Richard,
a belated welcome from me, too, and I've read your discussion, and the
questions, and your replies to them, and various work at your website, so all
most interesting.
I'm a sometimes translator from the Spanish but haven't chimed in on this. If I've
understood correctly you're not translating from the original but rather from
pre-existent English translations? I've known of translators who don't know the
original and work from crib sheets, literal translations of the original, which
then, usually as poets, they work into poetry and I think a number of
translations that are more reflective of the translator's sensibility (though I don't
know if this is the case with the Coleman Barks' translation of Rumi) originate
this way. Perhaps being from the beginning unbound by the original. And then
there are some who work from crib sheets while in collaboration with another
who reads the original. So this is somewhat a different process, your working
from a previous English translation. And so results in a different approach. For
instance, for me, form is integral to the original, if the original is a sonnet or
couplets or has a particular meter that seems to exert some requirement of
form and meter upon the English. Whereas you included form in one of your
earlier posts as part of 'time and space and form' as if it were a consideration
primarily of cultural and historical context. So in terms of this question about
Saadi and using couplets, as a translator who works from the original, I'd be
inclined to use couplets only if it were somehow analogous to his form. Not in
terms of some 'essence' of the piece, or the making of 'explicit statements.' Do
you feel that Saadi is making 'explicit statements'? I don't know his work well
but reading your translation at the url the poetic passages seem somewhat more
complex than that, to not be explicit in the way of Pope "The proper study of
Mankind is Man".
>I suppose I am not thinking of Pope in terms of anything other than a formal
>sense, the way the couplet is suited to a poetry that makes an explicit
>argument.
And just in terms of English poetry, Chaucer also used the couplet in Canterbury
Tales and The Tale of Good Women, which perhaps ties in with your earlier look
at Carruth's essay of the couplet being close to prose, plain rather than 'hi-
falutin.' It's true that in Pope the couplet is suited to a poetry that makes an
explicit statement, but Pope and Dryden made the couplet somewhat 'closed,'
fitting the syntax and sense within the form. Donne also uses couplets but
differently, un-closed, by means of his enjambments, to create a perhaps more
complex argument,
Anyway thanks to you and to Alison's and Edmund's questions for an interesting
discussion,
Best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 17:59:06 -0500
>From: Richard Jeffrey Newman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Introduction and Oops!
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Alison
>
>>>I can see what Edmund means by nodding towards Marvell; it's not just the
>ethical inquiry, but a certain sensuality present in the translation, at
>least, which I can't say I quite see in Pope.<<
>
>I suppose I am not thinking of Pope in terms of anything other than a formal
>sense, the way the couplet is suited to a poetry that makes an explicit
>argument. Saadi is perhaps more subtle than Pope, but he is very much about
>making an argument, not so much in the samples I have on line, but in much
>of the rest of the book, and certainly in the parts of the Bustan that I
>have worked on so far. Still, I will have to go look at Marvell now.
>
>>>With different intent, it has, in English translation at least, the same
>kind of elegance of Haibun.<<
>
>Who is Haibun?
>
>>>Then I started wondering what traditions we have in English of this
>prose/poem style. I could only think of the prose of the King James Bible
>and Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but it is early in the morning
>and my thoughts aren't exactly sharp and scintillating...<<
>
>I don't think we have a genre quite like the one Saadi wrote in the Gulistan
>in English. True, there is mixed genre writing in English, but Saadi's genre
>has in Persian a name that I cannot remember now, and it has very specific
>features in terms of form and content, that I also do not yet have committed
>to memory, that differentiate it significantly--I remember thinking when I
>was reading about it--from stuff in English.
>
>I have, obviously, a lot of learning/research to do about all this, and I am
>thinking that, when I am done with the translations, there is a long essay
>about this stuff waiting to be written.
>
>Rich Newman
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