Seafood Doesn’t Travel: crossing the sea of translation by Menna Elfyn

Back in 1998, while doing a three-month stint in New York, I was sitting in a lovely little New York deli doing what I do best: eavesdropping. Amidst the ramblings of two animated women, came this wonderful line:

“You know honey, seafood just doesn’t travel.”

For some reason, I associated this instantly with translation – its joys and perils - the notion of what travels or doesn’t travel between languages, of those words that often cannot be squashed into a suitcase, in case their delicate forms split, combust, or even worse, begin to ooze an anomalous liquid, rather like a stinking fish. How can poetry in a minority language such as Welsh reach the world without creating a stench? I have certainly attempted, time and time again, to keep my seafood as fresh as possible. When one of my poems was launched in the Metro in Porto earlier this year, there was no one there holding a hanky to their nose. There is another poem of mine on the Metro in Washington, that’s been there since 1998, and although it isn’t the most fragrant of places, at least it’s not the poem that creates the noxious odour. So even if seafood cannot travel without creating a stench then it appears that poetry certainly can. Or so it seems.

The all important question is this: who allows it to travel? Who does the choosing? Who decides what goes into that English-labelled suitcase? “Did you pack this yourself?” they ask you at the airport. Not really, is what I always want to tell them.

Although Welsh was the language of the hearth, my mother tongue – there have always been disruptions in my life - language interference, if you like. At eighteen months old I was whisked away from my homeland to a very English part of Wales, Chepstow, Monmouthshire, as the result of a facial disfigurement. In fact the surgeon said that I was the worse case he’d ever seen. So, for almost three years I lived in hospital, visiting my mother and father for a few weekends and holidays. English was all around, and I’d return home to attempt to bridge the linguistic gap that had begun to form between myself and my native tongue. I had to, in effect, reconnect with my Welsh.

There were more disruptions. We moved from a very bilingual Swansea valley to a rural, Welsh-speaking area, and yet the school was entirely English. The teachers (many of them Welsh speakers), never let on that they could speak Welsh. It was the early sixties and Cymdeithas yr Iaith (The Welsh Language Society) hadn’t yet become a force to be reckoned with. I joined at the age of 15 – rejecting all things English – even to the point of refusing to study English at A Level. That shows you how passionate my views were. To many, such a stance was disrespectful of the status quo. But I rebelled along with the others – fighting for the rights of the language we loved and respected. But at university, though I campaigned for the language, got arrested, imprisoned and the rest of it, my world view was vast and expansive — I worried about other issues, other types of prejudice, writing to the President of the US about the Vietnam war, marching the streets of London in defiance of violence, and arranging anti-apartheid campaigns.

Yet, my poetry was always written in Welsh. I loved Welsh poetry but felt at odds with it too. How could I, a Welsh woman, be a poet? Weren’t they all men, descendant of an age-old Bardic tradition? I veered away from reading the Welsh poets, and chose instead to read the European poets in translation, or the women poets of the US — learning my craft through the likes of Bishop and Dickinson. And then, when it came to writing my first book, I was still trying to be a Welsh poet, wanting to connect with the tradition.

Until one discovers that there are ruptures in tradition, that there are clefts and splits, crevices and fissures – and through these gaps I saw that Welsh women were now beginning to write in English, about Wales, turning boldly outwards, with the likes of Gillian Clarke, Jean Earle, Sheenagh Pugh, putting their eyes to the cracks and seeing beyond the wall.

And so my real writing started unexpectedly with winning a prize for my second collection. I’ve never liked competitions but after suffering a miscarriage in 1977, poetry seemed to be the only way to write about how I felt. I wrote in a way that was very unliterary—it was almost a cri de coeur— and little did I expect the eminent poet Bobi Jones, to award my collection Stafelloedd Aros (Waiting Rooms) first prize in the poetry competition.

From then on, I never looked back. I was involved with campaigns during my next couple of books, trying to be a mother, trying to write, trying to teach at the university and finding the overflow of life too much at times. All the while my writing was becoming more womanist (I reject the term feminist which has to do with power relations, political structures, social situations). Poetry belongs to something else. I won another prize for a selection of all four books and Aderyn Bach mewn Llaw (A Bird in the Hand) was published.

