Muse of Translation

“There is no muse of translation,” the translator reminds as he struggles with Pindar’s victory odes, and what he means is that the imagery is overwhelming: the hissing of snakes as Medusa’s sisters mourn her death, the baby Iamos “lying on a bed of yellow and purple violets,” Heracles with his baby hands strangling the two serpents sent “to devour him on the day of his birth” so every translator must beware of “rank transplantation.” Just imagine, if one were to translate the line as “Forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.” How ridiculous that admonition to a king. Better to transpose to the vague modern, though Pindar “perversely, from our point of view—often seems to relish... the concrete image,” and it’s just there that I think perhaps all being is translation; the child I was at the kitchen table, translating my mother into my father, my father into my mother; each one’s “inviolate honey” becoming the “blameless venom” of the other. So now I too prefer the naked tongue, even pained and writing, caught in hammer and tongs, flexed and torqued upon the anvil, until the metal turns mercurial, quick, spilling into and out of the shape of everything that is. For all day, while that pair of grey-eyed serpents feeds the abandoned child on honey, and the e-mail box fills with a multitude of voices debating the distinctions of the hoaxes of authorship—the pseudonym, the heteronym, all the masks we can put on—I have trembled because of my tongue. Because it insisted upon saying I love you. So it waits and waits for some word from you. It’s late in the afternoon when you finally reply and then to the quote I sent to a list. I read obliquely, wondering if I should hope because you say you’re thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnets (the beloved and the lover’s love) or if I’m lost to the shadows you’re going off to dispel with a cup of coffee, that “best” at the end of your letter, my allotment from now on. Is it too much love or too little that I have translated into being? Oh by now I’m mistyping forget your tongue upon the anvil that the tongue itself has made.