The problem of translation cuts across free and formal verse, and when you really work hard at translating a poet and then look at other translations (I do it that way so I'm not subtly copying or resisting other approaches), it's truly horrifying how bad most translations are. There's a recent and generally gaseous book on translating Rilke by William Gass, but it has a brilliant twenty-five page section somewhere in the middle that compares and contrasts versions of one of our most-translated poets. Bly's stuff is BAD, almost as loose as the Lowell "translations", but Pope wasn't any better, so he has some good company.
Translating free verse, while difficult, is exponentially easier than translating formal verse--I think very few people are doing it well. I have a chapbook of Petrarch translations coming out next year, and it is remarkable how different the five or so other standard versions of this century are from each other and from mine. I think many poets have difficulty subjugating their own voice in order to capture the voice of their victim--it takes arrogance to attempt translation but then that arrogance gets in the way of the work.
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