Introduction
The entries for today and tomorrow constitute a two-part post on contemporary verse translation, featuring the insights of 19 translators who have generously contributed their answers to my frustratingly broad questions about the subject.
Many thanks to Geoffrey Brock, Bill Coyle, Dick Davis, Rhina Espaillat, David Ferry, Christophe Fricker, Jonathan Galassi, Rachel Hadas, Len Krisak, David Lehman, Charles Martin, Robert Mezey, Michael Palma, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, Roger Sedarat, Alicia Stallings, Rimas Uzgiris, and Philip White. (See below for contributors’ notes.)
These posts are meant as a somewhat casual practical guide for Anglophone readers of non-Anglophone poetry, especially readers who don’t know the language of the original work. At first I thought I’d write on this subject myself, having at least had the experience of bewilderment over which translations to read, which to avoid, and so on. But before long I remembered that I have numerous friends who are well-regarded translators. I decided to ask them a couple of very basic questions about verse translation.
Today’s post focuses on rules of thumb for readers seeking to read translations of verse in languages they don’t know. Tomorrow’s post will list some translations the contributors admire, along with a note (at my request) concerning a work of their own.
As you may notice, my questions are geared to the speculative assumptions of ordinary readers, not to those of most translators! In a couple of cases, contributors very reasonably questioned my questions, and this in turn led to interesting comments that depart slightly from the original format.
Please note: For practical reasons, I’ve had to edit down most responses. But whenever I've done so, I've included a link beneath the contributor's name to a PDF of the fuller answer—which in every case I strongly recommend reading. I’ve also substituted an ellipsis wherever I’ve cut something.
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Question: Please list up to five things readers should consider before
reading a collection of poetry in translation.
GEOFFREY BROCK
[Readers should consider] rhythmic and tonal qualities. With the translation of poetry, the most important qualities are almost always going to be those that don’t inhere in the semantic fabric of the original—the very qualities of the original that vanish when one is translating just for “meaning” (“Poetry is what is lost...”). These qualities must be freshly created by the translator in the new language, if the translation is going to have any life of its own. (If they’re not, what you have is a trot.)
BILL COYLE
Please click here for the full answer.
(1) How well, if at all, does the translator know the language he or she is translating from? This is not the be all and end all. Richard Wilbur doesn’t know Russian, but his translations of Joseph Brodsky are the most readable in English.
(2) What is the translator’s attitude to meter in general, and to the metrical qualities of the work being translated in particular?...
(3) Is there an edition of the translation that includes the original printed en face?...
(4) How close is the original language to English?
(5) How similar is the culture that produced the original work to the culture with which the reader identifies?...
DICK DAVIS
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(1) Is the translator honest about how well he knows the original language?...
(2) Who is the translation being made for? Scholars or would-be scholars...; students in general lit classes in college...; people who care mainly about the culture the translation is from...; people who care about both the culture and about poetry....
(3) Do you feel confident that the translator knows enough about the historical/social/literary contexts of the work he is translating to notice when they should be taken into account, and to be able to do this in a trustworthy manner?
(4) Do you think the translator has the skill to submit himself to the original, and the character to do so? This can be hard to gauge, but sometimes it’s obvious...
(5) Can the translator write at least competent English verse?
RHINA ESPAILLAT
I think readers should approach poetry in translation the same way they approach poetry in its original language: wide awake, prepared for pleasure, but ready to be surprised by the kind of pleasure they find and how it’s produced. Literary scholars, of course, are another story: they come to whatever they read with additional expectations peculiar to questions of their own.
DAVID FERRY
I think the reader of an as yet unread book of translations should hope that the translations would be good poems on their own, and that they should represent the original poems in as much understanding complexity as possible, with regard to semantic meaning, tones of voice, nuances of expression, whether syntactical or metaphorical or whatever else, and with some recognition, one way or another, of the rhythmical life of the original.
CHRISTOPHE FRICKER
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Poetry is translatable. If poetry were not translatable, we would know very little about The Odyssey and the Commedia, about Petrarch’s love and Rimbaud’s suffering. Many would be oblivious to Faust’s striving and Cavafy’s longing. Our trees would not remind us of the myths that Ovid has told us, and our hearts’ angels would scarcely know Rilke. Our worlds would be small, and silent.
JONATHAN GALASSI
[Readers] should try to learn as much as they can about the poet and poetry in question. The more they know, the more the translation will mean. This includes listening to and also reading the poetry aloud in the original language, even if they don’t know the language. The sound and rhythm are all-important.
