Aaron Coleman, a literary translator, interprets a few mini poems submitted to NPR's National Poetry Month hashtag, #NPRpoetry. In the art of literature and scholarship, the Platonic good lies in tradition, a code word for theft. Historically, the transformed words have no beginning, do not seek an original author, an original tongue, or first words. In translation, however, maintaining the rhyme of a poem often means interpreting it in a different way – but without losing the gist of the original piece. Minor acts of translation ripple out from every single reading. In that sequence of translation and retranslation from the earliest original creation, from God's self-translation into being, up to the text before us, we depend on the secular powers of the translator to turn the formless void into light. Even the first three lines of the brief, nine-line poem illustrate that translation is far more complex an art than a simple mathematical process of replacing each word in Creole with its counterpart in English; the trot provided, while fascinating, is clearly lacking as a poem in English. presentation of the words with no clearer insights into the context behind them. Heaven is the instant of translation. Moving between tongues, translation acquires difference. It is so only by affirmation of a superficial convention that sees poorly and has established feudal hierarchies of value between overlord originals and vassal translations. Poetry in Translation, a unit created by Queens teacher Carol McCarthy, draws on the unique abilities of her multicultural classroom. We've been devouring your miniature poems in honor of National Poetry Month. Then, when you display your stolen wares, greater praise will await your deeds. Remember, this is not a contest — it's a community project — the point is not to win or lose or even to get your poem on the air. Direct access to the original: probably the most common form of translation of poetry is metatextual, and consists in a critical apparatus prepared for a poem – in the same language of the poem or in another language – allowing people not particularly proficient in that language to access an interpretation of the text through a clarification of the semantic values of the original. But as Octavio Paz has written, good poets are not necessarily good poet translators. Fidelity to the letter, preceding the word, makes an even better, higher form of faith. The linguistic problems include … Why not show preferences, to use Jorge Luis Borges' favorite word for choice, judgment, discrimination, and taste? One of the stumbling blocks when trying to study poetry is that it seems like a different world. The potter transforms the spirit of an old pot, the recollection of its shape, into a new pot. Translation is a zoo and a heavenly zion. With the informant scholar, the poet translates the poem. April isn't over yet. In a history and theory of translation, practice must be specifically documented, but I have made its example secondary. By: Natasha Sutton Williams Thursday 19th January 2017 Clare Pollard is a poet translator, journalist, teacher and poet in her own right.Her first collection of poems The Heavy-Petting Zoo was published by Bloodaxe Books when she was still at secondary school. Practice makes perfect, and exploring not only the practical aspect of a type of translation but also its theory is a good way to deliver a translation of quality. A translation dwells in imperfection, using equivalents and shunning mechanical replicas—which is the dream of literalists who believe in truth. Original work is never independent, nor even wholly original. ", Then, the trickiness of translation comes out to play. Old writers will not lose the centuries of their age when heard in modern diction. myillo/Getty Images Is it possible to translate poetry from one language into another without losing meaning? It gives us the other. In that instant the poem becomes everything or nothing. And be fair to the gardener who keeps them up. Kabbalists like meaningful letters. A Day in the Life of a Poetry Translator. They "descended from the terrible and august crown of God whereon they were engraved with a pen of flaming fire.". Poetry translation may be defined as relaying poetry into another language. Coleman says, "We don't have that opportunity for metaphor in English, so I did 'days' instead of 'time' in order to get at weather and also the passage of time.". It takes time, experience and mental effort to produce a good translation of a poem. They said: Don't go to the end of the Earth because your lengthening shadow will frighten you. "De nada a todo," Saint John of the Cross inserts into a concrete poem drawing. In Spanish, "tiempo" means both "time" and "weather." Readers of the original text read the language of their own time, unless the author, like Spenser, deliberately imitated an archaic mode. Enter the informant. We need it, for we still suffer under that early Babylonian God's edict of language dispersal. If a poet—and among the grand translators are Mary Herbert, Hölderlin, Pasternak, Rilke, Valéry, Lowell, Moore, Pound, Quasimodo, and Bishop—we are lucky. But do not rely on them to give you the end-all-be-all translation. We're still accepting submissions to Twitter with hashtag #NPRPoetry. A poet translator survives as a good confessed thief. Poetry is part of every country’s cultural heritage and should therefore be cultivated like a precious seed. "I approach translation even knowing that it can't quite be what it is in the original language," he says. Dr. Leal is first and foremost