Poets on Translation is a collection of brief essays by which poets study the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, id, authorship, and extra.
Who’s guilty for what Damion Searls, in The Philosophy of Translation, calls “the annoying declare that translation is not possible”? Regardless of all proof on the contrary, the notion that some issues (significantly poetry) are untranslatable is so prevalent that it’s typically taken as a truism. Again in 2012, in my preface to The FSG E book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, I wrote:
Probably the most infamous and thoughtlessly repeated comment in English about translation is the chestnut attributed to Robert Frost: “Poetry is what’s misplaced in translation.” Although Frost’s authority on the topic is doubtful, his comment—just like the Italian phrase traduttore traditore (“translator betrayer”)—lends epigrammatic zing to the previous notion that the interpretation of poetry is an not possible activity. Arthur Schopenhauer, ever the pessimist, declared that “Poetry can’t be translated.” The nice Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo stated merely that “everybody is aware of that poetry is untranslatable.” And Roman Jakobson, the Russian linguist, argued that “poetry is by definition untranslatable.”
Such claims—many different philosophers, poets, and linguists have made comparable ones—are so prevalent partially as a result of they include a kernel of fact. To the diploma that the essence of poetry is embodied in its precise phrases and their specific sounds, poetry actually does get misplaced in translation: all the unique phrases and their sounds disappear. Because the famous linguist Steve Martin remarked after a go to to Paris: “Chapeau means hat. Oeuf means egg. It’s like these French have a special phrase for all the things.” Martin’s joke will get on the severe distinction between originals and translations that Vallejo, for instance, had in thoughts: poetry is untranslatable, he defined, as a result of “translated into different synonymous however by no means equivalent phrases, it’s not the identical.”
In his translation diary Catching Hearth, Daniel Hahn, describing a e-book he’s making ready to translate, involves a considerably totally different conclusion: “The brand new novel gained’t have any of the identical phrases because the previous one, however I’m hoping will probably be in any other case the identical e-book.” Hahn’s “in any other case” does lots of work in that sentence and would possibly remind us of the previous “Ship of Theseus” paradox, which philosophers have used for greater than 2,000 years to wrestle with questions of id and distinction: as the person planks of the Argo put on out, they’re changed one after the other with new planks, till not one of the authentic ship stays. Can we are saying the brand new model is (“in any other case”?) the identical ship—it’s nonetheless the Argo, nonetheless seems to be the identical, and nonetheless carries sailors throughout the ocean in the identical means—whereas additionally admitting that it’s not equivalent to its authentic model?
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Whereas what’s misplaced in translation is admittedly monumental, to conclude that poetry is due to this fact untranslatable is to essentially misrepresent each what poetry is and what translation is, and Jakobson’s pronouncement that “poetry by definition is untranslatable” actually hinges on definitions of poetry and of translation which might be each unreasonably slender. Echoing Jakobson (and Vallejo), Italo Calvino wrote: “Everyone knows that poetry is by definition untranslatable.” However neither Jakobson nor Calvino might be understood with out the context of their following sentences, by which they each reveal their statements to be largely rhetorical. Jakobson provides that “Solely inventive transposition is feasible,” and Calvino provides that “Literary translators are those that put their entire selves on the road to translate the untranslatable.” Jakobson, that’s, means that one thing known as “inventive transposition,” versus translation, is feasible (as if literary translation has ever actually meant something aside from inventive transposition), and Calvino, leaning into the paradox, makes clear that the not possible activity—translating the untranslatable—is, by some means, potential.
Wikipedia, to its credit score, at present specifies within the opening paragraph of its web page on “Untranslatability” that “the time period arises when describing the problem of reaching the so-called good translation” (emphasis added). All notions of untranslatability rely actually on the fallacy that “perfection” (or “sameness,” to make use of Vallejo’s time period) is a perfect that translations ought to aspire to and be judged by. Provided that we conceive of the relation between a poem and its translation on this means, as some type of mathematical equation meant to end in good sameness, can poetry (and just about all the things else) be stated to be untranslatable.
