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Finnish Journal for Romanian Studies | No^1 ● 2015
MYSTERY AND SPACE
TRANSLATING THE POETRY OF LUCIAN BLAGA
█ Diarmuid Johnson
█ The Academy of Modern Celtic Ethnography
█ Wales (UK)
ABSTRACT
The present article describes the process of translation of a selection of the poems of Lucian Blaga into English, and investigates some of the challenges that this task presents the translator. The discussion begins in generic terms, and includes some remarks on the character of the Romanian language, as perceived by the translator, continuing then with a more detailed analysis of lines and verses from sample texts. All texts are quoted from Blaga Opere 1. Poezii (Blaga, 2012a). Other works by Lucian Blaga that contributed to my understanding of his work are included in the bibliography.
The stimulus to translate the poetry of Lucian Blaga can be formulated simply as follows: Romanian literature is largely unknown in the English-speaking world. It is an immensely rich tradition, comparable with other great European traditions, German, French, Italian and English. A knowledge of it is desirable to arrive at a more complete understanding of European civilisation and culture. Insight into rural life and into human existence beyond the urban space is particularly rich in Romanian tradition, and a knowledge of the Romanian literary tradition grants us access into a world seldom depicted in other European traditions, this being the world of a people who derive their living from the earth.
The sample poems and translations in this article lend themselves to five categories; the monastic world, folk culture and Christianity, the rural space, poems of the night, and ars poetica. Within these categories, we find lexical items that occur repeatedly in Blaga's work, and on which he builds the edifice of his lyric world. Several examples from this lexicon are discussed.
KEYWORDS
Mythological space, vernacular, core lexicon, rural, mystery.
Diarmuid Johnson Mystery and Space. Translating the Poetry of Lucian Blaga
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS, FRAMEWORK AND CONTEXT
Having discovered the poetry of Lucian Blaga in 2009 while working at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, I began reading his work in French translation ( Les Poèmes de la Lumière , Éditions Minerva, Bucharest 1978), and discussing it with members of the Department of Romanian in Poznań, Poland. I thus became aware of the cultural resonance in the poems, a resonance that prompted me to visit Romania in an effort to learn more about the source of the poems, and the context in which they were written.
Attending the Lucian Blaga International Literary Festival in Alba Iulia three times between 2009 and 2013 enabled me to discover the heritage associated with Lucian Blaga both locally and nationally in Romania. Exchanges with others at the festival, at the University in Alba Iulia, and in other Romanian-speaking environments, brought me closer to a position from which I could begin to translate the work with confidence.
Having established the above, we proceed to consider the Romanian language, the idiom in which Lucian Blaga wrote, and to become acquainted with the character of this language.
Romanian is essentially a popular language, a vernacular that developed organically over time with little prescriptive or institutional interference. The language absorbs the lexicon of the linguistic communities that co-exist and succeed one another over time, Slavic, Hungarian, Greek, German and Turkish^1. Although Romanian in the 20 th^ century adopts swathes of idiom from French, these innumerable Gallicisms, prevalent in the spheres of politics and journalism, for example, make little impact on the poetry of Lucian Blaga.
While many 20th^ century scholars in Romania enjoyed an education in Latin and or Greek^2 , the language itself, unlike other literary idioms in Europe, is largely uninfluenced by the Hellenism and classicism that was prevalent in literary circles in Europe in the 18th^ century. Also, the influence of 19th^ century romanticism on Romanian, while palpable, is an influence less profound than on European writing in general^3. Because of these things, the experience of reading Romanian is closer, in its immediacy at least, to the experience of reading Shakespearean English, for example, an idiom still young and vigorous, richly figurative, and not yet touched
(^1) The idea of lexical purity is reflected in language policy in several European cultures since the emergence of the idea of the nation-state. French, German and Irish are three cases in point. (^2) This remark reflects the impression given by senior academics whom I have met in Romania and whose level of classical education is comparable to level in other European countries two or three generations ago. (^3) Cf. Mihai Zamfir, Scurtă istorie – Panorama alternativă literaturii române , Volumul 1, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 2012.
