Hi Rebecca
The problem of translating poetry is that it can't be done. How can you
render a work that foregrounds the particular sounds and rhythms and
semantic associations of one language into another? But of course,
translations happen all the time: and personally I'm grateful that they do.
If you read two or three or four versions of a poet's work, as I often do,
then you might end up with a sense of what they hold in common, which might
be something like what the poet was doing. All the same, I am always going
to prefer those translations that make the most beautiful poems in English.
As a poet and reader, beauty matters to me; and I have a fairly broad idea
of what I mean by that, which includes what is often called unbeautiful. As
a poet, and I don't see what can be done about that, I am English-centric;
it's my language, it's my material, it's what I make poems out of; and my
primary interest is always going to be, in the end, what disturbances
translations might create in its fabric, how it might be torn open slightly
or stretched or warped into some new possibility of expression.
Arguments about translations are always going to be about subjectivities, as
are all arguments about poetry. I respond to the poems I respond to. As
with reason, or Rilke's ladders, such things are forever without ground.
All the same, it seems a bit misleading to me, beyond fairly basic mistakes
and obvious misinterpretations, to refer to a stable original as the
authority to trump the argument. The original is surely susceptible to all
these interpretations; it's how each translator reads the poet. In poetry,
the aesthetic/stylistic choices are always going to be as crucial as any
semantic decisions; I don't see how that can be avoided, or why it would be
desirable. The one thing you can't do is make exactly the same poem as what
is translated; if that were so, all languages would be the same. And they
manifestly are not. Given that, you end up with a bunch of different
versions, each of which perhaps incline to a slightly differing aspect of
the poem; and the rest is up to each individual reader.
The kinds of things that particularly grated my ear were phrases like "the
body that's loved" (V) as compared with "beloved body" (E) - they seem
clumsy and unnecessary locutions which don't affect meaning at all but do
affect my reading of the poem in English. I simply don't see how they
reflect a "particular sensitivity to some element that exists in the
original": it's the kind of English I am always paring out of my prose.
That said, it's not that I think Variasis' translations are without merit.
I simply preferred the others, as is my right as a reader, and attempted to
articulate why.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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