validity of translations in poetry

See, I feel the exact opposite for Neruda. I can't really get into his poetry b'c it seems too flowery, and he uses words that I'm guessing are much more beautiful and less cliche in spanish than they are in English. My enjoyment of Neruda is dimished by the translations, which is why for the first time in my southwest proximity to Mexico life, I want to learn spanish.

As for other translations, I will forever have a grudge against Ezra pound for raping the chinese poets, and I will forever admire Nabakov for Lolita, although Lolita's not a poem, the whole book is poetry, and he translated from english to Russian (I think...). It's just a beautiful book and the words are just right.

I think it's a compromise of the poet's intention, and the flow of the words. Ezra pound totally disrespects the poet's intention, and my Neruda poetry book might respect it too much.

Godfather said:

Alicante, by Jacques Prevert

Une orange sur la table
Ta robe sur le tapis
Et toi dans mon lit
Doux présent du présent
Fraîcheur de la nuit
Chaleur de ma vie.


Translation, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

An orange on the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet present of the present
Cool of night
Warmth of my life


Translation, by I don't know who

An orange on the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet gift of now
Crisp cool of night
Passion fire of my life

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First, See? Warmth of my life, Passion fire of my life, both of those are kind of cheesy, and I'm sure they wouldn't be in french.

Second - his last name is Prevert? That's like Pervert. AHAHAHA.

Ok done.

Godfather said:

"I want to do with you what Spring does with the cherry trees"


- now for me, this is an absolute helluva line of poetry and its from neruda, but i don't speak spanish

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Ok I give you that one.

Godfather said:

as far as i know, nabokov wrote lolita in english.

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That's what I thought!

Godfather said:

i see what you're saying, but your addressing your opinions to specific translators and to translation generally

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Isn't that what you wanting?

Neruda is my favourite poet. A couple of my Neruda books have the English on one page and the Spanish on the opposing page. I wish I could learn Spanish so I could read him in his own language. I just know I would get more out of it. At the same time, I never met a Neruda translation I didn't love. I think his poetry is powerful when translated, so I hope that it is his essence coming through. Only pure bi-lingual speakers would know for sure, I suppose.

It's probably just a personal preference thing for me, Kevin. I tend to get stuck on a certain word and obsess over it, so if a translation isn't perfect, or a shade of what it was meant to be, I get stuck on it.

I wish I could read Spanish too, b'c then I would know true romance or something.

I don't think you can "learn another language" and then go read its poetry in its pure, unadulterated form. If you could, then you could translate it into your own language in its pure, unadulterated form. It would be the same process...learning the other language or translation...you have to start with your own language and all the cultural whatever that entails.

Maybe you can get close, but it'll never be perfect.

i'm with you, godfather. i never fully trust a translation. rimbaud is largely responsible for my serious study of french.

The great thing about translations is that if you have them, and also have a passing acquaintance with the original language, you can pretty much get the whole thing. You don't need to be completely fluent, imo.

As an aside, here's an interesting "translation." One of my favorite poems is the Yeats poem that starts, "When you are old and grey and full of sleep."

This is a loose translation of a Pierre de Ronsard poem -- so loose, that I wouldn't call it a translation at all, but a new work, maybe "inspired"by Ronsard.

Literary sampling?

yep. definitely something of the sort.

Yep, Nabokov published Lolita in English and then translated it into Russian later.

Huaka said:

Yep, Nabokov published Lolita in English and then translated it into Russian later.

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What a beast of a man.

I studied French, German and Latin in high school - the latter years were much taken up by translating from one language to another. The teachers were impossible to please. Either you translated literally or you translated loosely - the latter being much better for translating the feelings or emotions in the piece. No matter what you did, you'd get critiqued for translating the language, but not the sentiment, or translating the sentiment, but not the the precise language. I've still got a particularly difficult piece of Ovid that revisits me at night in my dreams. The art of translation is horribly difficult - a "damned if you do" and a "damned if you don't" profession.

I've read Neruda in many translations. I can't say I have a favorite translator, per se, but I do have favorite translations of various poems. It's fascinating to compare the translations. My long-standing favorite is Merwin's translation of Widower's Tango. Could it be even better in the Spanish? I can't hardly believe that it could be. Ah - I wish I'd studied Spanish!

Nabakov's a bad example of how works translate. While better remembered for "Lolita", most of his work was directly contributing to the theory and practice of translating Russian poetry. He viewed himself as more an academic literary figure than a creative one. At various points in his career he argued in favor of formal (retaining structure) over aesthetic (retaining meaning), aesthetic over formal, and the patent absurdity of seeking after either at the expense of the other as a matter of course (arguing that the priority must be determined author by author, if not poem by poem).

I think Yevgeny Yevtushenko might be a better illustration. The bulk of his poetry was composed in Russian, though he learned "workman" English early. His early work is almost textbook russian verse, right down to variations on nested sevens. This early work was translated into english by various third parties (through the mill). Contact and communication with the burgeoning Beat movement profoundly changed his approach. He was inspired to experiment and began working English phonic and metric devices into his Russian poems, even going so far as to compose bilingually, writing an English and Russian version of a poem simultaneously. Some of his soundplay is extremely strange, almost seems absent, until one breaks out a Russian-English dictionary and discover that he's rhyming off a translation (i.e. rhyming a russian word off the english equivalent of a word in an earlier phrase).

In a way, one could say that Yevtushenko began composing poems around the impossibility of translation.

BCarruth said:

Nabakov's a bad example of how works translate. While better remembered for "Lolita", most of his work was directly contributing to the theory and practice of translating Russian poetry.

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Not quite. The thing with Nabokov is that he was incredibly multi-faceted. Certainly, he had a lot to say on poetry - he was a translator himself, but he was also a lepidopterist, a chess expert, a briliant academic, and an astonishing writer.

Nabokov's infamous literary battle with Edmund Wilson over translating Eugene Onegin would be of interest to you, godfather, if you haven't already read about it. Here is one of the episodes from that battle.

Please, please, read Dougle Hofstadter' Le Ton Beau de Marot. Buy extra copies and make your friends read it. It's an amazing book, about language, translation, poetry, cognitive science, and love. At the heart of it is a series of translations of a tiny little old French poem, by any number of people in any number of styles.

Then y'all can come back here and we can play at our own translations - in fact I thought of starting it as a game months ago, but couldn't find Marot's original online anywhere.

I find it hard to believe that a discussion such as this could ignore FitzGerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" which, though very loosely translated, (in several versions), brought fame both to FitzGerald and to Khayyam and is widely quoted even today.

Moreover, don't forget that all the Roman and Greek Epics have come down to us ONLY in translation so it's just possible that one shouldn't be too quick to dismiss such.

JRH