Diarmuid Johnson Mystery and Space. Translating the Poetry of Lucian Blaga
THE MONASTIC WORLD
The great cathedrals of England, France and Germany epitomise a view of the world as held by the medieval Christian mind in Western Europe. These edifices reach out to the sky in longing. They cast huge shadows and humble the beholder. Their message is clear: feet rooted to the earth, man is a lesser being than the all things celestial and high. Such cathedrals do not exist in Romania. Here, as elsewhere in the Balkans and the Orthodox world, there are other models; the low- roofed monastery, for example, a place where the faithful wait with dignity for divine grace to descend amongst them. In the poetry of Lucian Blaga, we meet some of the inhabitants of this Orthodox monastic world. Here, rupture between the medieval and modern epochs is of no major significance. The Orthodox world retains much of its early resonance. It has not undergone the fragmentation that causes the malaise of the west.
Sample Text 1
From Călugărul bătrân îmi şopteşte din prag , (Blaga, 2012a: 103)
On the Threshold the Agèd Monk Speaks to me in a Whisper.
The monastery is the scene of Călugărul bătrân îmi şopteşte din prag. Three simple lines from this poem serve to illustrate how the tension in the Romanian can easily be lost in English.
i) Vreau să-mi dau sufletul ii) Viaţa mea a fost tot ce vrei iii) Umbra lumii îmi trece peste inimă.
Literal translations of these three examples yield:
i) I wish to give up my soul. ii) My life has been everything you wish. iii) The shadow of the world passes over my heart.
To honour in translation the tension and tenor of the original lines, we suggest the following:
i) I wish to relinquish my soul. ii) My life has been all you might wish to call it. iii) Over my heart, the shadow of the world now passes.
FOLK CULTURE AND CHRISTIANITY
Inhabiting the margins of the human in the poetry of Lucian Blaga, we find shapes and shadows, figments of the subconscious perhaps, not spirits as such but simply
Finnish Journal for Romanian Studies | No^1 ● 2015
other beings. These are not always hostile to their mortal neighbours, but seem to represent some danger, at least to the innocent.
Sample Text 2
Fiica pământului joacă | Earth-Daughter Dances, (Blaga, 2012a: 114)
We take the first couplet of Fiica pământului joacă to illustrate ways of arranging the order of ideas in the original to create increased resonance or greater tension is the translation:
Spre dimineţile tale râd soare vechi, soare nou. Through your mornings I laugh Old sun, new sun.
Or:
Sun of old, sun risen anew For your every morning I will laugh.
THE RURAL SPACE
A reading of European poetry, from romantic to modern, enables us to discern four views of the rural space: the view of the native metropolitan poet for whom the rural space is distant, and alien to varying degrees; the view of the metropolitan poet who migrates to the rural space, spends some time there, enjoys inspiration there, but remains a stranger to the human society there; the view of the rural poet who migrates to the metropole and writes there of his native place as he remembers or choses to remember it; the view of the rural poet who remains in his native environment poetically, and writes of the experience of living there (Johnson, 2013: 137-152). Lucian Blaga is a voice who expresses this fourth view.
Sample Text 3
Pluguri | Ploughs (Blaga, 2012a: 98)
The opening verse of Ploughs illustrates how the Romanian, if translated literally, often falls short of exciting the imagination. English expects its poetry to harbour several dimensions, while the Romanian, in Blaga’s case, for example, is confident in the clarity and therefore in the transparent nature of the style it adopts_. Pluguri_ begins:
Prietene crescut la oraş fără milă, ca florile în fereastră, prietene care înca niciodată n-ai văzut cîmp şi soare jucînd subt peri înfloriţi vreau să te iau de mînă, vino, să-ţi arăt brazdele veacului.
Finnish Journal for Romanian Studies | No^1 ● 2015
As though the breast were not its source But a place deeper within the earth.
Sample Text 5
9 Mai 1895 | May the 9th^1895 , (Blaga, 2012a: 218)
May the 9th^ 1895 is Blaga’s date of birth, and in a text so entitled, he sings of his village, Lancrăm, whose name resembles the Romanian word for ‘tears’.
