[Roger Slater]

To use rhyme is to sacrifice poetry? I generally understand that sort of comment to mean that the translator is not skilled in writing rhyme in English so has rationalized away her own deficiency by asking us to believe that the original poet just threw in some rhyme for the hell of it and didn't think it was an important element of the poem that anyone should notice or care about. It's an attitude that seems to be based on the notion that a poem is entirely made up of content and only incidentally packaged in form, and that all the fun is not in how you say a thing but only in saying the thing.

[AZ Foreman]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

To use rhyme is to sacrifice poetry? I generally understand that sort of comment to mean that the translator is not skilled in writing rhyme in English so has rationalized away her own deficiency by asking us to believe that the original poet just threw in some rhyme for the hell of it and didn't think it was an important element of the poem that anyone should notice or care about. It's an attitude that seems to be based on the notion that a poem is entirely made up of content and only incidentally packaged in form, and that all the fun is not in how you say a thing but only in saying the thing.

I think that most people who say this kind of thing would agree that the "how" of saying a thing does matter. It's just that they are averse to the idea that this kind of "how" should matter in any substantive way. Or at least, not so much so as to make it worth bothering over in translation. People who aren't accustomed to writing rhymed verse themselves often have a harder time of it, and so may be more susceptible to arguments about its inconsequentiality, though there's a bit of a Chicken vs. Egg thing going on there.

The real issue I think is that English-speaking readers of poetry have been effectively trained not to care about formal features like rhyme, and to aestheticize other things. To a degree this is true in many other languages spoken by the mandarinate of Western Europe, but it is I think less true of Spanish or Dutch, and it is not at all true in Russian, Welsh, Yiddish or Arabic.

I wrote a thing (forgive me for quoting myself) about this problem re: the translation of Classical Chinese verse. One basic point of mine is that these kinds of belief about rhyme etc. are part of an ideology about what matters in poetry. A reason why I think of, and treat, it as an ideology is that it is so readily read into nature. People will say "oh rhyme just doesn't work in English, English is hard to rhyme in" which would be news to Bob Dylan, Don McLean and Eminem (which connects with another point: that disdain for rhyme, and/or disdain for those popular verse forms that retain rhyme, is also class-inflected to a degree among modern Anglo literary elites).

The reason I translate in form-conscious ways is because the form is often a component of what made the thing worth reading. I'm very aural, and I appreciate things aurally. I think distaste for formally-conscious translation is the flipside of that, one way or another. To translate in a way that connects with formal artistry is to tell the reader — one way or another — that form is worth being aware of, thinking about, thinking with, and thinking through. The problem is that some people don't really like being told that, which I am convinced is part of what fuels complaints about rhyme being a "distraction" that "calls attention to itself". Form that doesn't call too much attention to itself goes down a lot better, often. People don't seem to mind blank verse so much.

[Kevin Rainbow]

In the latest installment (the sixth), the translator justifies leaving the two-line refrain of a famous poem untranslated, by saying that it's hard, and others have done it badly, and anyway, it contains English cognates that non-French-speakers should be able to figure out for themselves.

Hmmm. How do others feel about that?

I think it is justified and kept within reasonable bounds of "poetic license".

It doesn't sound like she is being reckless or arrogant, rather than admitting a weakness: "I tried my best...but, in one instance, I gave up", "the famous refrain...defeated me." , "I could find no English words...", "please forgive me..."

It is not uncommon to use foreign tongues (especially Latin and French) in English artistic writing, as titles, epigraphs, stylistic flourishes etc. Even though this is a translation, the artistic effect is along the same lines.

If you don't know what something means, thousands of dictionaries and grammars are only a click away to help. Unless one confines oneself to the most understood words, now and then (s)he is likely to make people look up English words in the dictionary too. Introducing people to different words/expressions - including foreign ones - is usually not a bad thing.

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[Roger Slater]

I think those who are hostile to form often can't really hear meter. If they "don't mind" blank verse it's only because they don't hear it and to them it's pretty much the same as free verse. But ultimately, even if you are an educated reader/writer with a good ear but you simply don't care for meter and rhyme, I would argue that your duty as a translator is to put aside your own view on the subject and recognize that the meter and rhyme of the original were important enough for the original poet to incorporate into his poem. Your own views and preferences are secondary to those of the poet you are translating, after all, and it's a cop-out to claim that the original poet went to all the trouble of writing in metrical rhyming verses for reasons that were trivial or ultimately not contributing to the poem in any way worth preserving. No one would translate a song without keeping the melody, and it would be no excuse to do so while claiming that the melody gets in the way of the lyrics.