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Is there any purpose in translating poetry (especially when it most often results in a pale imitation of the original?)
Is there any purpose in translating poetry? This question was posed last weekend in the Guardian Review by James Buchan, reviewing a new Paul Celan selection, Snowpart/Schneepart, with English translations by Ian Fairley. He adds that, after all, “a poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice”.
That’s true enough. Modern lyric poetry, with its symbols and metaphors, its arcane allusions and teasing line breaks, is fairly bad at giving us the facts. We no longer live in an age in which the skills of beekeeping, say, are explained by the greatest verse-maker in the language, as Virgil does in The Georgics. Even those jolly mnemonics about the weather or the Greek alphabet are fading from consciousness. It’s a pity, as I often think I might get the gist of assembling a new piece of flatpack furniture quicker if the instructions were wittily rhymed.
So why translate? My first answer is that poetry in translation simply adds to the sum total of human pleasure obtainable through a single language.
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September 28th, 2007 at 11:47 am
I dunno, I have a lot of translated Pablo Neruda. I’m sure it’s better in Spanish, but I don’t speak the language, and the translated versions are beautiful in their own right.
September 29th, 2007 at 6:50 am
Yes, that’s true, but maybe “poetry in translation simply adds to the sum total of human pleasure obtainable through a single language” (Rumens, scroll up).
September 30th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Speaking of just Celan at the moment, I have the earlier Hamburger translations and even if those translations are not the shining gems that the originals aree, still they were their own beings. The poems sounded like no other poems I had ever read, and being in translation, they were born from the seeds of the original. This in itself is worth the price of admisssion.
October 1st, 2007 at 1:41 pm
I’m reminded of a poetry class I took back in grad school where the teacher ranted a bit on how americans never read translated poetry and what a shame it was, etc. etc. Then a few minutes later he was telling us how horrible poetry in translation is and how it is never even remotely as good as the original.
Ok.