Sat al meu, ce porţi în nume sunetele lacrimei, la chemări adânci de mume în cea noapte te-am ales ca prag de lume şi potecă patimei.
Here, the issue of rhyme arises, in two ways, neither forced nor artificial; between the substantives ‘nume’, ‘mume’, and ‘lume’ in the first instance, and between two genitive forms in the second, ‘lacrimei’ and ‘patimei’. In translation, the rhyme is discarded, and the key-phrase ‘te-am ales’ is deferred to create a sense of culmination:
You, my village, Whose name evokes the sound of tears This was the night on which, Heedful of the deepest mother-callings, As threshold to the world, as passion’s causeway, You are the one I chose.
POEMS OF THE NIGHT
An affinity with the hours of darkness is a theme that occurs repeatedly in the poetry of Lucian Blaga, and this is reflected in the choice of poems that feature in the samples presented in this paper.
Sample Text 6
Pleiadă | Constellations , (Blaga, 2012a: 223)
Gazing at the sky in wonder, as a child, the poet finds the following couplet, naive as suits the scene, reminiscent too of light-hearted rhyme in popular culture, and weightless, despite the reference to the cross:
Vânt le iscă, vânt le duce cineva le pune-n cruce
This couplet might be translated literally as follows:
Diarmuid Johnson Mystery and Space. Translating the Poetry of Lucian Blaga
The wind causes them to appear, the wind carries them away Someone has formed a cross with them.
Here, none of the character of the Romanian couplet has been preserved. Given the limitations within which the translator finds himself working, and the better to set the lines in motion in English, we suggest the following:
The wind sets them spinning, then sweeps them away, A hand, unknown, forms with them a cross.
However, ‘to form a cross’ in the original Romanian expression is to be taken not so much literally as figuratively, and means ‘to consider something dead’, ‘to make the sign of cross as on a dead body’, or ‘to accept that something is gone’.
We amend the translation in an effort to preserve both the literary and figurative meanings:
‘The wind sets them spinning, then sweeps them away, Somebody thumbs the sign of the cross on their forehead.’
Sample Text 7
Mi-aştept amurgul , |I Await the Dimming of the Light (Blaga, 2012a: 21).
The question of literary cliché, obsolete forms, archaisms and outdated lexicon comes to the fore when translating the poetry of Lucian Blaga into English. In Mi- aştept amurgul (Blaga, 2012a: 21), the opening lines read:
În bolta înstelată-mi scald privirea şi ştiu că şi eu port în suflet stele multe multe şi căi lactee, minunile-ntunericului.
The first phrase might be translated by ‘celestial vault’. This is unsuitable, placing Blaga and his poem in an earlier century, the 18th^ or 19th, and creating a misleading impression of his thinking. The translation must be more neutral, and modern. We find ourselves considering ‘starry pool’. Also, the phrase ‘stele multe multe’, ‘many many stars’, we translate with ‘innumerable stars and galaxies’, thus giving Blaga’s text an educated feel in English, rather than an unsophisticated one.
ARS POETICA
Four poems from the work of Lucian Blaga that we have translated into English and that express a vision of the world in the form of an ars poetica are Biography ( Biografie, Blaga, 2012a: 127), The Wonders of this World are a Crown of Petals I will not
Diarmuid Johnson Mystery and Space. Translating the Poetry of Lucian Blaga
Oltenia, I thought I had understood this line. The translation I had made was correct, but, unknown to me, as I sat in the library, the original line hides a layer of meaning that was revealed only a result of immersion in an environment similar to that in which Lucian Blaga spent his childhood, a traditional village, ‘sat’ in Romanian. After the midday meal, on a warm afternoon in autumn, a group of neighbours gathered together in the village where I was staying to talk and exchange memories_._ ‘Hai să stăm la taină’, one of them said, ‘let's sit and talk together [about the things we share, past and present]’. In Biografie , I now realised, Blaga sits with his ancestors, as with his living family and neighbours, exchanging with them memories of things that bind them together, and thus rejuvenating them.
