I was excited to read about poetry translation this week, since it so directly bears on my own translation of Tschernichovsky’s wild, brittle poetics. In general, my own philosophy of translation is conflicted: I am on the one hand drawn to acculturating translations (closest to Lefevre’s ‘versions’ or ‘imitations’), such as the charming translation of Catullus provided by Frank Copley, cited in Susan Basnett’s text—I find the effort of recreating literature so that it is accessible to a new culture and, often, a new time, a worthwhile and valiant one—some of my favorite movies and songs are reworkings of previous narratives, breathing new life and new language into a literature that would lie dormant and inaccessible were it to be literally rendered. On the other hand, since the work I am translating does not bend itself to acculturating translation (among other factors, it is a historical drama set in a very specific time period and already laden with potent political meaning for Tschernichovsky’s peers), I find myself concentrating more on questions of poetic sound and sibilance. I took objection, however, to Edith Grossman’s unilateral focus on rhythm in her poetry translations. I myself have elected to keep rhyme insofar as it’s possible, believing that the authoritative –click- into place of a rhymed couplet is irreplaceable and must be preserved unless it’s completely impossible to create a line that isn’t thick and awkward. I’ll close this little reflection with some lines that I attempted to recreate in rhyme--not without its own tortuousness, but, I think, with a surviving sense of finality and certainty that preserves the original.
THE FIRST GROUP
O youth, cast your eyes upon my beauty, my comeliness!
Money is false, fortune is vain,
what pleases the eye forever is gained.
Locusts plague the threshing-floor, moths devour cloth,
what pleases the eye is an eternal troth.
SECOND GROUP
Youth, cast your eyes toward family!
Beauty is false, grace is vain,
What a woman of valor builds never shall wane,
You shall not fear hunger, nor dread persecution,
A woman of valor is a timeless institution.
Excellent translation! I really like how you keep the rhyme, but not so slavishly that sense is sacrificed. I also very much like how you use repetition with difference (one of my favorite poetic techniques) in line two of each of your stanzas.
ReplyDeleteDo you hope that your translation of T. is going to stand as a literary text? Or are you being driven in your translation by its importance to scholarship? That said, if you can do both, you've achieved an ideal.