RACHEL HADAS
Readers should consider: Do I know the source language? Do I have a sense of what other translators have made of this material over the years/generations? Do I have a sense of how well the translator this time knows the language and tradition of the work? If the translator is a poet in his or her own right, what do I think of their poetry?
LEN KRISAK
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When I see a new translation on the bookstore shelves (we all remember what bookstores are, don’t we?), I first check to see if the publisher has provided the source language en face, and then if the translator has worked line for line (there’s just something about an Italian poem in three quatrains that’s been worked up into 16 or 20 lines that leaves me either scratching my head or else shaking it, tsk-tsk). Then, if I have a stumbling acquaintance with the source language, I check a few lines to see if the poet has turned bicycle into doorknob, or cathedral into can opener. If so,... Finally, I sample a goodly number of lines to see if they please me as poetry in English. If all systems check out, I buy and begin reading.
DAVID LEHMAN
David left the first question unanswered. His answers to the second and third
questions are available here.
CHARLES MARTIN
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Charles replied, first, that he thought the question was somewhat simplistic and that he was reluctant to attempt a definite answer. But he later supplied some interesting notes on his way of thinking about various modes of translation.
Dryden described three registers of translation: metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation. Metaphrase is word for word literal; his example was French translations of Horace’s odes into prose. Paraphrase is freer, and imitation might very well not be translation, it’s so free. My practice is paraphrase: I try to find a form in English analogous to that of the original, and I try (most of the time) not to include any imagery that isn’t in the original. This I have learned from Richard Wilbur and others. But many of Lowell’s imitations, while sometimes being bizarrely inventive, still delight me....
ROBERT MEZEY
It might be best just to begin reading and see what happens. If you feel pleasure and excitement, you may want to compare these poems to other versions by other translators. You may want to find out, to whatever extent you can, how much liberty this translator has taken in his or her englishing. I can’t think of much else one must consider.
MICHAEL PALMA
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(1) Are the texts of the original poems included? The experience of reading a poem in translation is incomplete without access to the original.
(2) Does the translation follow the rhymes, meters, and stanzaic forms (if any) of the original?... This is not to say that a rhyming version is necessarily preferable....
(3) Is the translation fluent, idiomatic, and natural-sounding?... I prefer a version that will strike me the way the original most likely strikes readers in its own language....
(4) Does the translation stand on its own as poetry? This is ultimately the crucial consideration. I don’t read poetry purely or even principally for its “message.” If you are reading strictly for content, you’re not really reading poetry....
ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
(1) Having an interest, eventually, in the original version.
(2) Not having an interest in the original version.
NATHANIEL RUDAVSKY-BRODY
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I think the key to the translator-reader relationship is trust. Every good translation, whatever the rules it sets for itself, has to break those rules now and then to get off the ground. If the reader doesn't trust the translator, and is always questioning lines, checking them against the original, then the poetry just can't happen.
ROGER SEDARAT
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(1) What the music is doing in the original. Even if the reader doesn’t know the source text language, it’s worthwhile getting a sense of cadence, rhythm, etc....
(2) The literary and cultural tradition from which the poem emerges....
(3) More generally, and I know this sounds obvious, but a sense of how translation is never a static process. It’s really important to get a sense of how translation-approaches to a given poet change over time. To that end I’d advocate for reading multiple versions of a favorite poet or even poem....
(4) Poet’s biography....
(5) The translation process.... It’s worthwhile to know if this was a collaborative process with the original poet, what connection the translator has to the language and tradition he or she engages, etc....
A.E. STALLINGS
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(1) If you really like the poet and you don’t have the language (or even if you do), going to more than one translation can be enlightening.
(2) The apparatus of a translation book is important, too. What does the translator announce in the apology? Are these strict translations, free, are they in a form in the original not got over into the target language? What liberties were taken and why? Does the translator know the language?...
(3) Is the original on facing pages? If not, can you locate the original?...
(4) If you really, really love a poet in another language, why not try learning some of the language to attempt in original?
(5) Knowing something of the background/historical context can be important too....
RIMAS UZGIRIS
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Rimas spoke mainly for himself about the qualities he seeks in translation:
I choose to read translations of poetry when either I want to get to know a certain author’s work better or when I am simply captured by the English version of the poems. In choosing between alternative translations I almost always choose those where the English version strikes me as a powerful poem. I do prefer dual language versions, especially in French and Spanish, where I can read the original (slowly). For Lithuanian, I sometimes read a dual language version for ease and/or to check how other translators are doing it....
