Wild Translation Workshop #2

By Sheila Nyholm D’Souza

Imagine if the world’s biggest pop star sang in Danish. Imagine her filling stadiums the world over with adoring fans who had camped out for nights, queueing for tickets. At a minimum, there would be a massive surge in Google Translate hits for Danish to English. But as most of us know, poems and song lyrics make little sense when run through an algorithm.

What is a good approach, then, for the nervous translator tasked with translating a song or a poem? She cannot stay faithful to the source text in the same way as when she translates a research paper. The faithfulness in this case is almost transcendent, loyalty being compelled to extend to the moment that the artist was inspired to pen the words. In many ways, it breaks the ‘rules’ of translation.

And break the rules is exactly what a group of Danish to English translators tried to do in the second Wild Translation workshop hosted by DELT and led by Nielsine Nielsen. We had come to work on translating song lyrics through the process of versioning. Versioning is a technique that Nielsine suggests is ideal for translating lyrics and fixed-form poetry because it positions the translator as a writer or poet, recognizing the creativity necessary to make something that is bound by form, culture and time resonate in a new form, culture and time.

The workshop drew on the theories of Roman Jakobson (1959, 2000), which Nielsine walked us through so that we had some theoretical grounding before we broke off into small groups to take a crack at how we might approach the songs we had brought with us to the workshop. Jakobson categorizes translation in the following three ways: intralingual translation (translation within the same language; for example, dictionaries, paraphrasing); interlingual translation (translation from one language to another); and intersemiotic translation (translation from one mode of delivery to another; for example, ‘translating a book into a movie). His analysis of linguistics provides a basis for a wild approach to translation; Jakobson argued that poetry was untranslatable because ‘of its peculiar characteristics’ (as cited in Venuti, 2012, p. 126-131). This opens the door to creativity and freedom for the translator, because she now has permission to make something new out of the supposedly untranslatable.

Nielsine suggested the following points for us to keep in mind as we considered the sample songs we had brought along: wild translations grow like trees; wild translations are process-oriented, wild translations look at ‘what happens’ instead of ‘what works’; and wild translations supplement other techniques and strategies.

She provided examples of cover songs—Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash—throughout the presentation (as well as a quiz!) to help us visualize how versioning as a translation technique can work. We were asked to locate ‘capsule’ words in the lyrics, words that we felt were representative of the message in the song. The point of departure for the translation/ the new creative work, would come from these capsule words. The main example running throughout the workshop was, of course, Taylor Swift and how one might approach translating ‘You’re Losing Me’. Nielsine took us through her thought process on this song, and the resulting discussion on it was enlightening as we debated some of Nielsine’s decisions, such as to make things rhyme (or not rhyme) in the translation. It demonstrated just how much of this type of translation is indeed almost instinctive, yet still based on learned techniques and strategies. It taps into the translator’s language skills and sense of playfulness, his cultural sensitivities and mental agility. Using songs in both Danish and English, the workshop proposed ways of making changes to creatively adjust the context of the lyrics.

In our small groups, we had the chance to try this kind of adaption with the Danish songs we had brought along. There was hesitation in getting going, and I can’t help but wonder how much of it came from the sense that we were ‘breaking the rules.’ Erasing phrases, dropping prepositions, creating rhyme where there is none in the original –it’s a kind of translatorial madness. And yet that is what we had come to do.

It was, quite frankly, a relief. A relief to know that while translation requires precision, caution, and fidelity there is a flip side, a wild side (a dark side?) to translation that frees the translator to play with the languages they know and love, and to challenge the conventions for which they generally are the staunchest of allies.

For those who do not translate prose, this kind of workshop is a thought experiment and a dare to break the rules.