[Janice D. Soderling]

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???)

[Shaun J. Russell]

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.

[Katherine Smith]

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.

[Mary McLean]

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.