Probably one of the most difficult genres to translate is poetry. In his essay, ”Translating Poetry, Contemporary Theories and Hypotheses” Ovidiu Matin explains some of the challenges connected with it. For one thing, it is practically impossible to translate great poetry without compromising something because, as he writes, ”poetry is neither just words nor just meter. Translators and theoreticians characterize it as music of words [….] and of conveying to the listener a heightened awareness of [the world] through an intense concentration of metaphor and words in which the natural flow of speech sounds is molded to some kind of formal pattern.” Thus, he explains, translating poetry is bound to fail from the get go. He provides a list of the various ways of approaching translation where prioritizing one or more aspects on the part of the translator will mean compromising or losing something else, hence, it is just a matter of determining what you want to prioritize the most and what you can live with losing (see list in Matiu’s essay below which is actually based on André Lefevere’s list). For example, a phonemic translation prioritizes reproducing the sound of the original in the T.L text, whereas a literal translation would be word -for-word and risks distorting the original meaning and syntax of the S.L text.
He also explains that due to the nature of poetry there is a tendency for the translator to perhaps want to clarify or explain a word or a phrase, something which can be done more easily in a novel, for example, but that doesn’t work very well in a poem. Or, the opposite may be true, if the poem is somewhat mysterious and less straightforward a translator may be tempted to make the translation more obscure and less accessible than it really is. Both phenomena should be avoided. Try translating the following poems ( either ”As I Grew Older” by Langston Hughes into a language of your choice or the poem by Johannes V. Jensen into English, see the link below). Which approach did you choose (consider referring to Lefevere’s list in Matiu’s essay)? Can you explain your reasons? Also, do you find some of the concerns regarding the translation of poetry (again, you can refer to the list) as being, in fact, similar to the concerns we’ve encountered the last many weeks with regard to the debates we’ve read about and the literary genres we’ve looked at? If so, what are some of those similarities? Also, when Matiu claims that translating poetry ”is music in language” do you think that really also goes for the other literary genres as well? Why or why not?
As mentioned in the beginning of this course, several authors have claimed that translating the works of other authors have impacted their work (for example, Murakami and Davis). Can you envision translation having the same impact on you and your work? Also, after translating a genre that you normally wouldn’t write in, do you feel in any way compelled to dabble and experiment with that genre after having translated a representative work? Finally, do you feel that you have a better grasp of such notions as ”hyper-reading,” “foreignizing and domesticizing” a translation and would you be able to use them with more awareness when approaching and experimenting with translation as a form of inspiration in your own creative writing process?
Teori:
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Langston Hughe’s poem:
https://poets.org/poem/i-grew-older
Johannes V. Jensen’s poem: