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Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries
A unique anthology that illuminates the history and the art of translating poetry into English
Into English allows readers an extraordinary opportunity to experience the process and artistry of translating poetry. Editors Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer invited twenty-five contributors, all of them translators and most of them also poets, to select one poem in another language and three English translations of it, and then to provide an essay about the challenges and rewards of translating it. This anthology offers the original poem and the translations side by side, so readers can compare the translations for themselves.
The original poems are from across time and around the world. The poets include Sappho, San Juan de la Cruz, Basho, Rilke, Akhmatova, Garcia Lorca, Szymborska, Amichai, and Adonis. The languages represented are many, from Latin to Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Haitian Creole. More than seventy translators are included, among them Robert Bly, Anne Carson, Ruth Fainlight, David Hinton, Rosemary Lloyd, Khaled Mattawa, and W. S. Merwin. Into English becomes a chorus in celebration of international poetry and translation--what George Kalogeris, quoting Virgil, describes as "song replying to song replying to song."
"Into English plunges the reader into a translation seminar: the joyous, argumentative, fetishistic, obsessive, and unending struggle to give poems new life in English. This generous book offers a plenitude: plural poems, plural languages, plural eras, plural translators. And summons us to add to the bounty."--Rosanna Warren
"Into English is the great book so many of us have waited for: an anthology that actually teaches one about craft. For what is the discussion of literary translation if not a patient, detail-oriented, step-by-step education for a poet on the masteries of word choice, precision, tone? To say that I love this very special collection is an understatement."--Ilya Kaminsky
Contributors include Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Willis Barnstone, Chana Bloch, Karen Emmerich, Danielle Legros Georges, Johannes Goransson, Joanna Trzeciak Huss, George Kalogeris, J. Kates, Alexis Levitin, Bonnie McDougall, Jennifer Moxley, Carl Phillips, Hiroaki Sato, Cindy Schuster, Rebecca Seiferle, Adam Sorkin, Susan Stewart, Cole Swensen, Arthur Sze, Stephen Tapscott, Alisa Valles, Sidney Wade, Ellen Dore Watson, and David Young.
Into English allows readers an extraordinary opportunity to experience the process and artistry of translating poetry. Editors Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer invited twenty-five contributors, all of them translators and most of them also poets, to select one poem in another language and three English translations of it, and then to provide an essay about the challenges and rewards of translating it. This anthology offers the original poem and the translations side by side, so readers can compare the translations for themselves.
The original poems are from across time and around the world. The poets include Sappho, San Juan de la Cruz, Basho, Rilke, Akhmatova, Garcia Lorca, Szymborska, Amichai, and Adonis. The languages represented are many, from Latin to Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Haitian Creole. More than seventy translators are included, among them Robert Bly, Anne Carson, Ruth Fainlight, David Hinton, Rosemary Lloyd, Khaled Mattawa, and W. S. Merwin. Into English becomes a chorus in celebration of international poetry and translation--what George Kalogeris, quoting Virgil, describes as "song replying to song replying to song."
"Into English plunges the reader into a translation seminar: the joyous, argumentative, fetishistic, obsessive, and unending struggle to give poems new life in English. This generous book offers a plenitude: plural poems, plural languages, plural eras, plural translators. And summons us to add to the bounty."--Rosanna Warren
"Into English is the great book so many of us have waited for: an anthology that actually teaches one about craft. For what is the discussion of literary translation if not a patient, detail-oriented, step-by-step education for a poet on the masteries of word choice, precision, tone? To say that I love this very special collection is an understatement."--Ilya Kaminsky
Contributors include Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Willis Barnstone, Chana Bloch, Karen Emmerich, Danielle Legros Georges, Johannes Goransson, Joanna Trzeciak Huss, George Kalogeris, J. Kates, Alexis Levitin, Bonnie McDougall, Jennifer Moxley, Carl Phillips, Hiroaki Sato, Cindy Schuster, Rebecca Seiferle, Adam Sorkin, Susan Stewart, Cole Swensen, Arthur Sze, Stephen Tapscott, Alisa Valles, Sidney Wade, Ellen Dore Watson, and David Young.
