Translation Bakeoff Voting Thread
 

Sincere thanks to Alex Pepple for the invitation to this competition. Quite an honor. I have been astonished by the number of entrants. To all participants and finalists: each of you faced, and now face, a staggering group. Good luck.

Please post your vote in this thread.

I must now - quite literally - see to a corpse; but I will return with mercy and love, to execute judgment.

Yours,
007

1. Bellay
2. Catullus
3. Rilke

1. Bellay
2. Goes
3. Marlowe

1. Rilke
2. Du Bellay
3. Catullus

OO7, you did a fine job. I can't say that I've ever seen better poems to choose from.

1. Catullus (for the wickedness of it)
   
2. Du Bellay (for perfect pitch)
   
3. Scherbakov (for ambition and sentiment)

Yes, kudos to 007. All entrants and contenders salute you!

I have to say I really like the double-blind bake off. You can focus on what is before you without conscious or unconscious consideration of the persons involved.

I. Du Bellay
2. Borges
3. Catullus

I'm not quite ready to vote, but I'd like to extend my thanks to DG007, whose identity I think I can guess from his/her intimate knowledge of Russian and the information tidbit at the top of this thread.

Selecting and commenting for these events is hard work for small reward and serious risk of feeling knocked about by others' comments. Please know that we appreciate what you've done.

Since our DG seems to be under some pressures elsewhere, I hope Alex will let us know how long the polls will be open.

Agreed. I had a strong hunch after the "off the cuff" translation from the Cyrillic earlier this week, then it was confirmed this morning. Regardless, I can't think of any better Distinguished Guest for this bakeoff, and the insights were splendid as always.

Like Mr. Jones, I'm also very fond of the double-blind element of this bakeoff. I think a lot of the traditional bakeoff complaints were forestalled for that very reason.

1. Bellay
2. Desbordes-Valmore
3. Borges

All three of these were ambitious in taking on complex rhymed works and achieving a high degree of success, but I also enjoyed several others, particularly the Marlowe and Goes. Many thanks to the DG and other members for good comments and a high degree of civility in the event overall.

Susan

Catulllus
Bellay

1. Catullus
2. Bellay
3. Desbordes-Valmore

It was evident to me, as well, who our DG was the moment she addressed Adam as "Mr. Elgar." Thanks in particular for working through such trying personal circumstances.

Of course, this is a translation event. But I approached them as poems in their own right, and asked myself (perhaps unfairly): which ones would I have enjoyed without knowing that they were translations?

1. Bellay
2. Heine
3. Catullus

Thank you everyone for the a highly successful translation events -- everyone who submitted, the finalists, the commenters, and especially to our Top Secret extraordinary operative, DG 007, who stuck with the mission despite a sudden incidence of great personal tragedy, and still completed the mission with great aplomb and skill!

About how long the voting thread will stay open, in order to avoid too much overlap with our forthcoming Flash Fiction Workshop, let's make that until, at least, 11:59 PM PST, Monday, October 14. After that, the thread might be locked.

Cheers,
...Alex

Many thanks to 007, and to the translators, for a highly enjoyable and informative event. Like Maryann, I'm not ready to vote just yet, but am pondering hard.

Of course I now know who 007 is, though I had my suspicions before...

I hesitate to vote, since the only languages I have native fluency in are are English, French and Spanish (though I have taken university courses in Russian and German).

To rate -- and indeed write -- a successful literary translation, I believe one must have an intimate knowledge both of the source and target languages as well as the poetic devices, cultural nuances, and historical context, unless one wishes to appreciate and judge the English version simply on its merits as a poem in English, with hints from the crib or what can be garnered by Googling or other research.

That said, my choices are:

(1) Joachim Du Bellay
(2) Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Like Tim, I have no third choice.

Thank you, Alex and DG007 for an interesting choice of translations and for hosting the bake-off.

Catherine, I agree with you about the requirements for judging to what extent a translation has succeeded in capturing the essence of the original. Yet - shortcuiting those criteria, as I did - in the end, the (or at least one) question must be: however skilful it may be as a translation, does it work as an English poem?

Only three languages with native proficiency? Tsk tsk. The rest of us are perfectly fluent in six or seven (give or take five or six).

