Váh

by Immanuel Mifsud

published by Midsea Books, 2024 

“What does a poem ‘say,’ then?” writes Walter Benjamin in his essay The Task of the Translator. “What does it communicate? Very little, to a person who understands it.”

I will not purport to understand Immanuel Mifsud’s latest work of poetry Váh, published by Midsea Books. Perhaps poetry ought to be perplexing.

Belt

In this work, Mifsud’s words bear different guises; they form various paths through which to reach us. He writes his poetry in Maltese interspersed with Slovakian, translates it alongside Ruth Ward into English and adorns his pages with images as imposing as the mountains around the river Váh, which lent the work its name.

Set in a foreign land, we are all “strangers” being beckoned by the mountain ranges: “Come to us. Come near us, stranger”.

Folla 3

We find ourselves alone amid Mifsud’s cryptic words and images. Then, piercing the silence and solitude is the intimation of a “voice like the sound of wind in the leaves; like the rippling downstream of a spring”.

We join the persona on a train. Torn and indecisive, he yearns for a journey he then shudders from. The train is a place of solitude, “a place to linger alone, weeping”. We can relinquish control on a train, its forward movement propelling us irrespective of our desires. Bound while on board to its whims, the train becomes an avenue for release.

A new energy picks up – a sense of hope and youth and hubris: “we imagine our time won’t come”. We journey to public squares “with no edges”.

Missier Iben u Xemx

Then from activity arises stillness: “As we walk with lips closed and eyes wide,” writes the poet, “we summon silence to rest in our bosom”.

The energy subsides and along comes confusion: “Who might we be now…?” As we yearn for escape back into that place of energy, waiting for “the night to recall the day”, we find “there is sky between us”.

Self-translation is not only inadvisable but also drastically incomplete

We, the bilingual – the fractured, the doubled – the both-and, the and/or – the people who speak in tongues… we who are in constant translation, constant misunderstanding… we yearn for intelligibility.

Trio

“You spoke in a language I did not understand. I answered in a language you didn’t understand.”

Is Váh a work of self-translation? One wonders if all creative acts belong to this mode. We express ourselves through mediation, with words and artforms, in our attempt to bridge the chasms running deep between us. Does this count as an act of self-translation – one done of us by ourselves?

“The translator’s task,” writes Benjamin, “consists in this: to find the intention toward the language into which the work is to be translated, on the basis of which an echo of the original can be awakened in it.”

Vah 3

He goes on to say: “Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other, so translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the original, must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original’s mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognisable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language.” 

Art therefore is not the result of self-translation; rather it finds the artist’s original intention and fashions this, lovingly and in detail, making recognisable in the process both itself and its originator. Self-translation is not only inadvisable but also drastically incomplete. We might think, ‘who better to translate me than myself?’ Indeed, there are those, like Augustine’s God, who are “more interior to me than myself”. It is the Other that makes me intelligible, whether this is another or a work of art. We weep with relief as we relinquish control.

Vysoke Tatry 2

How ought I to read this book? Should I meander from one language to another, as I do in life? Should I alight from the language of my thoughts and settle amid the charcoal and acrylic of Mifsud’s paintings? Should I journey from one disparate word to its translated mirror and rest awhile to wonder how it is the same and how it may differ?

In a work that invites us into a silence we may sow “to raise a forest”, it may be best to resist too much activity. Let us read this work in the spirit of stillness, guided by perplexity.