In a talk at Yale University, Felstiner shared a fantasy of his. I will start my focus on Felstiner by sharing it with you. “It’s a fantasy that takes place in the early summer of 1939. I do know that there was one time when Neruda and Celan were in the same place. In the late spring, early summer of 1939, Neruda was in Paris, having gone through his part in the Spanish Civil War. He was receiving refugees in Paris and trying to get them to Chile, and so on. He had lost Garcia Lorca, but he was still a partisan of the Republican government. And Paul Celan, a much younger person, was in Paris to study medicine, but mainly to study surrealism, which is what was happening for him then.
“The fantasy begins at some café on the Left Bank, where I imagine Neruda and Celan sitting down together — they’d probably been introduced by Paul Eluard, who was a friend of Neruda’s and a passion of Celan’s — and the subject comes around to translation. The question comes up of who can translate this powerful LatinAmerican voice and who can translate this as-yet-obscure — because he was still writing love poems to his mother — this poet-to-be from Czernowitz. And oddly enough, a strange thought comes into all their heads at once, and they realize that somewhere in New York — I could have told them exactly where — or in Maine at the time, there is a three-year-old. And it’s clear [from a picture of himself as a child Felstiner is holding up] that he’s just gotten the news. That’s why he’s looking up with such a startled frown on his face, because it’s bad enough that a three-year-old should be told he has to translate from two difficult Spanish and German poets, but he doesn’t know any German or Spanish; he’s rather worried. But I think he’s up to the task, ’cause as you can see, he’s scooping up his crayons and he’s getting ready to go to work. So my fantasy continues: Neruda and Celan solemnly rise up, silently shake hands, and walk along into their separate destinies, confident that at one point . . . then I wake up.”
Since musicians often feel they were born to play Bach or Beethoven, and actors feel they were born to play Hamlet or Mother Courage, it’s nice to see a translator who not only feels he was born to translate the poets he’s translated, but who can express it in such a whimsical, self-parodying way. But then Felstiner’s first book was about the parodies and caricatures of the English
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