Alas, Roger, personal circumstances over the past sixty-odd years have led to that pesky insufficiency, which I tried to use as a justification for my votes. ;)

Had I a better knowledge of Latin (other than a long-ago exposure to the Latin Mass) I might have been able to assess the Catullus translation, which I thought was quite effective as a poem in English.

I have been reading and enjoying the poems but haven't had time for thoughtful
comments. I just want to thank Alex and DG007 for their work and let them know
it is greatly appreciated.

Martin

p.s. I really loved the Catullus--I hope that even though I have been only lurking,
I can give it a vote.

It's fair to judge a translation without knowing the source language. It's also true that to know both languages makes for a deeper enjoyment, like knowing how to read music to understand more intimately a symphony.

But if we take the second rule too far, then so few would be able to comment at all and traffic at the Translation forum is thin anyway. I think it's important to keep in mind that the two types of critique of translation (by one who knows, and by the other who doesn't, the source language) are critical because

a) a translator needs to understand the source language, and

b) someone who doesn't know the source language must also pass judgment.

Point b is important. The purpose of translation is broadly, though not solely, to make available to audiences a version in their own language, the very audiences that do not know the source language. On the other hand, you need someone who knows the language to ensure that those who don't can take on trust that the version they read is a reasonable approximation. Both watchdogs are necessary.

In any case, how well did Baudelaire or Proust know English? Were they fluent? I don't think so though I could be wrong. I know Proust wasn't. Yet one translated Poe, and the other, Ruskin.

I've made up my mind:

1 Catullus
2 du Bellay
3 Borges

Thank you, translators, and thanks again, DG007!

1. Bellay
2. Borges
3. Catullus

1. Catullus
2. Bellay
3. Marlowe

And apologies to the DG for my big mouth.

1. Desbordes-Valmore
2. Bellay
3. Catullus

1. du Bellay
2. Catullus
3. Desbordes-Valmore

1. Desbordes-Valmore
2. Catullus
3. du Bellay

vote
 

Many thanks to the judge, to the translators and to Alex. Here's my vote:

1. Goes
2. Heine
3. Scherbakov

Katherine

1. Bellay
2. Catullus

Sorry not to have participated more. I'm shockingly inept in every language but English, so I find it hard to judge, but I liked these best as poems.

Hi Mary,

You illustrate my point. Now maybe you had obligations as are you a busy person. However, I would never want you not to feel welcome to the table for the reasons I point out in my previous post.

Next time feel free to join in if you have the time. We need informed readers and writers of English who read no other language, as well as polyglots and bi-glots and tri-glots and what all! How about, for instance, we use your scientific rigor to detect nonsense or even abject failure in a translation?

Cheers,

Don

1. Catullus 39
2. du Bellay
3. Sherbakov

Thanks for the hard work 007 and also thanks to the screener (I think there was also an anonymous screener???)

It's an interesting conversation that's probably worth having (and has probably been had) at length elsewhere, such as the Translation forum.

Personally, I'm fluent in English, and have a passable working knowledge of Spanish, but to expect readers to be polyglots to be able to effectively judge various translations is a very exclusionary view, in my opinion. The crux is how well the poem reads in English, isn't it? There's a certain degree of trust we have to place in the translator, which is why there is often a fairly large gulf between two different translations. Unless we're getting into some serious scholarly study, usually reading one translation is sufficient to get 95% of what the original writer intended to convey.

I think it's particularly telling that the du Bellay and Catullus translations are the clear winners of this bakeoff, even though some voters have extensive knowledge of the mother languages, while others have literally none.

Hmm my feeling is that the duBellay and Catullus are ahead because the emotions they express are ones academics connect with (not that there's anything the slightest bit wrong with liking Catullus, and academia--minus the "collegial" egos--is a noble profession!).

That said the only languages I speak fluently are French and German (10 years in France and 2 in Marburg). I don't know Latin so maybe the Catullus is going right over my unsophisticated little head.

Hi Don,

I certainly didn't feel excluded. I would have been happy to pipe up with any reasonably intelligent comment that occurred to me. I have commented on the Translation boards occasionally in the past. But no criticisms did occur to me, and I suspect that my liking of one poem over another had more to do with the original than the translation. The styles were very disparate.

And yes, my lack of participation was also partly because I've been too busy at work to give the bake off the attention it deserved.