On 17/1/05 12:09 PM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Well, it's curious this idea that translating poetry 'can't be done' since I
> try to do
> it all the time, and am always glad for translations, particularly from
> languages I
> can't read in the original. So that seems a bit of a logical conundrum, no?
> and
> perhaps beyond reason, since that would make all translators fools for
> impossibility.
It's an unexceptionable truth that translating can't hope to remake a poem,
with exactly the same sonic and formal properties and exactly the same
cultural and linguistic resonances. How can it? That's an impossible
ideal. In a Borgesian sense, perhaps the perfect translation might be the
careful writing out of the poem, word by word, in its own language. But so
what? Why suggest that I am not glad for translations, when I manifestly
am? My thinking is more like that 1968 surrealist slogan: Be realistic!
Demand the impossible!
I read translations - as I read all poetry - primarily as a reader.
Admittedly, a reader with a special interest in writing, with all sorts of
temporal variabilities - what I might enjoy at one time, I might not enjoy
at another - and also with constancies: I am the kind of reader who, as it
were, reads with my ear first, and where my ear leads, my mind follows. I
am always excited by works which stretch my particular sensibilities, which
challenge and excite me: isn't that what reading poetry is about? And
surely suspending one's predilections is always the task of encountering
anything new - you restore them on the re-reading, in the process of
exploring understanding. With really exciting work, those predilections are
restored irrevocably altered: you might never read anything in the same way
again. With less exciting work, you might find your biases reinforced:
which is not, I would think, a good thing. No reader is truly a void;
reading seems far too dynamic an activity for that. How can you communicate
with a void?
I have never suggested that Haviaris did not have his reasons for
translating as he did.
Cheers
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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