Translation Challenge (into English) has been held annually for over a decade alongside its sister competition ‘Her Gyfieithu’ (into Welsh) with the aims of encouraging the development of creative translation in Wales, internationalising our literature scenes and strengthening the relationship between Wales and the world. Each year a different source language and text are selected, reflecting topical issues and contemporary debates.
This year, yet another significant year for Wales, the UK and our relationship with the European Union, it seemed appropriate to select a language and text that would represent some of the best values of the European project. During the refugee crisis of 2015, the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel implemented a progressive policy of asylum that led more than a million refugees to be able to settle in Germany.
Born in 1961 in Ankara/Turkey, Zafer Şenocak has been living in Germany since 1970, and is one of the country’s main voices in the discussion on cultural and political identity, citizenship and multi-culturalism. An essayist and novelist in Turkish and in German and a renowned poet, his work has been translated into many languages. His poem “Nahaufnahmen” was selected as the text for the Translation Challenge and Her Gyfieithu 2020. He was a Visiting Fellow at Swansea University in 2000 and Gefährliche Verwandtschaft was translated into English Perilous Kinship by Professor Tom Cheesman.
The competition is organised by the Wales Literature Exchange, Literature Across Frontiers and Wales PEN Cymru, and is supported by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Swansea University, O’r Pedwar Gwynt, Poetry Wales, the Arts Council of Wales and Cymdeithas Cyfieithwyr Cymru. This year’s competition is supported by the Goethe-Institut. The adjudicators are Professor Karen Leeder, New College, Oxford University for the Translation Challenge into English and Professor Mererid Hopwood, University of Wales Trinity Saint David for the Her Gyfieithu into Welsh. Mererid’s adjudication and Elan Grug Muse’s winning entry will be published in O’r Pedwar Gwynt.
A ‘online and in situ’ evening of celebration of Her Gyfieithu and Translation Challenge 2020 will be held at Yr Egin, Carmarthen in collaboration with the Senedd on Wednesday 30 September in the company of Zafer Şenocak, the judges, winners, sponsors and supporters of the competition.
Professor Karen Leeder’s adjudication
Şenecak’s ‘Nahaufnahmen’ (Close-ups) presents a sequence of eight poems in a characteristically self-conscious, spare and sinuous poetry. The poem starts with a declaration ‘Setze mich zusammen aus Worten’ ([I’m] composing – literally putting myself self together – in words). And the eight poems offer such linguistic snapshots with language itself squarely in the frame: ‘the wind will whistle up vocal chords for itself / language will revive’ (or ‘be resurrected’ – one of the decisions is how far to take the religious vocabulary in the poem). ‘The poem’ is mentioned casting ropes out into the world and indeed these poems seek out the ‘rain poet’, the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al Sayyab (1926-1964) perhaps one of the most influential poets of the Arab world, to go on a journey to find the poet with no address: the Chilean poet and Nobel prize winner Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). So a highly self-conscious sequence in a language at once condensed but also light of touch; the poems bristle with powerful and precise images but also a kind of syntactical looseness made visible in the blank lines and the complete lack of punctuation. The first test was grammatical: simply understanding how the clipped grammatical relations function in the poem. Subjects are often missing but comprehensible from the verb forms – the first line quoted above is a case in point. Several of the contestants confused subjects and objects, singulars and plurals or mistook possessive pronouns. Then there are several of the always tricky reflexive constructions which threw people off: ‘lass dich kneten Bruder (‘allow yourself to be kneaded, Brother’); several impersonal constructions which demand interpretation; or the abstract nouns that are often so difficult in German (here, for example, ‘die Schützenswerte’, the feminine thing/person deserving protection). German grammar is more rigid that English grammar and so can sustain grammatical relations across these strung-out sentences much more easily than English, where a nudge is often needed so the reader can follow. Then there are the shifts in tone from the use of conversational slang, to the exotic or religious often with subtle inversions of word order to imply a high register. And finally, there are the images – often obscure, and often dependent on neologisms that are interpretable (if at all) by analogy with existing words but are so difficult to pin down. A very challenging terrain indeed, then, and the contestants rose to the challenge.
