ON TRANSLATION
A conversation with Esther Kinsky
by Caroline Schmidt
The first book by Esther Kinsky that I translated was Grove, which came out in 2020. I was immediately hooked by the language, which is exquisitely precise and yet at times unfamiliar – no doubt a reflection of Esther Kinsky’s prolific career as a translator. Usually when Esther and I talk about her writing, it’s on the micro-level: words, phrases, names. In this conversation we spoke more broadly about the art of translation and what drives her research and writing. We touched on German scientific language, the relationship between translations and originals, the role of photography in Esther’s work and how translation has influenced her writing.
In anticipation of co-translating your book Schiefern (“Slates”) together, I’d like to start with your interest in geology. Schiefern is a collection of poetry and prose devoted to the Slate Islands, an archipelago located off Scotland’s western coast, and the sedimentary rock itself. That brings me to my first question: Why slate? What are some properties of the stone that appeal to you?
My interest in geology developed quite late, it was something so remote from my daily experience, unlike plants and birds. As a matter of fact I was a latecomer to all terminologies of nature, it really developed from my discovery of the term “disturbed lands” in 2012, when my interest in the terminology of disease (in particular cancer) coincided with the experience of a space next to an oncology practice, where everything suddenly seemed to come together – history, botany, illness, and each with their own terminology, which, however, also overlapped in parts. Language is a peculiar beast which barks in so many directions from the same hoarse throat.
But, coming back to slate … In the early 90s I had visited the Slate Islands together with my partner who had grown up on the west coast of Scotland. He had some interest in the working-class history of the Slate Islands, but all motives for travelling there from Glasgow were overshadowed by the fact that he almost drowned on the first day of our visit, in one of the flooded shafts. At the time I didn’t even know anything about the history of this location. After Martin died in 2014 I travelled back to some places we had visited together in Scotland, and also to the Slate Islands, and this time I was just overwhelmed with the bitterness and beauty of the place – in particular the small island of Easdale – and became very interested in the history of slate mining there but also the shards themselves were really mesmerizing with their innumerable layers and inclusions and veins of otherness running through them. When I came back from Scotland, I took the first opportunity to go to the Natural History Museum in Vienna which has a spectacular section on geology and minerals. And it was there I encountered the description and terminology, but also the many different manifestations of slate. The Scottish slate is very old, much more ancient that the slate in West Germany I was familiar with. I realized in how many guises I had handled and encountered slate and started reading about the geological definitions and also the development of slate history. It struck me how close the descriptions of slate were to definitions of post-traumatic developments of the human soul, and that became my starting point.
Of course the German scientific terminology, which was developed in the 19th century, stands out because it is much less Latinized compared to most languages. Just as in botany and ornithology, this language has a huge poetic potential when seen separate from its scientific context. This potential intrigued me, and it still does. I think geology then became important for me because it highlights human smallness and the inadequacy of all words in the face of temporal space that is simply beyond our grasp as humans. We can add zeroes and zeroes, but they just illustrate the vastness of the material world, but they also make language look so vulnerable. Vulnerability is also a condition of poetry, I’d say, poetry is never robust, it is always something preciously fragile and as such an illustration of the human condition on earth.
The difference you mentioned between German and English scientific language presents a challenge to the translator. One example that stands out to me is in Slates. The third part of the book is titled “Schrifttierchen.” Literally translated, the English equivalent would be something along the lines of “writ creatures.” But as I learned from you, the German, Schrifttierchen, is actually an older scientific term for graptolite, and not a neologism. So there is a richness to the German that isn’t readily available in the English – of course graptolite is Greek for “written creature,” but Schrifttierchen would be much more immediate and accessible to German readers, since you don’t have to know Greek to get it. So the question becomes, are those valid grounds for inventing a word or providing a more visually evocative translation? You had suggested writlings, which I like.
But now I’d like to come back to your comment: “It struck me how close the descriptions of slate were to definitions of post-traumatic developments of the human soul.”
