Pope's Iliad is an imitation - of course, people were expected to have
at least a nodding acquaintance with the original - as with the same
author's Horace imitations, which stray quite far. Cribs are to help
anyone (like schoolchildren) read the original. I expect any English
speaker can read French with a bit of help from a crib, the same way
Eliot taught himself (reading) Italian by reading Dante with facing
prose cribs in the old Temple Classics, or Pound used Fenellosa's cribs
(thus Rihaku for Li Po) to do his own imitations of Chinese poets. Of
course, a genius can get the gist out of a creaking old translation:
Brecht used Giles' English versions of Li Po et al for his Chinese
poems & was congratulated by a Chinese Sinologist for having got
literally closer to the original Chinese than his crib had without
knowing any Chinese at all. I wouldn't believe in reading if I were
offered one, and only one, interpretation which I could not deviate
from, since an interpretation is always inferior to its text, though an
imitation, which is essentially a per/version, isn't. But I admit I was
being deliberately provocative.
best
mjay
Mark Weiss wrote:
>> I no longer believe in poetry translation - imitation, yes
>> (Nachdichtung), crib, yes, but not traduttore= traditore.
>
>
> As a rule, one doesn't translate place names, although on occasion,
> and only on occasion, something germaine is lost. Here's one: a
> reading of Rochester's "An Evening's Ramble in St. James' Park" gains
> little from knowledge of the park as it is today--it takes a slew of
> education or footnotes to be aware of what it meant to Rochester (who
> wrote that the past is another country?). Translate it into Spanish as
> El parque de Santiago and you 've elucidated nothing and you've added
> a bunch opf extraneous matter, as Santiago, the patron saint of Spain,
> aka Matamoros, is never far from Spanish consciousness.
>
> Imitation's the easy way out--it skips all the complications of
> understanding the source culture from the outside or one's own from
> the inside. And cribs are for schoolchildren. One hopes to convey to
> the reader in the target language what makes the poem compelling in
> the original and something of the context within which it was written.
> But as with any reading of anything, the translation is an
> interpretation--however I read, say, Asphodel entails a selection of
> the available possibilities. So maybe one shouldn't believe in reading.
>
> Me, I'm doing carpentry today, and trying for very exact measurements,
> so that the pieces will fit together easily. But it's almost
> impossible to make a perfect cut. I suppose I could say I no longer
> believe in measurement. But it would be nice to have a bed to sleep on.
>
> I guess I'm saying that belief is beside the point. We have a choice
> of partial or total incomnprehension. I'll choose the former.
>
> Why, by the way, do you think that cribs and imitations aren't betrayals?
>
> Mark
>
--
The self that shines in the greying sunshine
of the immediate is actual, though it is
not all that is there. - Douglas Oliver
|