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I've been meaning to ask about Peter Riley's interesting post below, but turkey, stuffing, and football intervened. Recovered now. I wonder what Peter means by "helpfulness, which will tend to go unnoticed." In fact, it seems to me that translation is often most successful at those moments when the otherness of the first text is brought forth through the second and the reader returned to a certain distance. In other words, perhaps the task of the English-language translator is not to "create a poem in English," as if the translation should become hidden or "unnoticed"; rather, to paraphrase Eliot Weinberger, a translation *must sound like a translation* written in living English-- an English that takes advantage of certain possibilities not normally available to poems written in the language. I've recently completed a translation with Forrest Gander of poems by the little-known Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz (which University of California Press will be publishing), passages of which caused us significant headaches. Some of the difficulty involved grappling with Saenz's direct importation of Quecha and Aymara syntactic patterns into his Spanish. We might have translated these moments into a fluent and unnoticeable English so as to make the translated poem more "helpfully" successful, but our translation, I'm afraid, often does the opposite. And I would argue that the "unpoetic" gesture is an appropriate thing. Fidelity in translation, it seems to me, involves an attentiveness to effects of estrangement within the original that are not even translatable to the linear spectrum of slavish literalness through creative excrescence that Peter mentions below. The translator must also read for traces of red-shift, so to speak, and then convert those into formulations of difference that mark a distance that is irrecoverable. Sometimes, by chance, there is unexpected beauty there. Which is also to say, frankly, that I am less sure now what translation is than when I started in on the Saenz. Kent ------------------ Peter Riley said: Yes but Greene changed Mandelstam's poems when he felt like it, chopped them up and reassembled them, believed he was translating the "spirit" of M or something. That shouldn't be necessary, there's no reason why fidelity has to be abandoned unless you're going to drop the "translation" tag and really make something new. There's a conflict between the Lowell line (I'm so creative I have to take this into my own hands here and there) and the Pound line (drop the pretense of replication completely). Two of the best recent works in the Pound line have been Rodefer's Villon and Sappho. But there should also be a third line, of scrupulous care and fidelity, and helpfulness, which will tend to go unnoticed. 80 percent of published translation of poetry into English is sheer murder. Either by rendering everything into a barely readable continuum of antipoetical dullness, (very common in the Complete Works market) or by being unable to restrain the unloading of "creative" excrescence onto the text, like Bellitt's Neruda, or Reed's Montale or Mahon's Jaccottet. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com