During this time, I was being invited to other countries – to travel – and like the seafood, my work in Welsh didn’t travel very well. It made me feel ill, and I began to wonder whether I’d developed some kind of intolerance. I wrote my own English versions of my poems, sometimes in hotel rooms before the readings. But I was lucky to have healthier friends who didn’t have such intolerances, and who were also poets—poets who wrote in English — Nigel Jenkins and Gillian Clarke, who were both passionate about the language, people who knew not to try to prize a closed-shell mussel open, but rather to find something else to eat instead. I translated their work into Welsh and they translated my work into English. And so it grew—organically, there was a synergy between us—an understanding that the work had to be made afresh, with different ingredients, like seafood chowder. “Out of the arms of an old moon,” Gillian once said, her words a sprinkling of dill.

Parallel translations soon grew into a necessity. I had met Nuala Ni Domhnaill, the Irish poet, and realised that this was what she did with her volumes. I asked Gomer, my Welsh publishers, whether such a thing would be possible. It was the early nineties and they were sceptical. But the translations soon appeared, side by side. A group of poets became a driving force behind it. It grew again almost out of my reach.

And then the English language readership read Eucalyptus and proclaimed to the world that I was a new voice. I wasn’t of course. I’d produced 5 volumes, won two major prizes, and I was on an A Level syllabus, so I was far from new. And soon enough, the esteemed publishing house Bloodaxe were interested in publishing my new book, Cell Angel and then Cusan Dyn Dall/ Blind Man’s Kiss. Those books are in a very different vein from my other works in Welsh. It could be, some would argue, that I was aware of another audience. I don’t think so. I think I was liberated in my writing because I had wonderful translators who never ever failed to produce the goods. Sometimes, I would tease them and say of a certain theme or word, now surely that it will be impossible to express in English. But they never failed to find a way.

So I owe a lot to my translators and it may come as a surprise that being aware of an impending translation has changed the poetry, to a degree. I’m aware of an intelligent reader in another language, another world, and I’m also aware that my work perhaps does travel effortlessly by now, without travel-sickness, better so in Warsaw than in Trelech, perhaps. The readership that comes as a result of translation is a readership that connects with the themes that haunt me.

Daniel Weissbort indicated in his introduction to Poetry in Translation: “whether we like it or not, English has become the world language, and thus has come to belong to people of all nations.” He talks about a hybrid poetics, as an important feature of Western modernism; a phenomenon that has not yet been significantly explored. Some of the reasons for the neglect, he feels, is due to the fact that major critics in the West are not familiar with, and some not even interested in, the languages of the colonized. Some argue that translation is not pure English. Hence the value of translation for political and cultural reasons has not been recognized. He also adds that many do not see translation as creative writing, even. And that once it is seen in that way, people will come to recognize and appreciate it.

So what is translation to me? It’s a way of getting through the journey with ease, even if it means that my translators have to take a series of dead ends and wrong turns for me to reach my destination. I insist on creativity. I don’t want to read myself word for word, verbatim in English. I can do that already. I need poems of a high quality that can compete with my Welsh ones, make them earn their place. People who resist the notion of translation nevertheless love to dwell on the beauty of the translations. As Edith Wharton says of reading – it is to dwell on beauties and hunt down the blemishes. That is part of the complexity of my work in Welsh and English. As Wittgenstein said: “It is difficult to imagine an origin without feeling that you could always go back beyond it. As the business of looking things up in the dictionary suggests, all words are stand-in for other words and all language is filched and forged, reach-me-down rather than bespoke.”

And while translation is a stand-in, in many ways, it is also more than that, it is the enabler of a different journey entirely. For poems, unlike seafood, are great walkers.

Menna Elfyn is the author of over 20 books of poetry, prose, academic & educational works, and the playwright of over 8 stage plays, 5 for radio and two television plays. She has also produced short films and has presented programmes for the BBC, HTV and S4C. She was made Poet Laureate for the Children of Wales in 2002 and recently won a Creative Arts Award to write a prose book on the subject of sleep. She has travelled the world to read her work at Festivals and has held residencies and workshops in the US, Canada, and in over 15 countries for the British Council. Her latest poetry collection Perffaith Nam/Perfect Blemish is published by Bloodaxe Books and she appears in a new book (with DVD) IN PERSON, by Bloodaxe, published in May2008, which showcases 30 of their most widely read and travelled poets. She is currently Royal Literary Fellow at Swansea University.