>> Why translate anything that anyone has already done better?
>>
>
> This seems to me like asking, Why write a poem if someone has written
> a better one?
>
> Jon Corelis http://jcorelis.googlepages.com/joncorelis
Oh, one should add the usual local and temporal scare quotes, as for
instance Chapman, but ...
More specifically, I find it for myself impossible to imagine to imagine
(re)translating Villon's "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan" today in the wake
of Logue's "Gone Ladies".
There may come a time when this particular Villon poem will be open to
(re)translation into English once more, but not for me.
On the other hand, while that's closed off for me, it provided a model for
what could be done.
Anacreon, for example, who in the entire course of English has never been
Englished properly.
The Greeks feared the infinite sea -- poetry is boundless, translatable
poems finite if unbounded.
Robin
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