[Julie Steiner]

COMMENTS ON THE POEM CHOICE AND TRANSLATION:

I find it more convenient to discuss both of these items together on this one.

I admire this entry's faithfulness to the playful spirit--if not always the literal meaning--of the originals. I don't expect everyone to share my appreciation of the large risks that this translator has taken, but this is why we have a popular favorite in addition to the judge's picks. I also commend the translator's (presumed) honesty in providing enough details in the prose crib for us to see what's going on in this non-Indo-European language. (Apparently, Hindi has more in common with most European languages than Hungarian does.) He or she could easily have made the prose crib seem much closer to the verse translation than it actually is, and few, if any, of us would have spotted the deception.

My favorite of the three, "The Wasp," shows the greatest deviation from the original text, with the completely indefensible "anthropo- / phagic!" Translators aren't supposed to just make stuff up. But, as my husband learned long ago, I can forgive just about anything if the offender manages to make me laugh, and I thought "anthropo- / phagic!" was laugh-out-loud hilarious.

And given the difficulty of maneuvering in such a tight space, rhyme-wise, what's the alternative--not translating the poem at all? Bah! Granted, not many kids are going to know the word "anthropophagic", but not many kids who read Ogden Nash's "The Centipede" know the word "objurgate," either.

I would definitely prefer "flighty" to "winged" in L3, but that's a small quibble.

My second favorite is "The Ant," although "No turmoil" seemed a little rhyme-driven to me; on my initial reading, I couldn't quite see the point of it. I think that this problem might be rectified if "see" in L3 were changed to "know." Also, I'd suggest using "grain" instead of "corn" in L4, because I'm American, and my first instinct on seeing "corn" is to assume that it only means "maize."

I think that to truly appreciate "The Marbled White Butterfly" (for which the prose crib didn't provide the original Hungarian title, unless it's the Latin), I need just a bit more guidance figuring out what's going on at a literal level. As in the first poem, I found myself asking, "What is the point of the poet's inclusion of these details?", but I couldn't come up with satisfactory answers. Currently, the first line seems an irrelevant truism, and in the second line I'm distracted by the appearance of a first-person narrator who can't sing.

This may simply be a flaw in the original poem, but I think more should be done to contrast the birds' music with the flower's muteness, and/or to otherwise explain the narrator's affinity for drunken, restless artists like the flower, rather than to birds.

I could be wildly misinterpreting this, of course. I'm only guessing that the narrator must be the butterfly, because otherwise the butterfly is only mentioned in the title; I think that the "mute painter" must be a reference to the blooming flower, tossing its head in the breeze...but the verse translation seems to suggest that the painter is the butterfly, landing on flowers. Hmmm. Clearly I'm not understanding this perfectly.

I'm thinking that, except in the really short lines, maintaining the syllable count is less important than clarity.

"Bohemian" has much more positive connotations than "offbeat," so I would prefer that word.

But overall, these were delightful.