More Translation Matters

So while plowing through a recent translation edition of Poetry, I began to underline a few interesting phrases and sentences that struck me as a useful addendum to my other posts on translation. I am intrigued by most of these statements because they are so rich with cliché and tautology, and yet they have this quality of contriteness and apology that seems to reflect a wonderfully refreshing level of care, concern and tenderness for the work of the poets they are translating, as well as a kind of fatalistic hopelessness about the capacity for us to reach across the divide of language and culture. Babel’s aftermath, I suppose, worked. All efforts to rebuild the tower are fittingly quixotic.
A very Oxford-like self-deprecating snootiness (only the Oxbridge crowd can manage this) pervades this disclaimer by Reynolds Price.
An early result of reading her [Enid Starkie] life of the poet [Arthur Rimbaud]—and my attempt to read all the boy’s poems in French—was the effort to translate a few of them into compelling and at least partially brilliant English. I failed, of course, but then so have all the English language translations known to me, however valiant and useful their tries. But I have never stopped trying--Reynolds Price

Here is the embattled Scottish poet and editor of Jonathan Cape’s poetry series, Robin Robinson defending “versions” against nay-sayers, and making quite sweeping and not entirely unassailable claims about what poems “demand”. Ah, those dusty, pushy classics!
The classics demand to be made new, to be dusted off and polished to reveal their currency. In the same way, in this Anglocentric literary world, we must attend to modern poetry in other languages and encourage new readers—not through slavish, mechanical transcriptions into English (which Lowell described as “taxidermy”), but through English versions that are true to the tone of the original and which are also viable as poems in their own right--Robin Robertson
Daniel Weissbort may be safely dubbed the don of translations into English, and here he expresses something of the futility of translation.
I cannot translate what I do not understand. As I see it, you work your way in and then have to work very hard to find your way out again. (I once edited a book on the process, which I titled The Double Labyrinth.) You may, of course, re-engage, as it were, with the same source material later; after all, cliché though it be, it is a fact that no translation is ever finished, it is only abandoned.--Daniel Weissbort
For Robert Pinsky, translation is flawed, but so is every act of writing, and so we do what we can.
Translation, always, is a matter of degree. Even the most methodical legal document, expertly moved between languages, will lose some nuances and create others. The simplest nouns—house and casa; bread and pane; head and capo or testa; vision or vista--have different feelings and associations. At the other extreme, the most wildly innovative writer cannot be absolutely original. The work, even if by defiance or annihilation, translates what came before it. --Robert Pinsky
Even as Kathleen Jamie’s disclaimer seeks to minimize the accomplishment of the translation, it posits a particular role for the “genuine” translator—to do something for the author that the author could not do for him or herself.
.It feels a bit fraudulent to “translate” a Gaelic poem, because all Gaels speak English, and the poets can translate their own work in two minutes flat—I can hardly claim to be doing anything the poet couldn’t do himself. It was just a pleasure to inhabit that atmosphere and “historical moment” for a while.--Kathleen Jamie
Paul Muldoon has decided to fall back on the idea that he has translated the poems of Nuala Ni Dhomhnall purely for his reading pleasure. We just happen to be eavesdropping. It is the disclaimer of the lyric poet, I suppose.
I translate Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poems for one very simple reason: I want to read them, and translation is the very closest form of reading of which we may avail ourselves.--Paul Muldoon
Finally, I really like Charles Simic’s contrition and daring here—very funny expressions of the failure of translation to meet the ideals we hold dear.
I worship accuracy in translation. Strict literalism—word for word, phrase for phrase is my rule until I get stuck. It pains me to take even the smallest liberties, but in this case I had no choice (I broke the very last line of the poem into two lines), since remaining faithful to the original would have made the ending awkward. Didn’t Dryden say, “I have endeavored to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England?” I hope he is right. Otherwise I’ll burn in hell, which is already full of translators of poetry.--Charles Simic