The second word from Blaga’s poetic lexicon we wish to comment on briefly is ‘poveste’. Like ‘taină’, ‘mystery’, ‘poveste’ is Slavic in origin, and means ‘story, tale, narrative’. However, none of the English words available to us resonate as the Romanian does. ‘Story’ in English is a label on a broad category, and invites further explanation. The word is sometimes associated with children, sometimes with news reporting, sometimes with things vaguely covert. It is not a word on which a poet can build his edifice. ‘Tale’ in English is associated with the culture of a former day, may imply an element of fantasy, and is removed from present-day preoccupations, inhabiting the margins of the contemporary world. ‘Narrative’ today is a term in vogue, and one on the verge of redundancy through overuse: in no way can it accommodate the things imply by Blaga's ‘poveste’. Translating ‘poveste’ will result inevitably in compromise.
Lines 5-6 of În marea trecere read: ‘Frunzare se boltesc adânci / peste o-întreagă poveste’. We suggest the following translation: ‘Leafy branches throw a steep arch / Over this undivided scene’.
Line 17 of Biografie reads : ‘poveştile sângelui uitat de mult’. Here, Blaga speaks of things forgotten, and thus the word ‘tale’ is appropriate in this instance. We suggest: ‘Tales of my kin, long since forgotten’.
We mentioned the word ‘sat’ above. Along with ‘taină’ and ‘poveste’, ‘sat’ is one of the key-words in Blaga's poetic lexicon that defies the English-language translator. Its simple equivalent is ‘village’. However, ‘village’ in British culture means something quite different to ‘sat’. Whereas in Britain, the village often implies a nucleus towards which things gravitate, and assume importance the closer they may be to the nucleus, the Romanian ‘sat’ is a linear development, a series of small- holdings, often lining a valley. To use ‘hamlet’ in English would create confusion in other ways, ‘hamlet’ being quaint, a word evoking idyllic paintings and peaceful rural scenes from pre-industrial times. ‘Sat’ requires the translator to use ‘village’ on occasion. We suggest ‘a country place’, as in ‘Spirit of a Country Place’ ( Sufletul satului , (Blaga, 2012a:108)
Finnish Journal for Romanian Studies | No^1 ● 2015
We conclude these remarks on translating the poetry of Lucian Blaga with the closing lines from the poem Cuvântul din urmă (Final Words), (Blaga, 2012a: 121):
Cu cânele şi săgeţile ce mi-au rămas Mă-ngrop, la rădăcinele tale mă-ngrop, Dumnezeule, pom blestemat.
A direct translation yields:
With the dogs and the arrows that are left to me I bury myself In your roots I bury myself O God, cursèd tree.
While acceptable in several ways, this translation seems unsatisfactory due simply to its brevity. This brevity in itself is not a fault, but the consequence of brevity here is that the lines have been uttered, or read, before they have time to create their effect. This may be due in part to the fact that ‘tree’, the last word in the translated poem, is monosyllabic, whereas, in the original, ‘blestemat’ has three syllables. Also, ‘blestemat’, the adjective, or past participle of the verb, carries the meaning in the original, a disturbing, dark and complex meaning, whereas ‘cursèd’ in the translation precedes the substantive and is partially eclipsed by it.
We now consider the following solution:
With my remaining dogs and unspent arrows I shall lay down in the grave, Underneath your very root, O God, I shall bury myself under your cursèd tree.
Grammatically, the English here does not go quite as far the original, where ‘pom blestemat’ qualifies the vocative ‘Dumnezeule’. The effect of the suggested English translation is however similar to the effect the original has on the reader. Another possible avenue is to restructure the verse as follows:
With my remaining dogs and unspent arrows I shall lay down in the grave [And] underneath your very root I shall bury myself, O God, you cursèd tree.
To conclude these remarks on translating the poetry of Lucian Blaga from Romanian into English, we can now state and restate the following:
Translation of this work involves the issues a translator will face when translating lyric work in general. These issues are linguistic, but also cultural. Therefore, as
