Comments on: Translation: Rhyme & Reason

By: A.Z. Foreman

A.Z. Foreman — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:00:52 +0000

I think the best argument for preservation of form is to imagine an English form-poem recast in free verse. If I were to take, for example, Robert Frost’s sonnet in couplets

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last *Put out the Light* was spoken

And imagine some “translation” back into English, only without rhyme, in a only a rough approximation of iambic pentameter:

A misty din rose from the shattered water.
Great waves looked over others that came,
And thought of doing something to the shoreline
That water had never before done to land.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks in the gleam of eyes, blown forward.
You could not tell, and yet it seemed
The shore was lucky the cliffs backed it,
And the cliffs, too, that the continent backed them.
It seemed a night of dark intent
Was afoot, and not only a night, an era.
Someone had better ready himself for rage.
There’d be more than surf broken
Before God pronounced his final *Put out the Light.*

I rest my case.

By: Mark Leonard

Mark Leonard — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:09:21 +0000

Richard Wilbur’s translations from the Spanish amaze me, e.g., his version of Borges’s sonnet “Everness” is nearly as aesthetically powerful as the original, while conveying the same meaning within the sonnet form. I assume his translations from other languages are equally adept.
In addition to Wilbur’s technical gifts, perhaps the fact that he has done so few translations is the reason for their quality compared to the larger volumes of translations put out by others.

By: Susan McLean

Susan McLean — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:11:55 +0000

I think that it would make little sense to translate free verse into formal verse, but even in translating formal verse into formal verse, one often has to make significant changes to rhyme and meter to convey the effect of the original. Different languages have different speech patterns, a different number of syllables per word, and different rules of prosody; to try to replicate the formal pattern of one language in another one can create more problems than it solves. Instead one needs to find an equivalent in the target language that has some of the same sensual appeal of the original in the source language and that does not alter the tone or content of the original too much. I do not think, for example, that in translating a sonnet from French into English it is necessary to maintain exactly the same rhyme scheme or even the same line length. Whereas hexameters and syllable count are a natural part of sonnets in French, English sonnets rely on accentual-syllabic meter and fall most naturally into iambic pentameter. Because it is much easier to find rhyming words in French, a rhyme scheme such as ABBA ABBA in French might need to be changed in English to something like ABBA CDDC or ABAB CDCD to avoid changing the meaning or warping the syntax of the translation. The essential ingredient is to convey beauty and craft, since the exact texture of the original cannot be reproduced.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:19:14 +0000

I agree with Ben. Light verse gets hurt worst.
I was talking with a fluent German speaker yesterday and we got to why Rilke works in translation so often, and why Goethe never does.
It seems to me that Frost and Housman are almost ideally hard to translate, and Whitman almost ideally easy. (That’s why Pessoa’s Whitmanesque avatar, Alvaro da Campos, works so well when translated back into English, and Pessoa’s other avatars not so much.)
A similar pair from another language: Mayakosfky (translates easily, as such things go) vs Akhmatova (doesn’t work in English in any translation I’ve seen).
I’m not so much in love with the Pinsky Cavafy above as Alicia, I’m afraid– too much filler. But I’m one of those people with no modern Greek who know Cavafy only through the Keeley… maybe I got used to the wrong effects.
Obviously it’s not optimal to translate from rhyming forms into free verse, but what about translating from one pattern of rhymes or line-endings into another? Long passages of terza rima are hard to translate, because English doesn’t have as many rhymes, but some of the most memorable Dantesque effects in English are attempts to find a pattern that is for English what terza rima is for Italian: axa bxb cxc rhymes (Ciardi’s version of Dante), stressed/ unstressed alternating endings (the tercets in Little Gidding), three-line stanzas with irregular patterns of rhyme, often aba bcb but sometimes aab or aax (Walcott’s Omeros, parts of Heaney’s Station Island).

By: Ben Friedlander

Ben Friedlander — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 16:52:14 +0000

What really suffers from lack of boldness in translation is light verse. You can read an unrhymed, metrically irregular version of Petrarch and imagine the same thing, only more beautiful. But how about imagining a flat statement as crisp, or even funny?