Translate This, Part Un

In my previous post, I wrote about some of the losses and gains of translating poetry in general. But, because I believe that generalities only have meaning when grounded in specifics, I wanted to talk about a few particular examples. Thus, for my next few posts I will be listing some poetic translations that have meant a lot to me.

My list makes no claim to be comprehensive or even representative, nor do I say that these are the “best” translations of any of these poets. They are just a few of the translations that have most struck me as poems in English, conveying and embodying material (poetic material, not mere information) I haven’t found in Anglophone poetry. They have brought something new and different into my poetic world.
Having already mentioned Mandelstam, I’ll begin with Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin’s Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems, originally published by Atheneum in 1973 or 1974 (the book gives both years) and recently reissued by New York Review of Books Classics as The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. As one of those translations in which a scholar who knows the language prepares a literal version which a well-known poet innocent of the original language then “poets up,” this arouses initial skepticism, but Brown and Merwin convey a strong sense of the excitement and poetic distinctiveness of Mandelstam’s work. This book was very influential when I was writing my third book, Wrong.
Another Mandelstam (or in this case, Mandelshtam) translation that I’ve found very powerful is James Greene’s Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics Selected Poems. Greene’s translations are an odd mix of faithfulness and freedom: as he writes, “in these versions, lines (and sometimes whole stanzas) have been omitted, in an attempt to produce poems that work in English, as Pound’s transformations of Rihaku [that is, Li Po] do. Occasionally I compress two of Mandelshtam’s poems into one. (Boris Bukhshtab wrote in 1929: ‘in Mandelshtam’s poetry every stanza is practically autonomous… Any stanza can be discarded or added….).” Greene does all of this in the interest of producing English language poems that originate in and even correspond to Mandelshtam’s originals (while not claiming to be replicas or representations of those originals), and which carry some of Mandelshtams’s poetic power and lyrical strangeness into English.