a writer, although he dabbled in some poetry translation prior to meeting Dr. Soler and learning more about the methods, theories, and terminology used by professional translators. In performance particularly, a poem’s meaning can fluctuate and change dependent on intonation, on the sympathies of the audience, on the mood of the speaker, the sounds of the surrounding words, the accent of the speaker, etc. With these reservations here are some general observations on the practice of the art of translating poetry. He uses a contemporary language but not so fearfully as to eliminate its contemporary scope and living history. I’m of the opinion that translation doesn’t end with the writer. Google's free service instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages. Even Latin grammarians and orators have troubles with poems and tend to Q them behind the eight ball. Think of a hilly field on a Greek island, with that rational light of the Mediterranean in which seven centuries before the common era Archilochos wrote about figs and wanton women and his own wild shameless sexuality. A translator operates in the unknown. It is absolutely free, all you have to do is provide a few details about your poetry translation … There it is the world of winged pythons; the earth there is ablaze with the fire they spit. Songs between window blinds and white cement.". Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland. The translator must gamble on gains to balance losses. "Poetry is what gets lost in translation," the American poet is often quoted as saying. As if I had heard these words of mine To choose the unknown path risks loss—and often brings gain. The translator is a writer. Rhyme is naturally pleasing to the ears and lends a sense of wholesomeness to words that are strung together. Give the art a name like paraphrase, imitation, or verse transfer, and the translation police will not arrest you. Untranslatable lines are natural meadows of translation and yield the best wild herbs. The translated poem should be read as a poem written in the language of the adopted literature, even if it differs because of its origin from any poem ever written in its new tongue. The orphan is Don Quijote de la Mancha in Chicago. When discussing the poet as translator, from time immemorial it has been the custom to start out by quoting Dryden. Horace and Jerome removed themselves from the literalism of the letter and condemned even the word in order to champion phrase and sense. Over the course of her long career, Eavan Boland emerged as one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. Although Antigone and Lear sometimes speak in exotic tongues, subverting God's rage against the monolingual builders of Babel writers still scrawl their words in a thousand scripts, pile them up on mounds of hope and futurity, awaiting translation. His poems with their sun in the time of the Dogstar—now modernized as fragments—are all preserved in the multiple trees in a Greek orchard on the afternoon hill. Language incessantly transforms itself, slowly like rust, quickly like conquest, and never, along the endless way of self-translation, remains the same. The port too will suggest in its name the conditions of the sea by which the ship reaches its destination. A translation is the first acknowledgement of a string of original Buddhist rebirths. Because the dream of capturing and stilling words must really be seen as an allegory for death, a bad joke, it is better to accept movement—translation—and live with peppy Proteus and Heraclitus, the two Greek jokers. In their old drawings we see a tree of life whose leaves are letters and a man whose body is covered at vital spots by the ten letters of the sefirot. The language lapses that inhibit an ideal interpretation can ultimately be "a creative, productive failure," he adds. 2 If that were the case, what would it mean? Therefore, a translation of a poem into a new language is an opportunity to attempt to realize the original (invisible) poem." A good translation is that in which the text in the target language accurately expresses the meaning, sense and intention of the writer of the source text in such a way that it sounds natural to the reader. But even when famous at home, the work comes into an alien city as an orphan with no past to its readers. So a paradox. Create a Literal Translation Read the entire poem once or twice to get a broad understanding of the storyline, characters and setting. Whether wonderful or monstrous, the version is always a version, another working and retelling. If not, a third person, a friendly and responsible human dictionary, can be an intermediary. Keep tweeting us your verses using the hashtag #NPRpoetry. If you would like to know more, you can ask for an instant document translation quote from the top menu. When different, it need not be humble and inferior. Don't eat a prickly pear for a peach and make unfriendly faces. A translation is a friendship between poets. Lexical shock renews weary language bones. When handsomely reborn through the word-giving voice of the translator, is the translation a form different from other literature? In rags, hand-me-downs, or dramatic black capes of glory, it is surprise, morning, a distinctive stranger. Before God created the earth and heaven, he created the book. Traditions of theme and form are altered by the infusion of poems from other languages, especially the impossible ones. Understanding the poetic experience is the proper object of the philosophy of poetry; moreover, understanding the social and moral value of