(The favored fondness for “untranslatable” phrases—of which the web accommodates many entertaining lists, lists that invariably embody translations of the so-called untranslatable phrases—displays this tendency to think about translation by way of equivalence. To say that hygge or abbiocco or schadenfreude or mamihlapinatapai are untranslatable sometimes means solely that no single English phrase affords an ideal equal. It means solely, that’s, that we should generally use a couple of phrase to translate one other phrase—a fairly banal remark.)
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A lot will get misplaced in our eagerness to acknowledge that a lot will get misplaced. Although the unique sounds of a poem do certainly vanish in translation, poetry doesn’t stay solely in its sounds. There’s additionally one thing like “content material” or “which means,” which, although typically overrated and overemphasized in school rooms, is just not nothing. There are additionally different, typically extra essential qualities: tone or voice, imagery or metaphor and even story; the logic or illogic of a poem that may disrupt or reshape our present concepts about ourselves or our world; and so forth. Such components can typically be conveyed, considerably if nonetheless imperfectly, in translation. And right here it’s value remembering an apparent however typically missed fact: translations are solely additive. They don’t seem to be, that’s, erasures of however fairly addendums to their originals—which live on, having misplaced nothing, and having even perhaps gained new readers.
One other factor that will get misplaced if we enable Frost’s dictum to be a mic drop is the truth that, in any good translation, poetry can also be what’s discovered. This opposing fact suggests a corrective corollary—and unsurprisingly poets as totally different as Octavio Paz, Seamus Heaney, and Charles Bernstein have all been quoted as saying that “poetry is what’s present in translation.” Certainly, discovering new poetry in a brand new language to face in for what’s misplaced could also be thought-about one of many chief duties of the translator—and good literary translations usually goal to do precisely that. Provided that we perceive that each Frost’s dictum and its opposing corollary are concurrently true can we method an understanding of what translation is.
One can go additional. Bernstein, for instance, provides that “there’s nothing ‘outdoors’ translation.” Each time we learn a poem we translate it—our studying is our translation—which suggests, to cite Bernstein once more, that “there might be no experiencing the poem, even in your individual language, with out translating” (emphasis added). Analogously, everytime you hearken to, say, Bach, you’re listening to a translation, even if you’re performing it your self. With no reader or a performer, the phrases of a poem or the notes of a rating are simply black stones of ink on the white stone of the web page. When Yo-Yo Ma performs a Bach cello suite, that efficiency is just not Bach’s authentic however Ma’s path by it. (Searls calls translation the translator’s “path by” a textual content.) And after I learn Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, or Clare Cavanagh’s translations of Szymborska, or any translation of any poem, I’m studying a efficiency of a textual content, following their path, simply as absolutely as I’m performing my very own translation after I learn an Emily Dickinson poem—and my path won’t ever completely match yours, or Dickinson’s personal. If we perceive translation because the efficiency of a studying, would we ever suppose to talk of its impossibility?
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Translation-as-the-Argo and translation-as-musical-performance are two of the numerous helpful if imperfect metaphors that many translators like to gather—partially, I believe, as correctives to the implicitly mathematical metaphor that declares its impossibility. One other is translation-as-metaphor—a meta-metaphor, if you’ll. It’s useful to recall that metaphor (from the Greek) and translation (from the Latin) imply roughly the identical factor, etymologically: each are a carrying throughout. Metaphors carry some essence throughout the hole between the literal and the figurative; translations carry some essence throughout the hole between two languages. If we perceive a translation as a metaphor for its authentic, would we ever suppose to talk of its impossibility?
Lastly, one other helpful if imperfect metaphor comes from the Indian polymath A. Ok. Ramanujan, who ends his good essay on translating Tamil poetry with this parable about translation:
A Chinese language emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored by an excellent mountain. The engineers determined that the most effective and quickest approach to do it could be to start work on each side of the mountain, after exact measurements. If the measurements have been exact sufficient, the 2 tunnels would meet within the center, making a single one. “However what occurs in the event that they don’t meet?” requested the emperor. The advisors, of their knowledge, answered, “In the event that they don’t meet, we can have two tunnels as a substitute of 1.”
In follow, in fact, the paths by no means coincide completely, and in contrast to the Argo instance, by which just one ship stays, translations all the time depart us with two tunnels. But when the measurements are ok, each can carry you throughout—or make a path by—the identical mountain.
