I've got to (willingly!) with Allison. At best, literal or prose-like
translations, afford the opportunity to get a literally prosaic of what's
occurred in the poem. Isn't it the Loeb editions of classical poets that
provide the poems in a prose version? They are fun to read and helpful.
Kenneth Rexroth was famous for taking Loeb - or other people's translations
of Chinese and other languages - and creating translations that are
remarkably good. I have talked to people who really know Chinese and English
and they speak very highly, for example, of Rexroth's "100 Poems of the
Chinese." But Rexroth was/is a very good poet in English as well.
By the way, a confession: I said George E - of the Greek translations - also
worked in sculpture. C'est pas vrai! I was confusing him with George Quasha.
My apologies for the stupid confusion. By my sense of sculpture - working
with volumes and surfaces -that tactile sense of the texture of language
(its 'thingness') is very much in accord with how I write poems and how I
read and appreciate the work of others.
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
> Hi Rebecca
>
> The problem of translating poetry is that it can't be done. How can you
> render a work that foregrounds the particular sounds and rhythms and
> semantic associations of one language into another? But of course,
> translations happen all the time: and personally I'm grateful that they do.
> If you read two or three or four versions of a poet's work, as I often do,
> then you might end up with a sense of what they hold in common, which might
> be something like what the poet was doing. All the same, I am always going
> to prefer those translations that make the most beautiful poems in English.
> As a poet and reader, beauty matters to me; and I have a fairly broad idea
> of what I mean by that, which includes what is often called unbeautiful. As
> a poet, and I don't see what can be done about that, I am English-centric;
> it's my language, it's my material, it's what I make poems out of; and my
> primary interest is always going to be, in the end, what disturbances
> translations might create in its fabric, how it might be torn open slightly
> or stretched or warped into some new possibility of expression.
>
> Arguments about translations are always going to be about subjectivities, as
> are all arguments about poetry. I respond to the poems I respond to. As
> with reason, or Rilke's ladders, such things are forever without ground.
> All the same, it seems a bit misleading to me, beyond fairly basic mistakes
> and obvious misinterpretations, to refer to a stable original as the
> authority to trump the argument. The original is surely susceptible to all
> these interpretations; it's how each translator reads the poet. In poetry,
> the aesthetic/stylistic choices are always going to be as crucial as any
> semantic decisions; I don't see how that can be avoided, or why it would be
> desirable. The one thing you can't do is make exactly the same poem as what
> is translated; if that were so, all languages would be the same. And they
> manifestly are not. Given that, you end up with a bunch of different
> versions, each of which perhaps incline to a slightly differing aspect of
> the poem; and the rest is up to each individual reader.
>
> The kinds of things that particularly grated my ear were phrases like "the
> body that's loved" (V) as compared with "beloved body" (E) - they seem
> clumsy and unnecessary locutions which don't affect meaning at all but do
> affect my reading of the poem in English. I simply don't see how they
> reflect a "particular sensitivity to some element that exists in the
> original": it's the kind of English I am always paring out of my prose.
> That said, it's not that I think Variasis' translations are without merit.
> I simply preferred the others, as is my right as a reader, and attempted to
> articulate why.
>
> Best
>
> A
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
|