[Susan McLean]

I'm always more confident making comments about translations from languages I have some knowledge of, but I have commented as well on translations with which the author has provided literal translations and the original language. Some Romance languages overlap a bit with the ones I know, and I can occasionally make an educated guess. At the least I can recognize awkward meter, rhymes, and syntax in English. And reading the translations introduces me to much great work that I would otherwise not know at all.

Susan

[Roger Slater]

The idea that only someone versed in the original language can offer useful comments appears to be based on the obviously wrong notion that the translator seeks only comments on the accuracy of the translation. That, indeed, is an important area for potential feedback. No one wants to get anything "wrong," but policing for accuracy is a function that can be performed by countless United Nations diplomats who know nothing about poetry, and often some of the more slavishly "accurate" translations are the least appealing.

In fact, someone who cannot consult the original may be in a position, at times, to perform a special service unavailable from the bilingual reader, for whom any translation is bound to be, to a certain extent, a profound disappointment. Only the uni-lingual reader can react to the translation on its own terms, without subliminally hearing the sound of the original in his mind's ear. Such a reader also does not fool himself into thinking he knows what a translated phrase means because he is unconsciously remembering what it meant in the original.

Like the native reader of the original, who does not balance multiple "versions" in his head but approaches the work directly, the reader of a translation who cannot read the original can approach the translation directly, as a single text, and not as an evocation of other texts, and thus is able to offer a "pure" response. If you believe, as I do, that the goal of a translator is to provide the reader of a translation with an "equivalent experience" to a reader of the original, then, I suggest, only one unschooled in the original language can actually let you know if a translation is a complete success. Such a reader may not be able to formulate specific advice about how to make the poem conform to the original, but if such a reader articulately sets forth his or her impressions about what it was like to read the translation, then the translator can decide whether the experience, as described, is true to the original.

To say that one cannot judge a translation without knowing the original doesn't account, say, for the positive judgment so many people here express for Rhina's translations. Tim has frequently praised them and had intelligent things to say about them, although he does not read Spanish.

So I would suggest that if you don't speak the original language, just write a critique that takes for granted the basic accuracy of the translation (let others deal with that) and say what you think of the poem, its tone, its diction, etc., giving it the benefit of the doubt when it comes to "accuracy."


[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited October 31, 2006).]

[Carol Taylor]

This is my feeling about translating poetry. Others disagree. When you are translating poetry, if you put the general idea across in a loose translation, producing a poem that shares the gist and some of the phrasing but is worse than, better than, or substantially dissimilar to the original, or which ignores plays on words or cultural associations or tone or technique or degree of formality or whatever doesn't conveniently translate, you have not translated the author's poem. You have plagiarized it--plundered it for its ideas and diction and rewritten it (perhaps improved upon it) in your own words. At best you have done an inadequate translation. Your version can certainly be critiqued as an English poem using whatever criteria we apply to poetry written in English, but it can hardly be critiqued as a translation of the original by someone who doesn't understand the original language well enough to read the poem for himself. How can he possibly say whether you've captured the original poet's intention?

As to relying on the literal translation, if the person who translated the poem also provided the literal translation, any nuances lost in the one are apt to be lost in the other. And there are so many poetic choices that go beyond the literal text.

So I would urge caution. By all means, comment to the English version, but qualify your critique by mentioning your own limitations in the original language.

Carol

[Mark Allinson]

All poetry is poetry in translation.

You have a memory, an experience, a concept, and you translate that into words which approximate to, or can elicit or suggest, an equivalent experience in the mind of a reader.

The actual experience you are writing about will never be directly available to others, but the artful approximation of the experience may be very rewarding for readers.

Faithfulness to the original experience is necessary, but not in itself sufficient for a successful result, whatever we are translating. Someone might capture the essential core of a memory, or idea or experience, and yet the expression or the chemistry of words in the expression might make it uninteresting.

Some translated texts, like Mike's, leave most us with little choice but to trust his faithfulness to the original. But this does not mean (as others have said above)that English-only readers can't talk about the English poem he has made.

