a time of acute nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment. We are reliving that time. The targeted immigrant groups differ, but the fervor of the rhetoric is strikingly similar. Our project became inevitable. An idea that emerged on the playground of translation took root in socio-political terrain. We sent a call out to poet-translators and the overwhelmingly positive response was encouraging. At this time Tess O’Dwyer, whose mother is Korean and her father Irish-American, and who is a superb translator and editor whose non-profit management firm works with various cultural organizations, joined our project. We received translations of “The New Colossus” into Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, Spanglish, Persian, Sicilian, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, French, Albanian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Basque, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Slovak, German, Swedish, Irish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Turkish, Czech, Haitian Creole, Argentinian Spanish, Filipino, Korean, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Esperanto, Greek, Shona, Kumanji, Turkmen, and Isthmus Zapotec. The poems are accompanied by the translators’ brief comments on their or their ancestors’ immigration experiences.

Tess O’Dwyer was instrumental in helping us to secure a host. Here are her words on the process: As soon as I heard about The New Colossus Translation Project, I contacted the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), which hosts the Emma Lazarus Project. Amidst their Lazarusian archival exhibitions, curricula, and poetry contests, I saw a heart-snatching video of talented children writing poems to The Statue of Liberty today—and that cinched it. 

The New Colossus Translation Project has joined The Emma Lazarus Project at AJHS (https://ajhs.org/emma-lazarus-project) and will launch later this spring. It will be an integral part of public programming for the exhibition “From the Sitting Room to the Soap Box: Emma Lazarus, Union Square, and American Identity,” and part of their permanent archives.

The forty plus trove of translations (including an intersemiotic one into a musical composition) gifts the Mother of Exiles with the ability to welcome migrants, immigrants, and refugees in their own native or heritage tongues. Such a gesture of unconditional hospitality might remain, especially in the current political climate, utopian. The radical multilingualism of Mother of Exile is a metaphor. Metaphors, however, are not without agency.

As Alicia Ostriker points out, in a world of escalating tensions, of fear of (im)migrants, and of xenophobia, this poem remains radical. What’s significant too is that the poem doesn't attack the haters; instead, it offers an alternative ideal. Also, think of the thousands of heroic statues of Men on Horseback. "Mother of Exiles" may be a stereotype, but she's a new, exciting one: a female hero.

Years ago, when invited by the Library of Congress to record something for its “Poetry of America” project, Alicia chose this sonnet and talked about it as key to defining who we were. Then in 2018 she quoted it as part of a lecture on “Poetry and the City,” mentioning that it was a perfect refutation of Auden's famous pronouncement that "Poetry makes nothing happen": Auden is wrong! When France gave us the statue, its official name was "Liberty Enlightening the Nations," and it was all about how America and France were allies; we were both republics that had overthrown monarchies. It had nothing whatsoever to do with immigration.  But the poem changed all that. It transformed the meaning of the statue, the meaning of the Port of New York, and ultimately the meaning of America. It directly opposed the pervasive sentiment that saw immigrants as dirty and diseased criminals.  It insisted on re-defining us as a nation of immigrants.

We hope the project grows (through further ‘installments’) and that, in time, the Mother of Exiles acquires enough languages to speak to all minority groups in the U.S. and beyond. Tess, who is herself a consummate translator (see her translations of Alberto Blest Gana’s Martin Rivas and Giannina Braschi’s Empire of Dreams and Yo-Yo Boing!) remarks upon the already impressive range of our collection: As an indication of linguistic range, the project features Emma Lazarus’ biographer Esther Schor translating “The New Colossus” into Esperanto, Israeli-based poet Karen Alkalay-Gut rendering it into Hebrew, Rose Waldman into Yiddish, Ming Di into Chinese, Dunya Mikhail into Arabic, and Emma Asonye into Igbo. The range of artistry is inspiring. With Spanish, for example, we have Argentine poet Lorraine Healy translating crisp to the literal edge of each line, while Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi riffs metaphorically on “The New Colossus” as though it were an arrangement of a song to American immigration in the Obama and Trump era, rather than a sonnet addressing immigration in the Cleveland and Roosevelt era. 

We have been asked, at various points, to comment on the translations themselves. That is beyond the purpose of our project, although we hope for opportunities (perhaps through the AJHS platform and/or other online venues or discussion panels) to engage our contributors in discussions about the process. Each poet-translator approached the highly formal qualities of the poem (a Petrarchan sonnet whose diction may feel highly elevated and antiquated) on their own terms. I assume choices were informed by multiple factors, including the nature of the synergy between the host and guest language, the translatability of form and music, personal aesthetics, and/or politics. Some initial contributors withdrew when they realized how impossible a task preserving the sonnet’s formal qualities might be, while others declared themselves surprised by how amenable their mother tongues had turned out to be to those same qualities. Others sensed right away that they needed to do away with the sonnet form and compensate in other ways. We imposed no restrictions and provided no particular guidelines, choosing to trust instead the craftmanship of the contributors from whom we solicited work.

Alicia mentioned in a conversation that for her this project was not about “making artistic judgements,” but “about getting at a significant human experience.” I agree, and also embrace Tess’s view of the project as having the potential to provide a deeper understanding of translation as an art form. Tess writes: Literary translation is a living artform.  I have always shied away from the concept of definitive translation. Translations are originals in the same way that arrangements of songs or symphonies are originals. You can recognize the origins of a composition, thought, concept, while simultaneously recognizing what is original in the tempo, tone, feeling, imaging, etc. That space between history and creation is where translation thrives. Let there be many more translations of this poem into other Asian, African, Scandinavian, and indigenous languages. Let readers appreciate that the new does not void out the prior. Let there be a wider understanding that literary translations contribute not only to the evolution of poetry, but to language itself.

Stay tuned for news about the launch of The New Colossus Translation Project on the AJHS site and for a call for further contributions.

Two articles of interest accessible online:

• David Lehman’s “Colossal Ode,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 2004

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/colossal-ode-103151288/

• Walt Hunter’s “The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty,” January 16, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-story-behind-the-poem-on-the-statue-of-liberty/550553/ 

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

This is such a wonderful and important project! I wonder if there will be recordings of these translations. It would be great to hear all of these voices. Thank you. Stacey

[The Best American Poetry]

Emma Lazarus's immortal sonnet is the perfect poem for multiple translation -- the perfect start to the program. The statue was installed in 1886 with Grover Cleveland presiding. Lazarus wasn't there. When she died in 1889, no one foresaw the posthumous glory of her lines. -- DL

[Kent Johnson]

Please see here, by Gunter Plessow, from Germany, into German and back again, transformationally, into English.

https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/poetry/22451/

[BP Vaski]

Thanks. The beauty of Emma Lazarus's sonnet is the vision of America it conveys.

[BP Vaski]

Every day in every way I'm getting better and better. Got it?