Recently while reading your book Schiefern I came across my old notes about various German terms you used to describe processes of memory and the brain, which are also applicable to stone and the earth. I remember exactly where I sat in my garden when I read the poem “Erinnerung 1” (“Memory 1”) for the first time, and how it felt as if my own brain were moving around inside my head, trying to expand to accommodate it. And at some point I must have also thought: This could be difficult to translate!
Oh, Caroline, I’m flattered that my poem can do this to your brain! I think the problem lies with the multiple meanings and associations of words in German which are so different from English. But I think one just has to work on creating a space with words that can stand its ground. It will be possible. Translations are never twins to the original, they are relatives, sometimes nasty uncles, sometimes favorite cousins, chatty aunts or wise grandmothers. It is important to find a structure in sound and image that is self-sufficient so to speak, without denying where it comes from.
As an illustration of this, here is Esther’s poem “Sulcus,” from Slates, followed by her English translation:
Sulcus
Furrow sagte die frau diese
zwei halblauternen silben zwischengetönt
die schon die furche ziehen in der luft
die falte in der sich allerhand sammelt
verbliebenes und verworfenes auch und
unangelautetes das noch nach namen zuckt
wie ungeboren furrow wie diese einwärts
wachsenden täler im hirn die pulsierenden
gräben zwischen ruhigen feldern über die
der hirnstrom kriecht und grenzen markiert
zwischen vergangenheiten und doch nicht
gewesenheiten ohne rechten sinn fürs futur
perfekt denken wir dann das muss doch
im perfekt stehen wie sie furrow gesagt hat
im morgenlicht am gefluteten schacht.
Sulcus
Furrow, said the woman these two
half-tone syllables, pitched to the shade
which marks the furrow in the air
this fold for all sorts of things to gather
remnants and residue as well as rejects
unsaid, unsounded as yet, twitching for a name
like an unborn, furrow like the gorges
growing inwards in the brain those quivering
ditches dividing quieter expanses
where brain current leaks marking boundaries
between tenses of the past between done-
undone and without a sense of the future
perfect we’ll think, this must be present
perfect the way she said furrow
in the morning light by the flooded mine.
A different thematic pairing in your writing that’s related to the language of geology and the brain is stone and memory. The connection is present in Rombo, as well – your polyphonic novel about the 1976 Friuli earthquake. I’m thinking about the abissi, the “shafts of forgetting,” “where whatever finds its way in will never find its way back out to the light.” Could you say something about that? Or about how the two contrasting materials of slate and limestone might have influenced the language in these two different books?
Well, memory is what drives all art, I would say, and personal language is our repository of memory. We have to name to actively remember. Of course music, visual arts, shapes, materials, are also receptacles of memory, but if we want to actively remember – and actively remembering will always mean sharing – we have to name. Time and history leave their mark in stone more than in any other material, and in ways that we have to decipher. The consistent, slow trace of water is different from the cracks and distortions brought about by an earthquake, by wars, by human tools. And slate and limestone are diametrically opposed as materials. Limestone is a very young rock, it is soft and still bears lots of traces of the living creatures (snails, shellfish, all sorts of animal shells) that have been slowly compressed and processed into this white and porous rock. Slate, by comparison is very solid and hard, it also bears traces of organisms but they have been compressed and enclosed in a rapid, shock-like development. Limestone crumbles and is very susceptible to being shaped by water, but slate is made up of layers, like the human memory. Limestone – as a result of the influence of water – can form these “abissi,” immeasurably deep crevices where things just disappear and lie buried as they would in the deepest unconscious. I’m not sure to what extent these two very different materials have influenced my language, maybe they have, I don’t know. One should never be too analytically aware of what goes on in the creative process.
You mention visual forms as receptacles of memory. I’m interested to hear about the role of seeing, looking and naming in your writing. The narrators in your books are often taking pictures – or “composing” images in language without a camera. What role does photography play in your work?
