Lyric Ventriloquism and the Dialogic Translations of Pasternak, Mandelstam and Celan

Abstract

The Egyptian lament quoted as my epigraph jumps to the heart of one of the central issues of literary history: the use of other people’s words as a source—the source—of literary production. If everything was already “just repetition” four thousand years ago, how can the modern poet possibly hope to create something new? The answer has been the same since Antiquity: the original use of other people’s words, or in a word: imitation. I use imitation here in a broad sense that covers its historical usages including lexical and stylistic appropriation; rewriting and retelling; translation; and various forms of intertextuality. Imitation was recognized for much of the history of literary theory as a central aspect of art. It was central to both Greek and Roman poetics² as expounded by Horace,³ Cicero,⁴ Seneca⁵ and Quintilian,⁶ among others. This imitatio was revived by Petrarch and the Renaissance Humanists who used imitation first of the Classical models, and later of contemporary figures, chief among them Petrarch himself, as their means of reviving their respective national traditions.⁷ The Romans’ and humanists’ faith in imitation, which progresses through the Neoclassical, stems from the Aristotelian tradition of mimesis that views imitation as a natural and basic human faculty underlying all culture (a belief shared by contemporary anthropology⁸). Beginning with the Romantics, and continuing to this day, imitation becomes something to be hidden—whence Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” which is another way of viewing a specific type of imitation, specifically the kind that pretends not to be.

For what has been said is just repetition,

What has been said has been said.

(The Complaints of Khakheperre-sonb, 19th century BC¹)