Anny,
I've been translating poetry for 30 years or so, but mostly as a kind of
practice cum self-tortutoring activity, essentially a method of close
encounter reading of the third kind. Thus I've translated poems by about 250
poets, but relatively few publication credits in the field, basically
because I have not sought to publish. Still, I have published a couple of
volumes of William Carlos Williams (about 240 pages in all) and a fairly
substantial selection of poems by Samuel Beckett, printed in a Beckett
anthology I translated and edited back in 1987. Also several poems in
magazines by Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth (I have booklength manuscripts of
both those favourite poets and mean to publish them one day), John Ashbery,
Cid Corman (adaptations of 10 of his poems made a section of my latest
collection of poems), Stanley Kunitz, Maxine Chernoff, Elaine Equi, Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge, Nila NorthSun, John Balaban (by order), Charles Causley, R.
S. Thomas, Tony Harrison (by order), John Heath-Stubbs, and probably several
others I've forgotten about. Mostly I've translated from the American and/or
English, but also some from German, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, even
Faroese.
Your best bet when talking about your writing, translations included, is
simply to stick to the elusive 'facts', i.e. describe the basic process,
talk about the difficulties and the nature of them (i.e. the incompatible
characters of different languages), your choices, or acceptances, if the
idea to translate was someone else's.
A friend of mine, Susan Bassnett, who's written and lectured ad nauseam
about translation theory, believes writers should place equal worth on their
translations as on their original writing. She gets rather annoyed when
writers don't list their translation credits, which too many neglect to do.
And I must say, I agree with her.
I've only once had to talk about translating poetry, while talking about
translating plays happens fairly often. (I've translated/adapted about 40
totally different plays for the professional theatres up here). Unprepared
and caught unawares, I was asked about the problems of translating John
Ashbery. Unfortunately my aquired blurted out 'wisdom' about these things
was not written down nor was it recorded, but I did stumble upon a metaphor.
I said: 'Translating poetry is like pulling a rope through a needle's eye.
In order to do it properly, you must disentangle the rope and, thread by
thin thread, pull each strand of it through the I. Once you've done this,
you must splice the rope together again and make certain no one can see that
the rope's been spliced together, i.e. the strands must fall perfectly into
the shape of the rope. By which token the translated poem should work in the
new language.'
Best
Árni
--
Árni Ibsen
Stekkjarkinn 19,
220 Hafnarfjördur,
Iceland
tel.: +354-555-3991
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/
on 4/6/03 9:11 PM, Anny Ballardini at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> I will soon (in a month) have to talk about: "Poetry in translation" and I
> am already panicking because I have to "talk". There was a cartoonist here a
> couple of days ago, Alessandrini, invited to hold a conference at the
> museum, and he said: "Every time I have to appear in public I sweat off a
> couple of kilos before", and I also remember Raymond Pettibon who at the
> opening of his show was literally hiding behind the column. I think I am
> worse. And as Alessandrini said, "I ask myself if after over 30 years of
> drawing the same faces I am able to draw one if they ask me to..."
> ... something similar is happening to me, and I would welcome any idea
> anybody has about translating poetry.
> Thank you. Anny
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