No doubt rhyme in ancient Chinese is very different than in English. Different enough, possibly, that one would be ill-advised to try a rhymed translation of Chinese poetry. In Russian however, or in any other European language, the cultural context is pretty much the same - these practices, after all, were passed around from language to language, and are part of what constitutes the common tradition of “Western” poetry. I think the main differences are in the resources of the individual language on the one hand - Russian has more rhymes than English - and in a certain time lag on the other - classical Russian verse is barely two centuries old, and so rhyme doesn’t seem quite so old hat as it does in English (or even Polish, which has a “classical” literature going back to the Renaissance).
To me the arguments against using rhyme in translating someone like Mandelstam basically come down to this: it’s just too difficult. But that could be seen as a challenge. Of course it drastically reduces a translator’s “productivity.” But I would far rather see good translations of a few poems, than yet another full-length collection of mediocrities. The “market,” of course, says otherwise.
Since Celan has come up a number of times, those who can read German might be interested in his verse translations, collected at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Chariot/3474/trans/trans.htm, which include poems by Dickinson, Frost, Marianne Moore, and of course Mandelstam (Nadezhda M. lumps these together with Lowell’s, though on a cursory sample they seem quite a bit more faithful to me).
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