The previous post highlighted translator J.G. Nichols' criticisms of fellow translator of Leopardi, Robert Lowell. Thinking about what Nichols wrote reminded me of Dana Gioia's essay on Robert Bly: "The Successful Career of Robert Bly." Here's what Gioia says about the task of translation in that essay (from Can Poetry Matter?):
"The main problem a translator of poetry faces is not in bringing across the surface sense. That task, at least in modern languages, is relatively easy. The difficulty comes in re-creating the complex design of sound and connotation that charges the original with energy. [Robert] Bly usually solved this problem by ignoring its existence. He merely provided prose translations, often curiously awkward ones, lineated as verse" (170).
And here's how Gioia describes the results of that translation:
"Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints. In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale and Machado, not only all sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not like Bly at his best" (172).
Translation could be a great opportunity for cultural exchange, for a man of one country and heritage to stretch himself by attempting the impossible task of expressing the dynamic tensions of another person's formed thought into his own native tongue. To do so, one would have to submit himself to the other person's expressed language and limit himself to recreating it as faithfully and devoutly as possible. Such a task would entail respect, that is working as if the original author could see one's translations and evaluate them. But how many translators exhibit this respect for difference, for otherness, to such a degree that they can pour all of their creativity into the task and yet also restrain the temptation to meddle.
Translation could involve the commitment to dialogue, the encounter between two parties who are different. Instead, all too often, translation is a superficial tourism. There's a place for tourism and dialogue both, I suppose, but one shouldn't confuse a border run to Taco Bell with a National Geographic expedition...
2 postscripts:
Are you dissing the exalted Robert Blythe? :) If not painfully obvious already, I commented anomalously--I mean anonymously--on your previous post.
I like what you say about dialogue and the respect for otherness--a humility that seems to run counter to the seemingly innate narcissistic egotism of the poet. Perhaps poets are the worst translators...who knows.
Either way, it's intriguing to contemplate the perspective of the "original author." How would they stretch themselves in this mutually respectful dialogue?
Welcome Richard!
This post came out with a certain regrettable vehemence.
Poets are egotists to be sure, and I have the egotism if not the writing of poetry. I think perhaps what makes poetry interesting is the tension between intense self- interest and love of things, otherness. Dante is a great egotist (which he reminds us of in Purgatory by doing penance for pride), and yet his love for politics and history also comes through. It's true enough that not every poet can be a translator because to translate well means writing with a transparency which serves the expression of another person.
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