this was no lie”). It is a statement that takes us back to the question of the
dog’s “honesty” above. Indeed, the beloved who has become a “black thing”
is not, like Beatrice, “a nine, that is a miracle, of which the root, that is of the
miracle, is solely the miraculous Trinity.” She merely is, or rather was.
Here is what we might call a conceptual poetry à la lettre—a set of strophes,
largely written in denotative language, that modulate familiar abstract nouns,
personal pronouns, and adverbs of time and place (Parfois, là). The net work
of likenesses and differences, so subtly articulated in the tension between
numerical base and linguistic construction creates what is a highly wrought
poetic text that is nevertheless quite amenable to translation. Rosmarie Wal-
drop, herself an important poet who might well deviate from the original
were it desirable to do so, has here produced a remarkably literal translation.
But then what were her alternatives? Take the line Tu étais morte, et cela ne
mentait pas, which Waldrop renders as “You were dead. this was no lie.”
Grammatically, one can’t say, following the French, “this did not lie.” The
construction “this was no lie” is thus the proper idiom any textbook would
use. Cela, of course, is normally translated as “that” rather than “this” (per-
haps Waldrop chose “this” for intimacy), but otherwise the line offers no
other translation possibilities. Or again, Waldrop’s translation of “Il fallait
faire connaissance avec la description” as “I had to make friends with descrip-
tion” is not wholly literal (e.g., I had to get to know description), but “make
friends” alludes slyly to Roubaud’s own veiled reference to Gertrude Stein’s
important essay-poem “An Acquaintance with Description.” In other words,
there are alternate possibilities available to the translator even in the case of
Roubaud, but only within rather narrow perimeters.
And there, of course, is the rub. Precisely because Roubaud’s poetry is, at
one level, so translatable, it doesn’t give the translator very much scope. And
this is the case even for the Oulipo lipogram, where the translator must be
extremely gifted so as to match the original. To translate texts like Quelque
chose noir or La Disparition is to subordinate oneself to the original, even as
Wittgenstein’s translators devote themselves to approximating the language
of their master, so that there is surprisingly little talk, in Wittgenstein criti-
cism, of the relative merits of translation A versus translation B or of the
English translation of the Tr a c t a t u s versus the French. The case of Rilke is
the opposite. To speak of a translation of the Duino Elegies is to begin with
the premise that X’s version cannot be commensurate with the poem itself.
Wittgenstein himself no doubt would have preferred Rilke’s poetry to
Roubaud’s, even as he preferred Brahms to Bruckner. But ironically, his own
understanding of poetry as invention, as conceptual art, became an impor-
tant paradigm for those writers and artists who came of age in the immedi-
Wittgenstein on Translation 79