Poetry’s frequently intense non-linearity, however, as well as the problems made for translation by that preference for crooked rather than straight roads, that penchant for metaphoric hints instead of plain assertions, is something I can more readily explicate than I am able in any reasonable compass to explain poetry’s musicality. Not long ago, while seated and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, in a doctor’s office, my drifting mind suddenly struck against a compelling rock: William Blake’s most famous poem, “The Tiger.” The first of its six four-line, closely rhyming stanzas is all we need:

 Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
 In the forests of the night,
 What immortal hand or eye
 Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The words might seem to tell us of a burning tiger. But we know better, accustomed as we are to poetry’s non-linear ways. Is it the tiger’s eyes that burn? or his presence, his fierceness, his passionate hunting? Blake is of course speaking of all of these, and more, but of none directly. This is non-linearity at its height. Night may seem to be described as a possessory landlord, the owner of forest lands; again, we know better. But does Blake mean that all forests are black at night, which is true, or that night is to be understood as simply black, or that night is wild and desolate and dangerous, as all forests are in their darkness? We cannot satisfactorily answer such linear-inspired questions: neither the poem nor the poet who wrote it is much interested in mere linearity.

The third and fourth lines seem to be a direct question; we know they are not. The word “immortal” assures us, if nothing else does, that God is the undeniable power of whom Blake speaks. Why then does he put the matter interrogatively? Is it because he wishes to shed doubt on God’s powers? or to advocate some other “immortal” presence as the true power behind creation? or does he by this indirectness merely fortify the immensity that he knows or believes God to be?

 But none of this is what my mind found compelling, that day earlier this summer, sitting, outwardly calm, in a doctor’s meaninglessly furnished and decorated waiting room. I was thinking, in fact, of translation, and of all the attempts made by knowledgeable Frenchmen to carry Blake’s poem into their language. None of those attempts are in my judgment in the least bit successful; I will not cite them to you but, rather, will examine a translation into French which I myself suddenly began to formulate. Here is how the crucial first stanza emerged, in my version:

 Tigre, tigre, tout brûlant
 Dans la forêt, noir géant,
 À qui les doigts, de dieu, déesse,
 Ont fait ce tremblant habillesse?

I had gotten in to see the doctor before my draft of this and the next stanza were completed. Three or four exhausting days later I completed all six stanzas, but the remaining five do not need to be inflicted on you.

 If this were from a genuine poem in French, and I doubt that I can make that claim, one could say that its basic sense – not the original’s but the translation’s basic sense—is: “Tiger, tiger, all-burning in the forest, a black giant, what fingers, belonging to what god or goddess, have shaped (or ‘made’ or ‘created’) this trembling (or ‘tremulous’ or ‘shivering’) “—and here the stanza ends with a word which, I confess, does not (or at least does not yet) exist in French. Every speaker of French to whom I showed this translation observed that fact, though every one of them knew exactly what I meant. Trapped by Blake’s ardent inconclusiveness and unspecificity, by the vast differences between French and English ways of thought, and also by the metrical scheme and the rhyme scheme which I myself had created, I drew on the common French word, habile, meaning “able, clever, adroit, skillful, cunning,” of which word there are half a dozen derivatives, serving various syntactic needs, and among which there is an extant nominal, habilité. And then I knowingly and willfully created the nominal my translation needed, habillesse. It might well have had a prior existence, though I can find no trace of it. But the word is completely understandable, if irritating to a proper Frenchman, and it rhymes and fits my meter, and for me that is, and of necessity has to be, sufficient.

 But what have I translated Blake into? Let me repeat Blake’s stanza, and then give you once again my French version:

 Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
 In the forests of the night,
 What immortal hand or eye
 Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

 Tigre, tigre, tout brûlant
 Dans la forêt, noir géant,
 À qui les doigts, de dieu, déesse,
 Ont fait ce tremblant habillesse?

I do not know if, without having the English version to hand (and in mind), one can even fully understand my translation. But, as I have indicated, it is impossible fully to understand, in the linear sense of that term, Blake’s original. And short lines, incantatory rhythms (but prosodically regular), and heavily clanging rhymes, are all major components of that original. If you read or hear this comparison with attentive ears, you will note clear echoes of these effects in the translation. Not the words, please note, but the music, for lexical shifts have plainly been made, to accommodate these more pressing necessities. And in any case, how can we contend, in a poem almost violently non-linear, that mere verbal linearities have to be given any sort of primacy, or even have to be paid a great deal of attention? Whether in the intensely mystical context of both Blake’s poem, and in my attempt at translating it, poetic transference is possible, moving between two cultures with frankly almost opposite views about animals—the English adoring bunnies and lambs, the French happily stewing both—I do not know. The French are not much given to mysticism, in dealing with either animals or humans.

Continue: Hwæt wē Gār-Dena     in geār-dagum

Please note:
This page’s section of “Translation: Processes & Attitudes” has previously appeared in The Literary Review, appearing on pp. 632 - 34 of the Spring 2002 issue, vol 45 No 3. For the full text of the French translation of Blake’s “The Tiger”, see “Le Tigre”.