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 7, 2017
9 people are currently reading
368 people want to read
About the author
Martha Collins
36 books13 followersBorn in Nebraska and raised in Iowa, Martha Collins was educated at Stanford University and the University of Iowa. She founded the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of creative writing at Oberlin College. She served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in 2010, and currently teaches (and is available for) short-term workshops. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 29, 2017
This last week of 2017 Into English has been my favorite book-before-bed. My grasp of other languages is mostly at the “Me want coffee” level, so I’m grateful to translators who carry the treasures of other tongues into English. In this case, Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer had a brilliant idea: ask a translator/poet to pick 3 translations of a favorite poem and comment on the choices made by each translator. The results are as various as the poems themselves, yet – as with any creative theme – the pleasure is in the variations. The wide format displays the four versions (original + three translations) across a single set of pages, which makes sense but also makes it a floppy book to read in bed.
I’d love to see a hundred books like this.* On the one hand, the specific genius of poetry; on the other, the gift, imagination and ingenuity of translations that always succeed and fail because “poetry is what’s lost in translation” (Robert Frost, of course). My version would be: poetry puts into words what can’t be said. Even perfect poems (Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” jumps to mind) leave me astonished, because they only emphasize an ineffable, recalcitrant, elusive presence. You can’t say it any better than the poem itself, but it’s still something other.
A superb experiment. I’ll be reading Into English again next year.
_________________
* An exuberant example: Eliot Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated.
I’d love to see a hundred books like this.* On the one hand, the specific genius of poetry; on the other, the gift, imagination and ingenuity of translations that always succeed and fail because “poetry is what’s lost in translation” (Robert Frost, of course). My version would be: poetry puts into words what can’t be said. Even perfect poems (Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” jumps to mind) leave me astonished, because they only emphasize an ineffable, recalcitrant, elusive presence. You can’t say it any better than the poem itself, but it’s still something other.
A superb experiment. I’ll be reading Into English again next year.
_________________
* An exuberant example: Eliot Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated.
August 26, 2018
Translating simple prose—a news article, an instruction manual, a contract—can be difficult. Translating literary prose ups the ante. And translating poetry is fraught.
(Just to see what would happen, I ran my second sentence above through Google Translate which came up with, "Tradurre la prosa letteraria aumenta la posta." Back translate that and you get, "Translating literary prose increases the mail." In Japanese the sentence becomes, "文学的な散文を翻訳することは、分かります." Back translate that and you get, "I understand translating literary proses.")
Martha Collins, in her Introduction to Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, writes that seeing "what different translators have done with the same poem immediately eliminates easy assumptions that beginning translators often make: that there is a single way, a most correct way, or a best way to translate a poem."
To disabuse beginning translators (and anyone interested in translation or in poetry or both) Collins and her co-editor Kevin Prufer have produced a fascinating book. It contains twenty-five commentaries on as many poems. The poems all appear in the original language and these include ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, French, modern Greek, German, Turkish, Russian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Hebrew, Arabic, Swedish, Romanian, and Haitian Creole. The poets include Sappho, Virgil, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Cavafy, Rilke, Akamatova, Pasternak, Vallejo, Garcia Lorca, Celan, Szymborska, Amichai. Tranströmer.
What makes Into English unique is that there are three translations (and sometimes more) of each poem and commentary by a fourth scholar/translator/poet. These give background on the poet and the poem, an indication of the translator's challenge, and a discussion of the different translations.
"A translation may go smoothly for a while," Collins writes, "and then come upon a section or a line that, for any number of reasons (semantic, syntactic, stylistic, cultural), runs into trouble. The trouble spots are the places where multiple translations are most apt to differ. Looking at them carefully can take us more deeply into the nuances of both the original language and English—and, more generally, challenge our assumptions about how language works." That last point alone is worth the price of the book.
I was particularly interested in a 1680 Basho haiku: 枯枝に烏のとまりたるや.秋の暮 (Kare'eda ni karasu no tomaritaru ya aki no kure).
Here's the 1902 translation by Basil Hall Chamberlain:
The end of autumn, and some rooks
Are perched on a withered branch.
