Kaleidoscope - Sauerbeck Page 1

Phillip M. Sauerbeck

Last summer I traveled to Greece and other parts of Europe with the help of an Undergraduate Research & Creativity Grant from the University of Kentucky, and a grant from the UK Office of International Affairs. One of my goals for this trip was to work on my Gaines thesis, which at that time was titled "The Art of Translation: Translation Theory and Greek Poetry." I planned to work on my own translations, read other translations, and finally write about a translator's role as an artist. Another one of my goals was to surround myself with the Greek language, experience it in a way that pure text cannot offer. I decided to take a course in Modern Greek. I decided to see many of the places I had read about in school.

I continue in the belief that I don't know how to translate, and that nobody does. It is an impossible but necessary process, there is no perfect way to do it, and much of it must be found for each particular poem as we go.
- W.S. Merwin (1989, pp. 139-40)

All of the choices in life that go on forever forwards and backwards through time are essentially rooted in creation and destruction. As one choice is made, another choice is often made impossible. As one person dies, another lives and continues in the cycle of thinking and acting. No creation can exist without destruction. Perhaps this is evident in a god's creation of a world in which people love and are inevitably hurt, grow and die, learn and forget. There is a discourse between creation and destruction, an oscillation between the two, a tai chi. That action is understood as embracing the past so to live consciously in the present with aspirations for the future. In terms of work, devotion, life choices, and growing, translation is a most suitable way to illustrate the reality that all things are in transition - constantly dying and being reanimated in new forms.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to
....unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down
....into flowerbed.
As roses, up from the ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open
(excerpt from Unmarked Boxes, Rumi, 1997)

Mentor:
Robert Rebel,
Professor, Classics Division,
Department of Modern and Classical
Languages, Literature and Cultures

Beginning with an interest in the translation of ancient poetry, Phillip Sauerbeck has proceeded to formulate his own theory of the nature of translation itself - an enormous undertaking for an undergraduate. He views the process of translating a poem as analogous to the process of transition in the living of a life. Perhaps the most significant aspect of his work concerns the analogous process of assuming responsibility for conveying accurately the contents of a poem and also taking responsibility for one's own motives and actions in the living of a life. In his work, translation emerges as itself an act of creation like the making of the original poem, and both poetic creation and the act of translation are closely connected, as they are for the novelist Margaret Atwood, with the facts of human mortality. Both poetic artist and translator assume responsibility for giving a voice to the spirits of the dead. I have worked with Phillip over the past several years and have read his work as both poet and translator. As always, he takes ideas very seriously and is concerned with their concrete application to everyday life.

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