PHILIP WHITE
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Readers, especially those who
only know their own language, need to be reminded again and again that they are
not reading the original poem, that whatever kind of translation it is, it
isn’t that; it’s a new thing altogether, though patterned on something that’s
often very different. Translation is something like describing what an actual
historic football game was like using only the terms for baseball. Better, it’s
like setting up and actually playing a game of baseball that’s supposed to
evoke an actual historic game of football. Now imagine that most of the people
watching know nothing about football. They only know baseball. So when they see
the translation, they think, “Wow, that was some game. Those football players
must be great athletes.”... The central irony here as elsewhere is that the
people who know the least may feel most sure that they understand what’s going
on. And the game was made for them, by people who know better.
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Contributors’
Notes
Geoff Brock has translated Pavese's Disaffections and edited The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry. His translation awards include the MLA's Lois Roth Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Bill Coyle received a 2010 NEA Fellowship to complete his translations of Swedish poet Håkan Sandell. His book of poems, The God of This World to His Prophet, won the 2006 New Criterion Poetry Prize.
Dick Davis has received the International Society of Persian Studies’ award for best translation three times. The Washington Post named his translation of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh one of the 10 best books of 2006.
Rhina Espaillat's three chapbooks and nine books comprise poems, essays, short stories, and translations. Her awards include one from the Robert Frost Foundation, for her Spanish versions of Frost.
David Ferry’s awards include the Harold Morton Landon Prize, the Ruth B. Lilly Prize, and a National Book Award. His books of translation include Gilgamesh, The Odes of Horace, and The Eclogues of Virgil. He is currently at work on Virgil’s Aeneid and the Satires of Horace.
Christophe Fricker translates poetry by Edgar Bowers and Dick Davis among others, and also trade books on politics, literature, and science, into German. His academic work concerns the relationship between poetry, travel, and friendship.
Jonathan Galassi has translated the work of Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. He is currently preparing a version of Montale’s later poetry.
Rachel Hadas has translated Euripides' romance Helen, and her translations from Modern Greek, Latin, and French are showcased in Other Worlds Than This, a collection published by Rutgers University Press.
Len Krisak's Odes of Horace, from Carcanet, and Ovid on Love, from University of Pennsylvania Press, will be followed in 2014 by his complete Carmina of Catullus. He has published four books of poems.
David Lehman's just-published New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013) includes translations he has done of poems or prose poems by Apollinaire, Henri Michaux, Goethe, and Mayakovsky.
Charles Martin’s verse translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (2004) received the Harold Morton Landon Prize from the Academy of American Poets. In 2005, he received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Robert Mezey has won the Lamont and Poet's Prizes. His acclaimed versions of Borges (with Richard Barnes) have appeared in such periodicals as The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and Poetry. [Despite interventions by a number of luminaries, they remain uncollected for reasons relating to permissions.]
Michael Palma's fully rhymed translation of Dante’s Inferno was published by Norton in 2002 and reprinted as a Norton Critical Edition in 2007. He is also the author of three books of poetry.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips has translated poetry and prose by many Catalan-language writers, including Salvador Espriu’s short-story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. He is also the author of The Ground (poems).
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody is the winner of the 2013 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. He has translated Benjamin Fondane and Paul Valéry, as well as contemporary Belgian poets.
Roger Sedarat, a translator of classical and modern Persian poetry, teaches literary translation in the MFA program at Queens College. He has also published two books of poems.
A.E. Stallings’s translations include Lucretius’ The Nature of Things and the Greek mock epic The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice. She is the author of three books of poems and recipient of a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship.
Rimas Uzgiris’s work appears in many leading journals. The recipient of a 2013 Fulbright Scholarship and a 2014 NEA Fellowship in translation, he teaches literature and creative writing at Vilnius University.
Philip White received the 2013 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for Wang Changling’s "Border Tunes.” He’s currently at work on poems by Du Fu and other Chinese poets. White has also published The Clearing (poems).
Paired translations, like Wilbur's Brodsky, work best when there is a real collaboration and back-and-forth between the literal-renderer and the poetic-renderer, not just a poet working in one direction from a literal version. The problem we have with most contemporary verse translations is that few people have both the necessary mastery of another language and its idioms and literature *and* the ability to render a comparable experience in English verse; we get a lot of vaguely melodic paraphrase. I'm a participant, but I think Maxwell's Brodsky translations are really successful heirs of the Wilbur tradition. It's slow work though.
Posted by: Ann Kjellberg | September 20, 2013 at 10:41 PM