>From: Alison Croggon
>>Which leads me to wonder to what extent the ease or difficulty of a work in
>>terms of translation may do for its reputation. It's a long time since I
>>received the idea that whereas Dante translates very well, due to the force
>>of the visual in the Commedia, such undoubtedly major poets as Pushkin and
>>Goethe are under-regarded outside their own linguistic boundaries, perhaps
>>because of their reliance on (what Jakobson called, in the case of Pushkin)
>>a 'poetry of grammar'. I wonder is this true? At all?
>
> I've often wondered if such wisdoms happen because poetry gets
> translated not only into another language but into another poetic
> diction or set of conventions. Like Dostoevsky getting tidied up by
> Constance E. Little (was it?) who removed all his repetitions and
> roughnesses and curses and therefore a good deal of the energy of the
> language, in the interests of writing "good" English. So a poem
> might get translated into a "good" poem when it is really not a good
> poem at all, but a badly behaved one; and if it's too badly behaved
> to be corseted into "good" poetry then it doesn't get translated at
> all.
A Bowdlerizing under the disguise of translation? Certainly easier to get
away with under that pretence.
> Though whether this might apply to Pushkin I don't know; was his
> grammar badly behaved?
As I remember, Jakobson was discussing a brief lyric of Pushkin's (only four
quatrains, I think), which lacked any obvious 'poetic' devices other than in
terms of sound qualities: no conspicuous imagery, and only one, arguably
dead, figure of speech. J argued that the force of the work came from the
deployment of pronouns. It's not hard to imagine how difficult it might be
to create an equivalent effect in carrying the text over to another
language. Much easier replicate straightforward metaphors, similes, visual
images.
T
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