The Brooklyn Rail is a stylish, politically relevant magazine that valiantly publishes translations of fiction and poetry as part of its online edition. My sweat-soaked attempts to translate a couple of my favorite French poems into English were published in the July issue:
http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org...
http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org...
In the past, I've gotten into fights with people who believe "poetry is something that simply can't be translated." I concede that there's a choke-sized grain of truth to this belief: a poetic translation that's really alive is inevitably imbued with the personality of its translator as well as the personality of the original author. The relationship between a poem and its translation more closely resembles the relation between a parent and their child than the relation between Dolly the Sheep and her sickly, short-lived clone. When a poem is translated, a kind of evolution happens, a process analogous to the recombination of genes that occurs in sexual reproduction. And, just as with sexual reproduction, the results are unpredictable: sometimes wildly good and sometimes wildly bad.
By emphasizing certain components of the original poem while de-emphasizing others, the translator is, in effect, writing a whole new poem, one that tries to communicate the unique emotional experience he underwent when he first fell in love with the original poem. Translation, then, is one of the sincerest forms of flattery; it's the translator's heartfelt tribute to the author of the original (albeit a tribute that risks being as ill-received as Cain's was).
I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts on this.
http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org...
http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org...
In the past, I've gotten into fights with people who believe "poetry is something that simply can't be translated." I concede that there's a choke-sized grain of truth to this belief: a poetic translation that's really alive is inevitably imbued with the personality of its translator as well as the personality of the original author. The relationship between a poem and its translation more closely resembles the relation between a parent and their child than the relation between Dolly the Sheep and her sickly, short-lived clone. When a poem is translated, a kind of evolution happens, a process analogous to the recombination of genes that occurs in sexual reproduction. And, just as with sexual reproduction, the results are unpredictable: sometimes wildly good and sometimes wildly bad.
By emphasizing certain components of the original poem while de-emphasizing others, the translator is, in effect, writing a whole new poem, one that tries to communicate the unique emotional experience he underwent when he first fell in love with the original poem. Translation, then, is one of the sincerest forms of flattery; it's the translator's heartfelt tribute to the author of the original (albeit a tribute that risks being as ill-received as Cain's was).
I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts on this.
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I grew up in France and also did fall in love with some of the poem you were just going thru. As far as translation of poem, I still feel strongly that it is pratically impossible to translate. as feeling , emotion does not work the same way in different language. However I do have to aknowledge that some writter have succeeded somehow to this exercise. Baudelaire was one of them who did translate some of the work done by Edgard Allan Poe under the name " Histoires extraordinairees" this work was amaizing. I would be curious to know if his translation was more like a new book or simply a very good translation. please le me know.
