Anthony Madrid's 'Five Complaints'

At the Paris Review, poet Anthony Madrid shares with readers five of his complaints about poetry. Some, you might have never considered before—for example, T.S. Eliot's 1948 address to the Library of Congress about Edgar Allan Poe. Madrid starts things off writing about his frustrations with reading works in translation: "Suppose you want to know whether a given Czeslaw Milosz poem rhymes in the original. Or you want to know if it’s in meter. If you don’t speak Polish, friend, you have some serious fuss ahead of you." (Hey, we've all been there before.) On, from there:

Tell you one thing. You won’t find out by reading the introduction to any English translation of Miłosz I’ve ever looked at. Questions of this sort are regarded as matters of absolutely no interest. Why would you want to know anything about a poet’s prosody.

2.

Books and books are translated out of Sanskrit, and the translators never tell you how to pronounce anything. Consequently you run around putting the stress on the next-to-last syllable of every single proper noun, as if Sanskrit were Spanish or Italian …

X Ramayána whereas it should be ✓ Ramáyana
X Mahabharáta whereas it should be ✓ Máha·bhárata
X Vatsyayána whereas it should be ✓ Vatsyáyana
X Ravána whereas it should be ✓ Rávana
X Kadambári whereas it should be ✓ Kadámbari
X Prajnaparamíta sutras whereas it should be ✓ Prájna·parámita sutras …

And it’s the same thing with Chinese. The translators and publishers feel no need to guide the helpless American reader with regard to the pronunciation of words like xian, qi, zhuang, and so on. Why would anyone need to know that.

(Two honorable—very honorable—exceptions. The volumes of the Clay Sanskrit Library tell you where the stress falls every time, and they provide a full explanation as to how the transliteration system works. Honorable exception #2: the old Aylmer translations of Tolstóy always tell where the stress falls on Russian names. That way, you don’t go around saying BOR-is, when it’s bor-EES (like Maurice except with a B). Also Vladímir, not Vládimir, et cetera, et cetera.)

Continue at Paris Review.