Here's Harold G. Henderson's 1925 translation:
On a leafless bough
A crow is sitting — autumn,
Darkening now —
And finally Nobuyuki Yuasa's 1966 translation:
A black crow
Has settled himself
On a leafless tree
Fall on an autumn day.
Three versions of the poem's four nouns and one verb—all valid. Hiroaki Sato's commentary points out the translator's immediate challenge is that most Japanese nouns don't distinguish between countable and uncountable, so one crow or many. Also, aki no kure means either "an autumn evening" or "late autumn" or both. So, as in many haiku, the meaning shimmers.
I am not a poet, and I do not translate poetry. Into English however is wonderfully stimulating with fascinating discussions of the poets, the poems, and the different attempts (always attempts, never final realizations) to render them in English.
(Just to see what would happen, I ran my second sentence above through Google Translate which came up with, "Tradurre la prosa letteraria aumenta la posta." Back translate that and you get, "Translating literary prose increases the mail." In Japanese the sentence becomes, "文学的な散文を翻訳することは、分かります." Back translate that and you get, "I understand translating literary proses.")
Martha Collins, in her Introduction to Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, writes that seeing "what different translators have done with the same poem immediately eliminates easy assumptions that beginning translators often make: that there is a single way, a most correct way, or a best way to translate a poem."
To disabuse beginning translators (and anyone interested in translation or in poetry or both) Collins and her co-editor Kevin Prufer have produced a fascinating book. It contains twenty-five commentaries on as many poems. The poems all appear in the original language and these include ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, French, modern Greek, German, Turkish, Russian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Hebrew, Arabic, Swedish, Romanian, and Haitian Creole. The poets include Sappho, Virgil, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Cavafy, Rilke, Akamatova, Pasternak, Vallejo, Garcia Lorca, Celan, Szymborska, Amichai. Tranströmer.
What makes Into English unique is that there are three translations (and sometimes more) of each poem and commentary by a fourth scholar/translator/poet. These give background on the poet and the poem, an indication of the translator's challenge, and a discussion of the different translations.
"A translation may go smoothly for a while," Collins writes, "and then come upon a section or a line that, for any number of reasons (semantic, syntactic, stylistic, cultural), runs into trouble. The trouble spots are the places where multiple translations are most apt to differ. Looking at them carefully can take us more deeply into the nuances of both the original language and English—and, more generally, challenge our assumptions about how language works." That last point alone is worth the price of the book.
I was particularly interested in a 1680 Basho haiku: 枯枝に烏のとまりたるや.秋の暮 (Kare'eda ni karasu no tomaritaru ya aki no kure).
Here's the 1902 translation by Basil Hall Chamberlain:
The end of autumn, and some rooks
Are perched on a withered branch.
Here's Harold G. Henderson's 1925 translation:
On a leafless bough
A crow is sitting — autumn,
Darkening now —
And finally Nobuyuki Yuasa's 1966 translation:
A black crow
Has settled himself
On a leafless tree
Fall on an autumn day.
Three versions of the poem's four nouns and one verb—all valid. Hiroaki Sato's commentary points out the translator's immediate challenge is that most Japanese nouns don't distinguish between countable and uncountable, so one crow or many. Also, aki no kure means either "an autumn evening" or "late autumn" or both. So, as in many haiku, the meaning shimmers.
I am not a poet, and I do not translate poetry. Into English however is wonderfully stimulating with fascinating discussions of the poets, the poems, and the different attempts (always attempts, never final realizations) to render them in English.
June 24, 2018
The anthology is a collection of 25 poems originally written in a language other than English, with three versions of each poem translated into English, for the most part within the last century. It is definitely oriented toward European languages, with only a handful of poems from farther afield. That is probably due to the paucity of multiple translations available in English, but a weak point. (Poems written in a non-Roman alphabet have phonetic translations so you can tell where the rhymes are and a bit about the rhythm.)
It is interesting as a commentary on the variations in translations and their ‘accuracy', as brief observations on the theory of translation, and on what individual poets will do when asked to review the translations of other poets of a poem they have also translated themselves. Some can’t resist the temptation to include their own translation in their review and to spend most of their three allotted pages analyzing their own, ‘obviously’ superior, version.
