I occasionally get asked about how I translated Sappho without knowing
Greek. I stumbled across these wonderful quotes by some of my forebears in
these matters, Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Spicer. I am never sure what it
means when computer folks use the expression "counter-intuitive" to describe
a kind of learning, but maybe that phrase works for these approaches to
translation:
"(Translation) ... is an important exercise of sympathy on the highest
level. The writer who can project himself into the exultation of another
learns more than the craft of words. He learns the stuff of poetry. It is
not just his prosody he keeps alert, it is his heart. The imagination must
evoke, not just a vanished detail of experience, but the fullness of another
human being..."
from Kenneth Rexroth, "The Poet as Translator."
The World Outside The Window The Selected Essays,
Edited by Bradford Morrow (New Directions Paperback, 639)
"Things do not connect: they correspond. That is what makes it possible for
a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as
he can bring them across time. That tree you saw in Spain is a tree I could
never have seen in California, that lemon has a different smell and a
different taste, BUT the answer is this - every place has a real object to
correspond with your real object...perhaps as unapparently as that lemon
corresponds to this piece of seaweed and, in turn, some future poet will
write something which 'corresponds' to them. That is how dead men write to
each other...
from "After Lorca" by Jack Spicer
Whether or not one agrees - and forms a translation practice from such
approaches - I love both the quotes - and the translations of both Spicer
and Rexroth (not everything, of course).
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
Sleeping With Sappho (a faux ebook) at:
http://www.fauxpress.com/e/vincent/
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