In a message dated 12/5/00 7:24:57 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
> Henry's posting of the excerpt from JOE GOULD'S SECRET (trying to tell
> us something, Mr. GOULD?), in which Longfellow is said to "translate
> perfectly into seagull," made me want to nominate John Clare as another
> perfect candidate, especially after having discovered a Spanish-language
> website where "Yo Soy" can be found--along with translations of poems
> by Emily Dickinson and Robert Louis Stevenson (hey, why not Robert
> Burns?!).
>
> The mind boggles at the thought of translating Clare into any language
> lacking equivalents for such nouns as "mouldiwarp," such adjectives as
> "swaly," or such verbs as "crankle" and "crump," "dropple" and "drowk,"
> "soodle," "soof," and "swop."
There's that famous story of Degas saying to Mallarme
that he had many ideas for poems but was unable to
make a poem from these ideas. Mallarme is reported
to have responded: But, Monsieur Degas, poems are not
made of ideas, they are made of words.
Well, in a perfect world, Degas would have retorted,
"Just as my paintings are made of merely paint?" Ah,
if it were all so easy, so pat. Anyway, the point of my fictional
retort is that tho the words are important, so are the other
conceptual aspects of the poem and for the words themselves
many languages offer at least "rough equivalencies" to a
resourceful translator. It really doesn't matter if the poem is
made different in translation…because, good/bad/indifferent,
the translation is the "original poem" to a reader/hearer
without access to the original language. (In the Joe Gould
story that Henry posted, suspending disbelief as to the language
capabilities of seagulls, there is no "Hiawatha" other than
J. Gould's version for the seagulls.) And to take the argument
to the ontological (and perhaps into the realm of the ridiculous),
the original poem could be called the first failed translation of
the poet's fullest intention and expectation for the poem's beingness.
Finnegan
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