For the most part, though, the commentary is enlightening. For some reviewers, the three chosen translators’ choices are full of real problems. Other reviewers are sympathetic to the translators efforts and mostly strive to illuminate how they relate to a literal reading, or to the range of valid possibilities in poems that are rich in ambiguity. I was most intrigued to those who turned what appeared to be very similar translations into quite variant versions due to subtle distinctions they teased out from the original.
In order to get three versions of a given poem, the editors were compelled to stick to mostly well known poets: Mallarmé, Tranströmer, Adonis, Celan, Szymborska, etc.. But I was also introduced to poets new to me, such as Romanian Marin Sorescu, who I will definitely read more of. I especially enjoyed the poems in Portuguese by poets Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I will include the translation by of Breyner Andresen’s poem about waiting by her mother’s death bed, translated by Richard Zenith:
for contrast, the other two translators present the second line as:
and
Alexis Levitin gives an excellent analysis of these and other choices made by the three translators. I think the third version of the second line is best (by Lisa Sapinkopf), but that Zenith is best overall.
It is interesting as a commentary on the variations in translations and their ‘accuracy', as brief observations on the theory of translation, and on what individual poets will do when asked to review the translations of other poets of a poem they have also translated themselves. Some can’t resist the temptation to include their own translation in their review and to spend most of their three allotted pages analyzing their own, ‘obviously’ superior, version.
For the most part, though, the commentary is enlightening. For some reviewers, the three chosen translators’ choices are full of real problems. Other reviewers are sympathetic to the translators efforts and mostly strive to illuminate how they relate to a literal reading, or to the range of valid possibilities in poems that are rich in ambiguity. I was most intrigued to those who turned what appeared to be very similar translations into quite variant versions due to subtle distinctions they teased out from the original.
In order to get three versions of a given poem, the editors were compelled to stick to mostly well known poets: Mallarmé, Tranströmer, Adonis, Celan, Szymborska, etc.. But I was also introduced to poets new to me, such as Romanian Marin Sorescu, who I will definitely read more of. I especially enjoyed the poems in Portuguese by poets Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I will include the translation by of Breyner Andresen’s poem about waiting by her mother’s death bed, translated by Richard Zenith:
The Small Square
My life had taken the shape of the small square
That autumn when your death was meticulously getting ready
I clung to the square because you loved
The humble and nostalgic humanity of its small shops
Where the clerks fold and unfold ribbons and cloth
I tried to become you for you were going to die
And all life there would cease being mine
I tried to smile the way you smiled
At the newsagent at the tobacconist
And at the woman without legs who sold violets
I asked the woman without legs to pray for you
I lit candles before all the altars
Of the churches located on one side of this square
For as soon as I opened my eyes I saw I read
The vocation of eternity written on your face
I summoned the streets the places the people
That had been witnesses of you face
In hopes they could call you in hopes they would unravel
The fabric that death was weaving in you
for contrast, the other two translators present the second line as:
The autumn when your death was being meticulously organized
and
That autumn when your death meticulously organized itself
Alexis Levitin gives an excellent analysis of these and other choices made by the three translators. I think the third version of the second line is best (by Lisa Sapinkopf), but that Zenith is best overall.
January 22, 2024
I can't recommend this book enough if you are at all interested in poetry, language, or the art of translation.
Twenty-five poets, from Sappho, Virgil, and Basho to Lorca, Adonis, and Transtromer, are first presented in their original language, and then followed by three different translations. A fourth translator discusses the difficulties inherent in each poem, providing context, and highlights how each translator's approach mirrors, changes, and enlarges the original text.
As Adam Sorkin asks, in considering the work of Marin Sorescu: "...what, finally should one translate? The poet's words, or the inner poem?"
Or, as Cole Swensen says on Baudelaire: "...any translation is, in fact, impossible--and thus unlimited."
The selection of poems is wide-ranging in historical time frame, form, and country of origin. I was introduced to many writers I did not know. I also learned a lot about the ways languages differ, and how that shapes their thought.
