As translators, we know that one of the hardest things to translate is poetry.Rhyme, meter, cadence, word selection, rhythm: we could spend weeks on end trying to translate one short poem. A poem emerges from the unique combination of select words and makes use of the music of a specific language. How, then, should we face the task of translating poetry?
In his text “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” Roman Jakobson affirms that poetry – by definition – is untranslatable. Being thus, upon taking on a poem we should forget about translating, and rather bring forth a “creative transposition.” Burton Raffel sustained that poetry in translation, if it is not poetry “reborn,” is nothing.
The poem “Digging,” by Seamus Heaney, constitutes a clear example of the difficulty of translating poetry. It starts thus:
“Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down […]”
For example, the writer and translator EzequielZaidenwerg translated this initial part the following way:
“Entre mis dedos índice y pulgar
cargo la pluma fuente, como un arma.
Entra por la ventana un ruido áspero
—la pala que entierra en la gravilla—
Y me asomo: mi padre está cavando”.
As we can observe, Zaidenwerg’s translation contains significant changes. Nonetheless, in a case such as poetry, it is exactly what needed to be done. Personally, I find Zaidenwerg’s translation exceedingly good. By altering even the punctuation marks, he achieves a new version of the poem: as Raffel says, he has created it anew.
Nevertheless, another question comes up: How much freedom is too much freedom? Upon assuming that the translation of poetry is impossible and that, as translators, it is in our hands to create a new product, what is the limit (if there is one)?
(Versión en español: http://blog-de-traduccion.trustedtranslations.com/la-traduccion-de-poesia-2012-04-12.html)
Tags: literary translation, poetry, Seamus Heaney, translating poems, translating poetry
ON THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF TRANSLATION
(“It is never what a poem says
that matters, but what it is.”) — I. A. R[ichards]
“The translator has to think himself into someone else’s mind, possibly an alien mind in an alien time, whose idioms and concepts are quite different to his own or to those current in his own
time; and the conventions of whose language are also as like as not quite different.
This is an almost insuperable difficulty. And particularly to the poet it is impossible .That is why so many versions, even when they are pretty literal in detail, take on the tone and style, and even reflect the views of the translator rather than those of the translated poet” – N. Moore.
cfr. http://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/moore_spleen.pdf
After this pamphlet ( Thirty-one versions of Baudelaire’s Je suis comme le roi…) can we translate poetry again?