The visual experience is important for my relationship with the world. People are different, it took me a long time to realize that they also see and look differently. There is no good or bad or better or worse, the important thing is to recognize how one’s vision works. I suppose I’ve always been interested in fractured and layered objects, every such trace speaks of an interference, and intervention, and incursion into a surface or a block of matter. I’m interested in materials and their suffering, also because I feel that any trace of suffering in a material speaks of human suffering. And I think – or rather, I’ve come to see, over time – that I’m particularly interested in finding words for forms of suffering and in exploring the relationship between the naming and the named. Who am I, a bystander, to give a voice to a suffering I don’t experience or haven’t experienced myself? What role do I play in defining an object as marked by suffering? This may sound very far-fetched and theoretical but for me it isn’t, language is something organic for me, and writing is an ongoing process of defining the space between the I and the world outside the I. I find this organic, not contrived.
Every act of naming is also a framing and that’s where we get to photography. I work with an analogue camera only, never with a digital device, which means that material is involved, a roll of film, and a complex decision-making process of framing. I often feel that my choice of frame is like a phrase in a poem, it makes sense in a wider context of a multilayered or multifaceted representation of something. I walk, I look, I see, I name/frame. The image and the words are two routes to one destination. You may feel you get to the same place but you approach it from different sides. And with the roll of film there’s also an editing process, from negative to print, then to the tonalities of the print.
The comparison of a photographic frame to a phrase in a poem is striking. Your writing subverts traditional hierarchies of subject matter, also in your depictions of the natural world.
In Rombo, nature is depicted as a tremendous, indifferent creative and destructive force. The mountain Canin is, to me, a character in itself, a villain par excellence. In part two, interspersed between the accounts of your seven narrators – survivors of the Friuli earthquake – are fantastic descriptions of the natural world: the vipers, the cuckoo, thistles, burning bush and devil’s claw are some of the local flora and fauna that you describe. And of course the narrators themselves speak of their own experiences of the natural world. Nature seems to play a role in almost everything you write – but is it nature writing? How does your work relate to or diverge from the tradition?
I think my writing is not really nature writing because what interests me are traces – of interferences, disturbances. I would never ever be interested in “untrodden paths” or “unberührte Natur” as it is called in German. It is the troddenness of a path that I like, I like to ask myself and the surface: what survives the tread, and how, what can the crumpled daisy by the wayside tell us about the feet that trampled past. When I was exploring the abandoned zone of a former hospital for “cripples” in West Berlin I did wonder why some plants had survived and others hadn’t. It isn’t just a question of soil and light and humidity. It seems to me that some plants, rocks, creatures have more “narrative energy” than others. This is no esoteric waffle, for me it has become a very important part of “reading the world” and it is this reading which forms the basis for poetry.
Speaking of “reading the world”: years ago, while translating your novel Grove, I took part in a ViceVersa workshop at Translation House Looren in Switzerland. One of the other participants commented on the passage I was working on: It’s like a translation of the landscape. You are a prolific translator from Polish, Russian and English, among other languages. How has your translation practice informed your writing?
Translation has always been important for me and will remain so because it challenges the boundaries of the language I translate into, which is also – mostly – the language I write in. Every language has ways and particulars which are seemingly untranslatable – at least within the framework of grammatical rules of the target language. But one has to question these rules, and bend them in order to keep language alive. I don’t mean, say, everyday Anglicisms, as a matter of fact I’m quite conservative when it comes to those “lazy” adaptations, which have more to do with our pitiful consumer society than with linguistic creativity. But I like introducing for instance a different way of using tenses which reflects the source language’s attitude to temporality. These infringements are fruitful and invite reflection about what is specific to a language. Translation will always remain the linguistic practice I learn most from.
Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, five novels (Summer Resort, Banatsko, River, Grove, Rombo), numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children’s books. She has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Iain Sinclair) and Polish (Joanna Bator, Miron Białoszewski, Magdalena Tulli) authors into German. Seeing Further is her latest book to appear in English.
Caroline Schmidt was born in Princeton. She translated Esther Kinsky’s novels Rombo and Grove, which was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and Seeing Further. She has translated poetry by Friederike Mayröcker, and art historical essays, museum catalogues and exhibition texts for the Albertina in Vienna and Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, among others. She lives in Berlin.