Can translated poetry matter?

January 18, 2006 Yet we must be aware of the problems concerning translation, and the translation of poetry in particular. Pessimistic statements on the translatability of poetry are much more common than affirmative ones. “Poetry is what is lost in translation”, American poet Robert Frost famously remarked. It is a commonplace to reject any kind of translatability.

There are some good reasons for this view in theory. Languages are never totally equivalent – lexical and grammatical categories might differ and it is obvious that every language is bound to a particular culture with its own specific concepts, which are revealed in its linguistic ways of expressing things. Information loss or the necessity of adding information is a well-known problem of translations, and not just literary ones. For instance, if one wants to translate from Chinese (a language without verbal tenses) to English, the translator has to add verbal tenses in English. In the case of literature, and poetry in particular, translation becomes even more difficult due to the importance of sound. Sound, and the specific meaning attached to the sound itself, is almost impossible to translate, but carries the “music” of the poem. All this led Schopenhauer to look more closely at the analogy of poetry and music, expressing his conviction that “Poems cannot be translated; they can only be transposed, and that is always awkward”.

What might look nearly impossible in theory seems to work quite well in practice, however. The pessimism concerning the general non-correspondence of categories in different languages cannot be justified, if one thinks of the actual possibility of learning second languages. Some issues appear a bigger problem in theory than in the process of translation itself. To come back to the example of translation from Chinese to English, in the experience of most translators it is quite apparent from the context which tense to choose, even though there are no verbal tenses in Chinese.

For a contrary, affirmative approach towards translation and especially towards literary translation one might think of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923), in which translation acquires a nearly spiritual significance due to its ability to give a kind of eternal life to the original. Through translation, language can come closer to a “pure language”, the suprahistorical mystery behind the world. Although it might not be too helpful in practice for translators to follow Benjamin into these metaphysical realms, his is quite an extraordinary view. Benjamin assigns translation an importance it has in probably no other philosophy.

When it comes to the practice of poetry translation one is faced with a much more practical issue: literality versus free translation – a crucial and controversial point in the discussion on translations of poetry. On the one hand stand the advocates of literal translation, such as Vladimir Nabokov, who believes that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase”. Translation should cover up the original as little as possible. On the other hand stand proponents of free translation, who aim to make the result more fluent, and thus more accessible to readers of poetry, than a literal translation could ever be.

Of course, there are some kinds of poetry where the translator cannot but fail in his or her attempt to translate. Obviously, poetry with a lot of sound effects will pose a problem. Some poems take sound and visual effects to such extremes that it even becomes unnecessary, as well as impossible, to translate them. Ernst Jandl’s poem, “yearning”, is a good example:


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Examples like these, however, are exceptional. Most likely, the translator makes a new decision for each individual poem, taking in consideration its particular character and possibilities for translation.

For Poetry International Web it could be a challenge to view translation of poetry not only as the translation from one language to another, but also as a mediation between cultures. The translator then becomes a cultural and linguistic mediator, who needs to know specific cultural concepts reflected in both languages: the source and the target language of the translation. Thus a website specializing in international poetry needs to overcome both linguistic barriers and cultural ones, which can be seen as a quite ambitious task. Key and book image via Shutterstock