That was a nice post by Mark Weiss, though I should say that the aphorism
from Weinberger seems to me pretty hard to read other than as it stands. And
it would be good to hear from Pierre Joris on all this.

Not sure if Peter has me partly in mind in the first sentences of his
response below, but I wouldn't argue with anything he says. When I brought
up the notion of an "otherness" that can sometimes resist first-level
semantic correlation, I wasn't suggesting that such instances give the
translator free license to unload himself into the poem. To the contrary,
such circumstances require a more subtle and capacious attunement to the
overall effect of an image, line, or stanza. In this regard, I'm talking
about translation problems as routine as drawing out a line's "sound of
sense", which might require, for example, the rendering of a single word
with multiple meanings into two, three or more words (or the shifting of a
particular effect that can't be rendered in the corresponding line down to
the next-- examples I'm paraphrasing from Weinberger again, actually), to
more abstract issues like bringing across resonances that are tightly
culturally-bound, or interpreting the connotations of neologistic and
grammatical play, any of which can demand improvisatory approaches from the
translator.

To put the general matter another way, there would be a world of difference
between translating into Spanish, say, a poem by Robert Bly and a poem by
Emily Dickinson. In the first case, all you need is a dictionary to help you
hop across to the other side; in the second, there are vertiginous
impediments to overcome, and these may well require certain tactical
scaffoldings and hand-holds to be built by the translator. The Dickinson may
be "less like" the original text than the Bly, but it may well be a more
deeply accurate translation. I wish I could read Celan's Dickinson...

But like /PR pithily put it, I would also readily say that "I don't know any
answer to this".

Kent



>I would have thought that the purpose of translation is to make something
>available to persons who cannot read the original.  To use it to erect
>further barriers between the original and the reader seems  perverse.
>It's a very difficult and delicate operation, walking a tight-rope between
>normalisation on the one hand (in which otherness in the original is
>erased)  and alienation on the other (the temptation to load your own
>otherness).
>
>Sometimes it is very difficult to understand why people intervene in the
>text when they have no intention of writing the poem themselves. --
>
>Dicevano gli antichi che la poesia
>è scala a Dio.
>
>The ancients said that poetry
>is the dream-ladder to God.
>
>I find such an interpolation totally mystifying, and it also produces a
>weaker rhythmic construct.   I can only guess that it is put there to say
>"I'm not having that old-time religion here." so it is deliberately
>subjectified.  Such things are really very common in translation of poetry.
>
>I think Anthony Barnett is someone who has studied the art of translation
>carefully and thought about these problelms and produced some readable
>versions of French and Norwegian poets. I am less sure of his work on
>Zanzotto which might be rather tricksy.
>
>Rhyme in Russian might not be the same thing, culturally, as rhyme in
>English, in view of the different histories of the two poetries.  Usually
>you have to choose between rhyme and meaning, if you translate the one
>you're going to lose some (sometimes most) of the other. And if you rhyme
>translation in English you're probably  going to displace the poem further
>back in history than is comfortable -- we don't _want_ Mandelstam to be an
>Edwardian poet!   It's certainly true though, that we get most Russian, and
>all early Chinese poetry, in cheap substitute versions by setting aside all
>that structure as if it doesn't mean anything. I don't know any answer to
>this.
>
>
>
>/PR

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