22 The Linguist Vol/61 No/3 2022
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Robin Meyer adopts a resistant approach to translating
the multilingual poetry of troubadour Sayat'-Nova
A
lmost every translation bears its
challenges – finding the mot juste,
the right turn of phrase, the idiom
closest to that in the original. Yet translation
goes beyond just transposing words, phrases
and sentences into another language; the
task of the translator, in the words of Walter
Benjamin, is to transmit, to let echo the
underlying intention of the original in the
translation.
1
To be true to that task, we can
neither just retell the original nor provide a
literal translation.
These two extremes, as the poet John
Dryden recognised in the 17th century, are
best avoided in favour of giving the original
thought "either the same turn if our tongue
will bear it, or if not, to vary but the dress, not
to alter or destroy the substance".
2
In essence,
he advises staying as true to the original as
possible without doing violence to the target
language. A perfectly sensible maxim, or is it?
In certain fields of translation this is more easily
said than done. Consider poetry or, to put
the cherry on the cake, pre-modern poetry,
or even multilingual pre-modern poetry.
I face this conundrum at the beginning of a
long-term project: the translation into English
of the Armenian poetry of Sayat'-Nova, an
18th-century troubadour who lived and
composed in and around Tiflis (modern Tbilisi,
Georgia). He is revered in the Caucasus as one
of the greatest folk singers and composers,
and his songs are well known and oft recited
to this day in their original languages: Azeri,
Georgian and Armenian.
3
Despite his fame,
no complete English translation of his largely
romantic poetic songs is available in English.
English versions of some poems can be found
online; others have been partially translated
by Sayat'-Nova scholar Charles Dowsett.
One of the reasons these pieces are so
challenging – and perhaps why a published
translation is as yet lacking – is their
multilingual nature. The Armenian poems are
written in the dialect of Tiflis, transfused with
borrowings from Georgian, Azeri, Turkish and
Farsi. These loanwords did not survive in
Modern Eastern or Western Armenian, the
varieties most commonly spoken in the
Republic of Armenia and the international
Armenian diaspora.
The task of translation thus brings with it
the challenge of finding not only the origin of
these loanwords, but also their precise
meaning in 18th-century parlance. In poem
26, Sayat'-Nova uses the term նաղաշ
(/nɑʁɑʃ/), best translated as 'painting,
artwork'. This word is derived from Farsi نقاش
(/naqqɑːʃ/; 'painter'), ultimately a borrowing
from Arabic ن قّ اش (naqqāš; 'engraver,
inscriber'). Both original terms designate
occupations, but cannot do so in Armenian,
A poetic
othering
