Viki Holmes, Poetry Wales, Volume 40: Spring 2005

Much has been written of the difficulty of translating poetry, the slipperiness of words, the impossibility of conveying the writer's meaning in words not native to their tongue or brain. Translation itself is a word with a multiplicity of meanings, on the one hand signalling no-change, uniformity between the words of one language and its fellow, alternatively the act of changing in form or shape or appearance. Change, or similarity? The translator's job is a tightrope between these twin poles, and many fall by the wayside. Poetry, more than any other medium, reminds us of how words transcend themselves, how they can be a seductive but misleading web where one singular meaning cannot be unwound from the shimmering, multi-faceted tangle in front of the reader. Thoughts may be shared, but are rarely duplicated. For all the en-face translations, the twins are fraternal only, never identical.

But I wonder whether this is such a problem. Writers are rarely discrete in their observances - in great poetry there is not one single meaning to be gleaned, but a kaleidoscope of possibilities, a shifting that can take place even during a single reading, let alone repeat viewings, different readers. Whatever language a poem begins in, it is always a translation. Collections dissociated from the writer's own language of choice remind the reader of their own part in this process of decoding and commonality: words are rarely transparent, singular, pure, but become simply a medium, a conduit, for the thoughts that have inspired them...What [translations] have in common is the recognition that we are all distanced by, and from, language...

...Translating the world, making sense of it can be a dark process as well as one lit with evening sun in woodlands. Stephane Mallarme, a master of French symbolism, was a writer who lived for this process of translation, of subtle shifts, impressions cast. He once claimed that "to name an object is to eliminate three-quarters of a poem's please...to suggest it, this is the dream." By this argument poetry should strive for intangibility: dislocation from names leaves us only with suggestion, inference, shade and tone. Notes for Anatole's Tomb is not a poem, we are told. Certainly it was not a poem in its author's eyes. Mallarme, famed for his writing of tombeaux for figures such as Poe and Baudelaire, found the death of his eight year old son an impossible subject. Patrick McGuinness' translation of the fragments that make up Mallarme's notes for his never-to-be completed elegy provides us with a moving insight into the poet's mind. In these impassioned and grief-stricken fragments Anatole becomes precisely what Mallarme is unable to figure in his poetry. The poet here is not an alchemist, he cannot transmute the death of his son into a kind of poetic afterlife, despite Mallarme's lament that "with gift of words I could have made you king" the words themselves fail him. But it is this failure, perhaps that makes it poetry. Anatole's Tomb is not always easy reading. Mallarme's notes are fragmentary, but this adds to the sombre power of lines such as "I can feel him in me wanting - if not lost life, at least the equivalent -" This is a collection to be experienced rather than read, flashes of empathy for a grief that the poet himself finds himself beyond articulation. He talks of his "fury against the formless" but for all his anger and grief, this is a fury directed at the inevitable partiality of language. If poetry is, after all, the communication of something, even the inability to communicate then this is certainly poetry, and of the highest order. What we can feel in others, what we imagine we feel...