The "Earish" poetry of Robert Kelly

Jerome Rothenberg at "Poems and Poetics" has posted Robert Kelly's introduction to his experimental translations in 2002 of some 30 of Paul Celan's poetry, entitled Earish, experimental in the sense that what's being translated from the German is not the original poem but something that's "heard". The poem in translation is "heard" by recognizing in Celan's German sounds accessible only to the English ear. (The "Earish" term is given primarily as the sound equivalent of Celan's poem "Irisch" for which the translation experiment was initially begun.) It's the sounds the translator records. The 'sounds' skimmed off the surface-text, however unrelated semantically they may be to the German sources, make the translated poem. It's something Kelly's dubbed "homeophonic": of it he says "By homeophonic translation I mean: listening to the sound of the [in this case German] poem until you can hear it as English-the result, the poem heard, no doubt 'says' a 'different' thing from the 'original.'"

It's an appropriative reading in which, again Kelly, "one listens to the original other-language poem until one hears the sounds of it as somehow one’s own." But it's also a way to write poetry, one that I've tried myself but with more emphasis on the "seen" than "heard". Kelly even admits to having tinkered with "homeophony" in his college days, looking for "heard" sounds in Horace: in any event, he seems to be the first to announce Earish as a new poetics, and Louis Zukofsky, via his translation of Catullus, as the first practitioner. Of course, questions are bound to arise, such as, Is Earish translation or poetry, or in what sense can it be both?  Is "heard" a variant of "found" poetry, lifting not lines but sounds instead? Or, concomitantly to the previous question, is the ear to "heard" what the eye is to "found"? And if "homeophonic translation" produces something that may bear little resemblance to its original & can still be considered a stand-alone poem, is "heard" poetry, in fact, a type of literary fraud?

I'll be perhaps the second person, after Kelly or Rothenberg, to defend "heard" poetry as a legitimate art form. I'll defend it primarily as a writing technique that begins in translation, & I believe Kelly himself does, too: "I am setting at naught whatever I may think or even know the original poem ‘means,’ and instead using just the sounds of it (as it sounds in my ears) to batter some sense into my head. Its new meaning." It's precisely as "new meaning" that the product of translation really can be designated a poem in its own right, sounds to be not so much gleaned from an initially foreign text as somehow deterritorialized (in Deleuzian parlance) into an entirely new creation. Celan's German text is a field of pure possibilities where translations seem to arise from tapping into hidden processes (among which 'sounds resembling English words' is one) that are both spontaneous and essentially indifferent to origins. But that's just a theory & at best an interesting aside: how does, in fact, homeophonic translation actually work?

Consider the case of the "heard" poem "All Dying Seagulls Are Broken? Nay." generated from a translation of Celan's "All deine Siegel erbrochen? Nie." (Again, I'm giving Kelly's English version both 'translation' and 'poem' status). The German original gives us the phonic blueprint from which Kelly's version is read, & all that's required is a willingness to read "until you can hear it as English":

ALL DEINE SIEGEL ERBROCHEN? NIE. 

Geh, verzedere auch
sie, die brief-
hautige, elf-
hufige Tucke:

dass die Welle, die honig-
ferne, die milch-
nahe, wenn
der Mut sie zur Klage bewegt,
die Klage zum Mut, wieder,

dass sie nicht auch
den Elektronen-Idioten
spiegle, der Datteln
verarbeitet für
menetekelnde
Affen.

Kelly's translation by "homeophony" gives us the following "sounds like" version:

ALL DYING SEAGULLS ARE BROKEN? NAY.

Gay verse ether oak
see, the brief
haughty elf
hoofing took her:

that the well, the hornet
fern, the milk
knower, when
the mood she tours clock be awayed,
the clock be dumb mood, weed her,

that she nicked oak
then elect throne dear idiot and
speak low, the dottle
for a bitter too for
many take a long dying
often.

A fairly predictable pattern of "sound" translation emerges in the opening strophe, consisting of no more than a tendency to rearrange a line of Celan's poem— by means of some easily detectable separation or addition moves— into "homeophonic" segments suited to an English reader (like me) with only the most elementary command of German pronunciation. And, of course, little or almost no familiarity with the poem's real meaning is actually necessary: it may even get in the way. Celan's "Geh, verzedere auch", for example, has been transcripted into "Gay verse ether oak" as if the original had appeared as "Geh, verz edere auch", a string of imaginary substantives rather than a complete (imperative) sentence arranged in fairly unorthodox word-order. A line like "hautige, elf-", on the other hand, has been fused into "haughty elf", with "hautige" shortened by one syllable, and a kind of caesural break in the middle of the line obliterated entirely, in order to force a smoother-sounding English phrase. How repetition of a Celan verse line can morph into one "sounding like" English can be the topic of an interesting study in poetic "lines of flight" (more Deleuze).

As I've said, I regard the "Earish" more a poem than translation. That something intended to be a translation can look like a bona fide poem speaks to me of the primacy of "speech" or orality. Sounds divorced from meaning (or only faintly related to it) can return to a primary language "chaos" against which semantical forces are ultimately helpless. Perhaps the failed chaoskampf in Celan's poetry & life—to be noted in Celan's real German poem— is as good a place as any to free "sounds" or let them live where they seem the most comfortable anyways: at the liminal edges between text and translation, away from enforced meanings. In the face of this radical irreducibility of sound to sense, I submit there can be no appreciable difference, after all, between John Felstiner's 'true' translation of Celan's second strophe, one attuned to real signifying practices (from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan):

so that the wave, honey-
far, milk-
near, when
mettle stirs it to lament,
lament again to mettle

and Kelly's own "heard"

that the well, the hornet
fern, the milk
knower, when
the mood she tours clock be awayed,
the clock be dumb mood, weed her

I'll reserve the next post for an "Earish" poem of my own.