J. Kates, writing about Pasternak, says: "There is...a glory in words, a falsity in words, and a limit to what words can accomplish" And so he concludes that "each (translation) has a piece of the truth and none has it all."
Which is true of communication within the same language as well I think. We are always translating, and retranslating, our ideas into words, and those words into meaning, hoping to reach some kind of understanding.
Twenty-five poets, from Sappho, Virgil, and Basho to Lorca, Adonis, and Transtromer, are first presented in their original language, and then followed by three different translations. A fourth translator discusses the difficulties inherent in each poem, providing context, and highlights how each translator's approach mirrors, changes, and enlarges the original text.
As Adam Sorkin asks, in considering the work of Marin Sorescu: "...what, finally should one translate? The poet's words, or the inner poem?"
Or, as Cole Swensen says on Baudelaire: "...any translation is, in fact, impossible--and thus unlimited."
The selection of poems is wide-ranging in historical time frame, form, and country of origin. I was introduced to many writers I did not know. I also learned a lot about the ways languages differ, and how that shapes their thought.
J. Kates, writing about Pasternak, says: "There is...a glory in words, a falsity in words, and a limit to what words can accomplish" And so he concludes that "each (translation) has a piece of the truth and none has it all."
Which is true of communication within the same language as well I think. We are always translating, and retranslating, our ideas into words, and those words into meaning, hoping to reach some kind of understanding.
Read
August 19, 2019I just received this book from the publisher and haven't had too much time to look through it, but I am really excited! I have often wondered what particular English books in translation to other languages reads like. I can read Simple German and some French and have noted that the stories I've read in those languages, never really translate what the stories were into English. So when translators translate books of a popular author in English into, say, Japanese, is it still the same story? Or has the translator actually written his own? I have also noted many variations of haiku. It's so odd to find one poem in Japanese translated so many different ways! Startling even. So poetry much be much more difficult to translate. I am looking forward to reading this book to solve the mystery, I hope! I'll update then. So excited!
May 9, 2021
Not as exciting as I expected, though with a few particularly interesting and touching commentaries. Expect quite technical language in the commentary essays.
The commentators' pronouns weren't included, but I have this sense that if you looked at which commentators included their own translation choices in their discussions, you'd find a large percentage of he/hims. Given the editorial choice to have commentators talk about other peoples' translations, it usually came across as a self-absorbed failure to decenter their own decisions and focus on the texts on the page. I found this very annoying.
The commentators' pronouns weren't included, but I have this sense that if you looked at which commentators included their own translation choices in their discussions, you'd find a large percentage of he/hims. Given the editorial choice to have commentators talk about other peoples' translations, it usually came across as a self-absorbed failure to decenter their own decisions and focus on the texts on the page. I found this very annoying.
November 28, 2020
I've had this book lying around for quite a while now, and I'm quite glad I finally took the plunge! As someone who is fascinated with poetry and language in general--but is no translator, in any way--I thought this was a fascinating and brain expanding read. I could only read a few poems/commentaries in a row, because there's so much information offered, but I think it's best approached that way!
May 29, 2018
A great book to read. Innovative thought worked behind this collection. It is a great display of differences in word selection while translating from one language to another. Same originals have been translated into English by three translators and they are not the same yet carry through the essence of the originals. Great experiment!!
August 11, 2020
A great collection of international poetry, enhanced by including the original and at least three translations into English. Reading the translations side by side is a revelation and opens up the poems immeasurably. Indeed, the commentaries are almost redundant.
October 20, 2018
Excellent book!!!
February 16, 2023
Lovely collection of translated poetry in 18 languages with insightful commentary on the poets, poems, and translation of each work.
October 29, 2024
Interesting, but a bit of a one-trick pony.
November 6, 2019
A dip into the waters of translations in poetry and non-English poems.
Want to read
November 24, 2017I received this book for free through Goodreads Giveaways. It is an advance reader's copy.
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February 24, 2018Fascinating critical analysis of poetic translations. Essential message is the balance between literal translation and translation of poetic intent, and translation vs imitation, and the impossibility of rendering a poem into a different language.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews