The life I see
yearns for the utmost reaches:
Desert, Jungle, no more.

I see that red-ferned September
deplores its own matter:
that it would have rather been
only Snow, Immensity, and Wolves.

I see that the Sun
dreams of pure light
and that Night
misses the primordial times
when all was night.

I look at my heart too,
and find that its desires
are summed up, sadly,
in two words:

the word Always,
the word Never.

There's an interesting article on the Dead Sea Scrolls (or rather, as the writer points out, scraps) in the NYTimes today. Buy why on Earth is it in the Arts & Design section???

Inspired by sartorias: Santa María del Naranco, a summer palace or hunting lodge of the Kings of Asturias, near Oviedo, Spain.

I've just finished reading The Translator, by John Crowley. It's set in an American Midwest university at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1961, and tells the story of the relationship between Falin, an exiled Russian poet, and Kit, his student, who eventually becomes also his translator. It's also a story about Russia, and about poetry and translation, and about the different worlds within this one.

I bought it partly out of professional interest (I am about to become a translator myself), and because the question of whether translation is possible worries me. I believe -- I passionately believe -- in the possibility of translation, always, and agree with Roman Jakobson (one of my personal heroes) that anything that is said in any one language can be said in any other language, in some way (it may be that it will be ugly, it may be that page upon page of footnotes will be required. But it can be fully said, without loss of meaning).

(This may have something to do with the fact that in Spain, where I come from, literature in translation is perfectly common, to the degree that translators' names are often not given, or only in the copyright page. In English-speaking countries, by contrast, both the reading and the publication of works originally written in a different language seems to be more unusual.)

When told by Kit that she has read some of his poems in English translation, Falin voices a common view of poetry in translation by claiming that those translated poems are not his poems. He shows Kit how the nuances of the original Russian are lost in the English translation: 

    "I point out one small example," he said. "Where this translation said I will denounce my neighbor my poem said only I will write about my neighbor."
    "Why would they translate it that way then?"
    "Because the translator was clever enough to know that in my country now, if we say somone has written about someone else, we mean the person has supplied to authorities information or just speculation, enough perhaps to have him investigated, even arrested. We say of someone, I don't trust her - I think she writes. So the poem may be read in that way, and that is why the translator chose this word denounce. But to write, in Russian, is still also to -- to just write. Write letters, poetry."
    She had never tried to translate poetry in any way except literally, as though cracking a code in which it was hidden, a chest of safe more beautiful than what was kept in it.
    She said: "I don't see why it couldn't be translated more accurately."
    "Perhaps it could." He moved the papers and things before him square with one another, his cigarettes and box of matches, notebook, a small book bound in pale green linen. "But it would then be different poem in English. Still not mine."

Falin compares using different languages to having different lovers: you can sleep with many mistresses, but love only one. Eventually, however, and despite his mistrust of translation, Falin asks Kit to help him render his poems into English, and . While learning Russian to translate Falin, Kit comes across a folktale in which the Devil forces every person in Russia to give him the thing he or she loves most as a tribute. The thing a boy loves most is a song he himself has made, and he begs the Devil not take it from him. The Devil however forces him to sing the song to him so that he can take it -- but still the boy keeps it and sings it so that it becomes the people's:

The boy had fooled the Devil, and had still kept what it was he had given away: for that's the way with a song, as everyone but the Devil knows. 

Elsewhere, Kit turns the old cliché of translation as betrayal (traduttore, traditore) on its head by remarking that the Russian word for betrayal means also devotion. (Throughout the novel, there is the question of Falin's allegiances -- is, or was, he a Russian double agent? An American double agent in Russia who was expelled; and if so, is he a Russian spy now?) Towards the end of the novel, Falin starts writing poems in English. And all that remains of Falin's last poems, which are lost, are Kit's translations (which make her own name and start her career as a poet): his Russian poems live on through someone else's words, in a different language, yet still his own. Devotion as betrayal, betrayal as devotion.