poetry is also the proper object of the Here, the translator attempts to do an exact word-for-word translation of the poem, trying to phrase the piece so that both the overt and concealed meanings of the poem’s words still carry through, no matter how different they might sound when spoken aloud. In la nada the Spanish poet-saint found God. The Torah was "written with black fire on white fire, and is lying on the lap of God." It makes the unknown known. Instability—eternal transformation—may be uncomfortable, but it is best to live with it. Yet translation of poetry is conceivable. In many eyes translation resembles a museum reproduction of a Cycladic statue: it is beautiful but has no intrinsic value. As a writer of poetry, it’s one of the best ways to steer readers’ experience of language and different potential meanings. It is sometimes indistinguishable. The Poet as Translator. In a translation, without art there can be no friendship between poets. Would it mean that every moment of our lives here on Earth held a poem that we … When we look at a poem in a language unknown to us, we are looking helplessly into the formless void that puzzled God until he found the right words to translate chaos into form and light. I spend my days drawing waves and goodbyes. Poetry's features can be sound-based, syntactic or structural or pragmatic in nature. And good or bad, beauty or trash, ancient or modern, a joke lurks under the text. For example, "largest * in the world". Basically, poetry translation should be semantic translation for a poem is typically rich with aesthetic and expressive values. There are also some excellent dictionaries and phrase books. The Chinese call the method of the great Tang poets of working imaginatively while being bound by strictures "dancing in chains.". Coleman shares another poem from Laurel Katchatag. With lingo like "muktuk" and "tuttu," it's fair to say that some of her words — in the Inupiaq language of her native Alaska — ring unfamiliar to many: #NPRpoetryDreams of Dried salmonHerring eggsBlack muktukFresh tuttuWild akpiqs3000 miles awayJust an Iñupiaq in the city. The final result, however, can be truly brilliant and bring about something mesmerising that will last for centuries, just like the original poem. Translation is an art between tongues, and the child born of the art lives forever between home and alien city. "Maybe it can open up a new way for us to see what can happen in English and what can happen in Spanish, for me, or whatever the original language is.". Author: Gwerful Mechain Translation: Zoe Brigley Why not shake up English poetry with the sudden arrogant figure of Vladimir Mayakovsky, standing tall in his coalminer's cap, shouting his syllables out to the sky from the Brooklyn Bridge? If you wish to do that, devise an appropriate speech, forget the epithet writer, good luck, and count on nothing. Yet if you must kill and rob, if you must transform the past and correct and embellish it for your time, confess and praise your benefactor. Any ship of any description may be qualified to reach port, sailing across the sea of fidelity or the sea of license. Yet any way—the way of Kabbalah's letter, God's word, or Jerome's phrase and sense—works if the created poem is beautiful. The unlikely and impossible to translate are rich. transfer, but it is also a cultural transfer, hence poetry translation should take the cultural aspects of both the source language and the target language into account. Translation is also an art to be learned, even by poets. Yes. A translation dwells in imperfection, using equivalents and shunning mechanical replicas—which is the dream of literalists who believe in truth. A poetry translation project usually aims to publicize a poet or … The informant is a dictionary, not a poet, useful as a dictionary but risky as a poet. Keywords : English poetry, Arabic poetry, translation, Robert Frost, strategies. Translators are hardcore stealers, but unlike ordinary literary confidence men, the translator gets caught. The true counterfeit (an unattributed imitation or re-creation), which is other in sound and devices, may be invisible, go unrecognized, in order to pass on its own in the new mother language. For a translator, to be "honest" means that if he steals the original for his poem, as Chaucer did, or invents or omits passages from it, as the two Roberts, Lowell and Bly, have frequently done, he will declare the theft or omission openly, as the Roberts do. So all literature is translation and all translation is unique and therefore original. And mixing together languages is the reality for many people.". If you arrive where it is neither day nor night you'll be turned into stone while you are waiting. © Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038. It gives us the other. The skill of a translator poet is tested by strictures. Clichés in the original are often fresh in a new tongue, so give literal clichés a new life—especially those from the exotic languages. We want to create a space where listeners can share their poems and read the work of others. A good translation is a good joke. 'I am a ghost holding up the Earth' is an incredible line for any poem.". Such practice puts a poet on the hot seat. Modest designations will do—translation, version, paraphrase, metaphrase, retelling, imitation, or whatever. In the Zohar (the Book of Radiance), the infinite (the eyn sof) lies not in a stationary mass but in two forms of undulatory movement: darkness and light. Religion is God's bureaucracy.
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