Rhosean Asmah

on translating Charlotte Delbo

Charlotte Delbo’s “Dialogue” presents a conversation between two people, a woman and the poem’s narrator, and the narrator’s inner thoughts. Given that “Dialogue” appeared in Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return), a collection of poetry greatly informed by Delbo’s time imprisoned at Auschwitz, it is likely that the poem presents a conversation that Delbo actually took part in and her thoughts during it. The poem, in a way that is both stunning and simple, presents the difficulty that comes with trying to instill hope in others while not truly having hope oneself — a phenomenon truly representative of Delbo’s experiences.

In translating “Dialogue,” I had two primary goals. First, I wanted to maintain the conversational nature of the poem, ensuring that the bits of conversation sounded like actual words that could have been exchanged between two women in a prison camp. As a result, various contractions such as “you’ve,” “that’s,” and “there’s” occur throughout my translation. Additionally, I try to use simple language throughout the parts of the poem that are conversation, often choosing more colloquial forms of words that have multiple translations. For example, I translate tenir as “make it” rather than “hold out” or “resist,” faut as “have to” rather than “must,” and lutter as “fight” rather than “resist” or “struggle.”

In my translation, I also wanted to emphasize and distinguish the different narratives within the poem. For that reason, I introduced space between the bits of conversation and the narrator’s inner thoughts. Additionally, in an effort to distinguish between the two speakers and the intervening inner thoughts, I indented the three components to varying degrees. Finally, because I thought the different indentations clarified who was speaking during the conversation, I removed the quotation marks from the poem to avoid redundancy.

My primary goal in translating the second poem was to stick as closely as possible to Delbo’s original, as I found the poem particularly striking. My greatest difficulty was in deciding how to translate the past tense of agoniser, which appears throughout the poem. Literally, agoniser means “to be dying” or “to be about to die.” Literally translating the past tense of agoniser would have led to particularly wordy English phrases in the poem, such as “for one who was dying for three days and three nights” or “for those who were dying so many deaths.” Therefore, to retain the poem’s simplicity, I translated the past tense of agoniser as “died.” As “died” often appeared next to time phrases (e.g. “for three days and three nights”), I hoped it would retain some sense of the continuous action that agoniser inherently implies.

Additionally, I decided to translate the forms of pleurer that appear in the poem as “cry” rather than “weep,” which other translations have used. Though the use of “weep” would have deepened the Biblical allusions already present in the poem, I chose to use “cry” because it rhymes with “die,” which introduces a nice cadence to the translation.