Other texts, like those by Homer or Ovid or Horace, are easier to comment upon because there have been so many translations, and so many of them now on line. If you have a solid but rough, literal translation of a passage, and a choice of sometimes dozens of other translations, in both prose or verse, it becomes very easy to "triangulate" (more or less) the meaning of the original. In this way it becomes quite feasible for an English-only reader to have an opinion on whether or not a translation is straying from its source.

Online language resources should not be underestimated. There are many translation sites which can give you a rough literal version like Babel Fish), and other more technically precise sites, like Perseus, which give you the original text, a literal rendering and an artful rendering. The word-tool also allows you to check on the individual words.

If you click on the Perseus link just above, you will see the first page of Homer's Odyssey, in a literal rendering. You can also choose to view the same text in the original Greek, or in Samuel Butler's translation. In the Greek view, each word is linked to the online dictionary.

Add to this a few translations from your own shelves, or elsewhere online, and you are certainly qualified to challenge any classical translation for its faithfulness to the original.

There is no reason why anyone here should feel reticent about commenting on translations.

[Quincy Lehr]

Okay, the Translation board fuckin pwns the world. They just waste us. Fuckin' pwn us, man.

Actually, I read over on the board sometimes, though I tend not to comment--not so much because I don't know the languages (I have enough of some though by no means all of them to futz my way through), but because I don't translate poetry. Whenever I finally get around to those Breton translations, though, I'll head your way.

Quincy

[Janet Kenny]

I would like to thank all translators who have shone a torch into dark corridors for me. Of course I feel all that sort of thing about translation. I have just been reading an anthology of translated WW2 poems.

I have in my possession a copy of a book in which an Italian translator wrote a maxim from the wonderful Italian writer, Carlo Emilio Gadda.

The three options for a translator:

1) Beautiful and unfaithful

2) Beautiful and faithful

3) Faithful and terrible.


My fear is that in order to please readers in a forum the first option would win by popular vote. But of course I respect Michael and Gregory and other gifted translators in Erato. I know they would always protect the original poem.

My own Italian was once, at best, fluent and appalling. It is now just appalling but I remember what it was like to hear Italians at home in their own territory. I may try sometimes to translate a poem but always conscious of the fact that I am representing an existing poem.

My last translation was a recipe book and even there I exercised extreme caution
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited October 31, 2006).]

[R. S. Gwynn]

I have managed to obliterate two long responses to this thread, so I will be very brief this time.

1. There's always a trade-off, literal meaning vs. fidelity to the "spirit."
2. The "spirit" is a matter of voice and tone, which may largely be functions of form (rhyme and meter) in the original.
3. The best definition of translation I ever heard was to "try to affect the reader in the target language in somewhat the same way that a reader in the original language was affected." This obviously requires some intuitive leaps on the part of the translator.

[Janet Kenny]

Originally posted by R. S. Gwynn:

1. There's always a trade-off, literal meaning vs. fidelity to the "spirit."
2. The "spirit" is a matter of voice and tone, which may largely be functions of form (rhyme and meter) in the original.
3. The best definition of translation I ever heard was to "try to affect the reader in the target language in somewhat the same way that a reader in the original language was affected." This obviously requires some intuitive leaps on the part of the translator.

Sam,
Beautifully said and who could possibly disagree? A perfect definition.
Janet

[Catherine Chandler]

I've done lots of translation in my day, but only recently literary translation (formal poetry). I only try to translate from the two foreign languages in which I am fluent (French and Spanish). If I cannnot meet Janet's #2 result (beautiful and faithful) after many unsuccessful attempts, I scrap it. This happened to me recently when trying to translate a seemingly very simple poem by Rosalía de Castro. I am 100% with Carol Taylor and Sam Gwynn on this one. My worst translation peeve is the translation from formal verse into free verse. Sure, there are always a few sacrifices to be made, but they must be few and far between.

Catherine

[Carol Taylor]

I pretty much agree with Sam, though a more accurate term might be interpretation rather than translation. But if this approach requires intuitive leaps on the part of the translator, it must require imaginative ones on the part of a critic who isn't in a position to be affected in the original language.

Carol