May 30, 2007
ted hughes as poet-translator
Translation is an imperfect art – even an impossible one. That is the truism. But it would be a very eccentric devotee of literature who for lack of Greek or Russian refused to read Homer or Tolstoy. Lyric poetry is more challenging to the translator than narrative literature is, since little can be separated out from the choice of specific words, their sounds, rhythms and associations, to say nothing of poetic form and the elaborations of syntax. That is why there are lyric poets of the first rank – Goethe and Pushkin are prime examples – whose poems are not as well known in Britain as their fame might lead us to expect. Nevertheless, most good poets attempt translation in the course of a life’s work and serious readers of poetry will want to have some familiarity with, let us say, Catullus or Baudelaire. There are those who claim, moreover, that poetry is essentially metamorphic – a process that includes negotiations with other texts and the transformation of experience into language, rhythm and form. To such a conception of poetry, the act of verse translation is fundamental.
more from the TLS here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 05:20 PM | Permalink
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I once had the good fortune to ask Richard Pevear a few questions about translation. Here's what he said (reposted with his permission):
"I can say that translation belongs to the posthumous fame of a book, and is a sort of dialogue with the original through time. Some differences among translations come from the ineptitude of the translator, some from changes of taste or vocabulary over time (there are things a Victorian translator could say authentically and that I could not), but the most important differences come from the translator's sensitivity to the spirit of the original. Tolstoy does not write good Russian prose, or bad Russian prose, he writes Tolstoy's Russian prose. To pour that unique vintage into a barrel labeled "good English prose" is a mistake -- one rather frequently made. We try to catch the Tolstoyan qualities of the original, its unique flavor, which means listening carefully to his prose and to my English language, and bringing them as close to each other as possible."
And here is his response when I asked about Vladimir Nabokov's insistence that the name Anna Karenina was a mistranslation, and that the name should have been Anna Karenin instead:
"I admire Nabokov's Onegin, all four volumes (because it's a dubious achievment without the commentaries), but he could be a pedant at times. Karenin has been used once, I believe, but only someone as boneheaded as Nabokov would insist on it."
Posted by: ghostman | May 30, 2007 8:04:47 PM
From my familiarity with poetry in English, French and Hebrew, and to a lesser degree in Spanish and Latin, I would say that each language has its own special set of sounds and cultural associations that it guards jealously from foreigners and also from people of another social class. I remember the shock of discovering how Catullus' sexually charged, passionate verses suddenly brought to life the dreary dative form and that silly Latin insistance of placing the verb at the end of a sentence. After years of trying to learn declensions and verb forms and translating reports of military confrontations with the Gauls, here my adolescent mind was able to relate to a guy getting the hots for his teasing girlfriend in that same cumbersome language.
If languages didn't have their own special flavors and exclusiveness, then poetry would be the same everywhere, like the MacDonalds chain. On the other hand, I agree with the assertion that verse translation is a fundamental part of poetry, and there is a special pleasure in tearing at that veil of language secrecy and seeing the common human emotions and ideas shine through.
Posted by: aguy109 | May 31, 2007 1:16:27 AM
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