The winning entry stood out at once, following the sinuous language to perfection and entirely in tune with that spare voice. But it also managed to capture the idiomatic tone and the elusive poetry: even hinting at the moments of rhyme and assonance.
After that several contestants did a very commendable job one what was really a very difficult task, though brought down occasionally by misunderstandings: here PenGwynBotk deserves special mention on account of the poetry of their version.
About the winner…
Dr Eleoma Bodammer is a university lecturer and holds the position of Reader in German at the University of Edinburgh. She teaches German literature, grammar, written language, and translation, including literary translation into and out of German and English at postgraduate level.
She is a Black Welsh academic, born and grew up in Wales and learned German at the local comprehensive school in Newport. She went on to study German at the University of Manchester and was awarded a first-class BA Honours in German Studies and a PhD in German literature, funded by the British Academy and the DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service).
Her published research has focused on mid-18th and early 19th century German literature: Goethe, Schiller, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Heine, the German Romantics and Friedrich Stolberg. She has also published in the field of literary translation: the reception of German-language translations of Robert Burns’ poetry in Austria and how German women translators translated the religious aspects of Burns’ ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. She is currently working on representations of disability in the works of E. T. A Hoffmann.
Winning Translation
‘Nahaufnahmen’ by Zafer Şenocak
‘Close ups’ translated by Dr Eleoma Bodammer
I
Piecing myself together with words
to the juvenile sentences I say adieu
blood salt and spit
lyrical sludge
is what the earth needs
freshness of rain and thawing
frost adieu
a springtime motto
pause
lengths of wild paths
lead through gaps in memories
that was it
whoever comes from there
goes home
II
woken up and written down
a whole life
thus the other time lost
its threatening eternity
the nearest ones responsible for fear
anxious writing
and because of them silence
nothing that a single breath
cannot say
III
no swans
winter rotation
usual
when rambling
the fingers splayed open
measuring the mountain ridges
peaks carried away on snow stretchers
no swans amongst the victims
the wind shapes its own vocal chords by whistling
language will rise from the dead
and claim it is human
a persecuted person
the rare one
the one worthy of protection
everywhere in need of repair
only a rumour the state
of the feathers
in the cupboard
IV
The thoughts dissolve on the tip of the tongue
Babylonian stillness
whoever still has a brother in faith
sinks into the loam
let yourself be kneaded brother
not even the finest poets escape
Neruda was said to have been sitting on the barge that drifted down the Tigris
not far from Baghdad
a rainy day
it pours into the hands of the women kneading dough
in the sand the deep tracks from the armoured tank fill up
with the rose oil from antique bottles
how did they manage not to break
it rains on
I ask the rain poet
whose name threatens to smudge
on curled up paper
Badr Shakir al Sayyab
I ask him the way to Neruda
fellow travellers on different continents
Neruda has no address here anymore
tugboats on the Tigris
at night with corpses during the day with oil
the winter vegetables behind the house
declare themselves in favour of life
Neruda lives
but the tugboats
night for night
do not rest
how nice an empty barge would be now
swaying at the shore
V
I have hope again
one tries hard to keep the dead
at peace
warm blankets
when it stays dark forever
nothing more to say
interrogation silence
VI
we carried wood up the mountain
trunk for trunk
stretched out arms took the burden from us
on the way back
the snow fell and fell
on the white line of the plain
where had we come from
sent by whom
our lot unknown
our feet defy the road
taking root instead of felled trees
crooked rocks
VII
tethers are left over from every poem
blurred ground
thank the eyes
their gaze does not go deep
for the passage you need harder ground
better eyes for the horizon
you wanted to be prepared for the wind
your wings outstretched
St. Francis of all the saints never wanted to fly
his shoulder a landing strip for the tired one
we have broken wings and are close again
to every ground