Translated Poetry

[Magpie]

I was wondering what other people thought about translated poetry. It may seem like an odd question but it isn't really. A while ago I used to read quite a lot of translated poetry such as Goethe and Pushkin and never even considered how different they might be to the originals but then I got to a point where I thought that poetry with rhyme was probably best avoided because of the obvious difficulties in translating it. That was before I knew anything about poetry, now I know still very little about poetry, but enough to know that all poetry is musical in so many different ways and the complexities in translating it accurately must be so much as to make it impossible. Even poems that don't rhyme still have a form of rhythm or they use alliteration, assonance and other sonic devices as a way to express their musical qualities.

I found this quote by Ezra Pound recently, "That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original."

He was one of the first poets to start urging other poets to translate poems because he knew how important it was that poems weren't translated by translators without any poetic inclination like a lot of early translations were. So to also add this fact that the translator needs to be as good a poet as the original poet with all the other reasons why a poem is so hard to translate I could start to wonder why anyone would want to read translated poetry. I don't wonder that of course because the answer is obvious, there are so many wonderful foreign language poets that it would be a shame to miss out. But how accurate a representation are we getting. From that Ezra Pound quote I get the feeling that the music must come second when translating. What do others think? Can anyone recommend good translations?

Part of what got me thinking about this again was a Rainer Maria Rilke poem that was posted somewhere on the net. 'The Panther' is quite a famous poem but this wasn't quite the same panther poem that I knew. I researched it a bit and found many many translations of this poem.



There's six of them together for easy comparison, they are all roughly the same with subtle differences. The translation that I knew originally is the W.D. Snodgrass translation which seems to stand out more uniquely than the others especially in the second stanza where he is the only one who mentions axis and orbit which to me indicates that there is no mention of axis and orbit in the original. But by mentioning these two terms he has implied a planet or a world which emphasises the fact that this cage is all of the panthers world. I think he expresses it better than all the other poems, so in some ways he comes closer to the original and its feel by moving away from its original words.

It's something I've thought about for a while, it would be good to hear other peoples thoughts about translated poetry.