La Servante Au Grand Coeur

[Lyle Roblez]

Firstof all, let's get the name right. It's a shibboleth in Scotland that the word has to be pronounced "Gallic", as close as possible to what native speakers say, "Gidhlig". The word pronounced "Gaylick", in England and in Ireland, is ambiguous, as it can refer to either of two sister languages - the Celtic language used in Scotland and the one which is an official, national language in Ireland. People have often said "Scottish Gaelic" to prevent misunderstanding, but current usage recommends referring to the two languages respectively as "Irish" and "Gaelic". That's what I'll do here.

When I began travelling back and forth between Edinburgh and Budapest at the end of the 1990s, I made a private promise to myself that I would not attempt to explain anything about Hungary to the people "back home". It wasn't just a matter of how easily they confused Bucharest and Budapest, or trying to encourage them to develop a clearer notion of central European geography. The effort would be pointless, because the two worlds were so different that clarifying one to the other was a hopeless undertaking.

Similarly, when a word travels between languages, it practically never retains the meaning it originally had. A clamorous example is "hello". When I first heard a Hungarian friend say "hello" and slam the phone down, I nearly had a heart attack. How could he possibly terminate a conversation the very moment it had begun? Within two self-coherent systems, the same combination of sounds cannot take on the same significance, in part because the space available will not be identical. To a limited extent, the same is true of literary translation, which must always involve a degree of creative misunderstanding, especially where poetry is concerned.

Poetry is already a Judas-like, treacherous and destabilising undertaking in the language the original poet uses. Previously applicable rules and connections, accepted values and implications are overturned. We become equipped to read a new poem by confronting the text and allowing it to teach us how it can be understood, in the wake of which our reading strategies become changed, often profoundly. The language itself, and the interrelations between texts, cannot remain indifferent to what happens in a newly written poem. Everything is transformed, however subtly.

The process of translating a poem is therefore analogous to what the poet was doing in the first place. He or she struggled to negotiate with what the language was prepared to permit, with what it imagined - wrongly - it was capable of saying. That could be why Tsvetaeva - famously - insisted that original composition was already a form of translation, from "that" language into a human one. Or why, when his Swedish translator asked Brodsky's permission to make an alteration for the sake of rhyme, Brodsky exclaimed that this was exactly what he had wanted to say in the first place, only the Russian language had refused to let him do it.

Poetry, then, is already in a foreign language, even when written in the one we use every day. Lotman would say that in poetry the bricks and mortar of conventional speech are subjected to the superimposed rules of a second, different language. This could explain why poems are so shamelessly promiscuous, why they have such a compulsive relationship to translation, almost demanding to cross over the elusive, insubstantial boundary between two languages.

I for one am sceptical about the increasing predominance in the English-speaking world of what is known as "relay translation", where a poet with no access to the language being translated works from a word for word version of the original text. Actually learning another language is looked on as elitist and exclusive, an unjustifiable challenge to the democratic right anybody has to put themselves forward as a translator, even if they are monolingual English speakers. As if it were not crucial that a significant portion of those writing the newest poetry in any language should constantly explore the sounds and meanings deployed by foreign writers.

In the case of a little-used language such as Gaelic, it is all the more crucial not to pass via a bland English crib, but instead to bring the tools of Gaelic, the possibilities the language offers, face to face with what a range of European and non-European languages have in their repertoire. Even the simple practice of reading a text aloud in Gaelic, followed by the text it translates in French or German, has an electrifying effect, as if the two languages could engage in a dialogue. That corresponds to my own experience of translating poetry, on the one hand like dipping litmus paper - the target language - into a solution - the language of the original - to see what colours emerge, on the other like finally getting two languages to talk to one another, and listening to what they say.

At the end of May a conference about translating into and out of Gaelic will be held at Aberdeen University. I plan to talk about poems by Attila Jzsef and Mikls Radnti which I put into Gaelic for the magazine Steall (something like "jet", "outburst", "outpouring").

I committed a howler at the very start with 'Az a szp, rgi asszony' ('That lovely woman long ago') because I confused 'rgi' and 'reg'. In my mind I had the image of an old woman, even a nanny, getting a moment of repose in the garden, perhaps not uninfluenced by Baudelaire's 'La servante au grand coeur dont vous tiez jalouse'. Correcting it got me into trouble with syllable counts and line endings which needed time and effort to sort out. Hardest of all, however, was the shocking simplicity of 'szeretnk nem szeretni'. Sometimes one will translate a whole poem for the sake of a single line, which is what happened here. Sadly, no satisfactory solution could be found, not least because 'I love you' in Gaelic can only be said in a roundabout way, literally 'There is love at me on you' ('Tha gaol agam ort'). I had ruefully to remedy the situation as best I could.

The importance given to restraint and understatement within my own culture can make Jszef's approach look like cheating, as here, or with the reference to a child remembering its dead mother at the close of the other poem. Our assumption tends to be that an emotion too openly displayed cannot therefore be sincere. Attila's poem offers proof of how mistaken the assumption is.

Christopher Whyte is a poet in Scottish Gaelic and a novelist in English. From 1987 to 2005 he taught Scottish Literature at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. He has been based in Budapest since 2006, where he writes full-time. He has translated five volumes of poetry from the Russian of Marina Tsvetaeva, most recently Youthful Verses (2020). Ceum air cheum / Step By Step (2019), with English translations by Niall O'Gallagher, is his sixth poetry collection. You can find more of Whyte's work at www.christopherwhyte.com

Dans le cadre des dbats que nous publions sur l'Europe et son avenir, voici un reportage de Bernard Guetta qui dcrit les aspirations de la Turquie rejoindre l'Union et qui pose cette dernire la question de ses frontires orientales

Dimanche, ce n'tait pas une quipe de foot que l'Italie affrontait. C'tait toute la Turquie, tout un peuple qui vit une anne de grce et voulait encore gagner au foot, comme en mai, mais aussi sur tous les fronts, conomique, politique, diplomatique. La Turquie a un chiffre.

C'est le quatorze. Nous sommes, martlent les Turcs, la quatorzime conomie du monde et la Turquie veut plus. Elle veut devenir tout ce qu'elle est dj sans l'tre encore, europenne, dmocratique, moderne, membre de l'Union. Elle veut frntiquement tre la hauteur de cette ambition nationale, proclame par l'Empire ottoman, poursuivie par la Rpublique, devenue crdible aujourd'hui et que le Galatasaray incarne.

Le Galatasaray, c'est la Turquie. Ce n'est pas seulement le club qui a gagn, le mois dernier, la Coupe de l'UEFA, qui a fait voir jusqu'aux derniers des Turcs, jusque dans les plus petits villages d'Anatolie, au peuple et l'lite la fois, aux riches et aux pauvres, que la Turquie pouvait tre la premire en Europe.

C'est la fiert de la Turquie populaire, son ivresse, mais c'est, en mme temps, le plus ferm des clubs, celui des Turcs blancs, non pas blancs par la peau mais par l'esprit, de ces Turcs de culture europenne, Europens de pre en fils et polyglottes.

Mete Razlikli, par exemple, directeur sportif du Galatasaray, franais parfait, lgance italienne, pragmatisme anglo-saxon. Dans son bureau du club, mtropole du foot, immeubles, terrains, villas, coles et internats pour les juniors, dans cette ville dans la ville, son portable finlandais sonne non-stop et c'est invariablement en franais qu'il rpond.

a vous arrive de parler turc?. a lui arrive. Si, si, a lui arrive, mais je suis ancien lve du lyce. Il ne prcise pas lequel. Le lyce, c'est videmment la maison mre du club, l'autre Galatasaray, le lyce par excellence, qui n'admet que sur concours, enseigne en franais depuis 1868 et dont sortent et sont sortis tous ceux qui comptent dans le pays. Continuit europenne, fil de l'histoire, foot et gopolitique.

En visite Paris, le sultan Abdlaziz avait demand visiter les grandes coles, ppinires de la puissance franaise. Il avait envi, admir, demand la France de lui envoyer des professeurs et quelques mois plus tard le Galatasaray ouvrait, en plein cœur d'Istanbul, capitale de l'Empire ottoman, ancienne capitale orientale de la chrtient. Elves musulmans, chrtiens et juifs se retrouvent pour la premire fois sur les mmes bancs, la moderne, la franaise, aux Lumires. Le grand mufti s'en trangle. La lacit vient de s'introduire dans l'empire.

Les Eglises hurlent. Les patriarches chrtiens crient au scandale. Le grand rabbin n'est pas en reste. Pie IX menace d'excommunier les catholiques qui enverraient leurs enfants dans cette cole du Diable. Les diplomates aussi s'agitent. Les ambassadeurs russe et grec vont protester au srail, la cour, car ni Moscou ni Athnes ne peuvent tolrer cet ancrage europen de la Sublime Porte, leur voisin, leur rival qu'ils ne veulent pas voir s'occidentaliser avant eux. Rien n'a chang depuis.

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