Can Poetry Be Translated?

It's certainly worthwhile. How else would we ever read Homer, for example? Few, I would imagine, could handle the original language. How successful the new version is, of course, depends on the skills of the translator...

Is the translation equal to the original? No.

A very interesting question. Fitzgerald's first edition of his translation of Kayyam's Rubiyat was a huge success, but was widely criticized by Orientalists, who said it was not a faithful translation. He put out a second editon, mostly to show he could do the "correct" translation--and it was as dull as dishwater. In later editions, particularly the third and fifth, he returned to his earlier method, which was to provide in English a piece of poetry which while not an exacting translation, preserved the flow and grace and rhythm of the original (i'm taking his word for that, although any reader can judge the quality of the product as poetry in English). I've always loved his translations, and i think they constitute great poetry. Unable to read Farsi, i cannot comment on the accuracy, and frankly don't care.

The moving finger, having writ,
Moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line.
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

Well, a translator of poetry must be a poet himself. He/she must take a literal translation of the poem in foreign language and to write a new poem in his native tongue on the issue, while preserving rhythm, ethnicity and other sufficient features of the original poem. I have come across with translations of Shakespeare's sonnets and Burns's poems into Russian made by the Soviet poet Samuel Marshak; later I read the same things in the original language, and to my mind, the translator managed to keep both sound and spirit of the poems he translated (in spite of phonetical and semantical differences between English and Russian).
Russian translation of Edgar A. Poe's "Raven" made by Mrs. Lozinsky seems to very adequate as well.

I think it depends on the type of poetry as well. "Jabberwocky" or e.e. cummings, for example, would be harder to translate than more plot-driven works like Homer.

But, nevertheless, the adequate translation into Russian of "Jabberwocky" from the "Alice in Wonderland" exists, I have forgotten the name of the translator, unfortunately.

Interesting! I'd love to know how they did that. I'm thinking of not only words like "chortled" and "gallumphing", which Carroll invented but then became part of the English language, but nonsense words like "brillig", "slithy", and "gyre and gimble", which suggest certain things to English speakers. Were comparable nonsense words that suggested those same things to Russian speakers created? Etc.

Poetry can be visual and lyrical I think the imagery invoked through in words is more than a worthy enterprise it is, at least for me, a realization that I am not alone.

I am not a poet and do not write well but I love it when a poet links me to random thoughts through the use of words. Regarding interpretation, well that is the fun isn't it.

Sozobe, some "gibberish" Russian was used for these words.

To Homer and Omar Khayyat let me add Rumi and the long forgotten author of Beowulf...

Poetry depends on two things: sense and sound. You can translate the sense even by giving a prose rendering of the literal meaning of the original poem's words. But what is devilishly difficult is to convey the sound, the music, the STYLE of the original poem. I would think that, for example, Emily Dickinson would be very hard to translate because her voice is so quirky and her style is so unique. Ditto for Gerard Manley Hopkins. On the other hand, Robert Browning and Byron probbaly translate without too much difficulty.

I agree with steissd, poetry can only be translated by a poet. And then, it should be a poet who knows not only both languages, but both cultures.
Some of the best translations I've read are "modernized" versions of Classic authors, such as Ovid.
One of the reasons to learn a language is to be able to read their poetry in the original.
I, personally, can't stand Spanish translations of poems written in English or Italian, and prefer bilingual publications of poetry in languages I can read with a crutch, such as Portuguese or French.

There are some Czech and Polish poems I've read in English that I love. Are they better in their native tongues? Most likely. Are the translations good poems as well? I think so.

Going the other way around, though, it's hard to imagine someone matching Shakespeare's (to drag out the tired old warhorse) language in translation, and suspect that my unenthusiastic reaction to Lope de Vega in college probably had much to do with the inadequacy of translation. (But back to the original hand, Ranjit Bolt wrote a stellar translation of Tartuffe...)

Interesting point has not been brought up here--and that is the reliability of the translation. In l'Etranger, Mersault tells his employer that he is obliged to attend his mother's funeral, and then says: "C'est comme ça." Anyone conversant with French and the American usage of English would translate that as: "That's just the way it is." (As in, get over it.) I have read this more than once in French, but about 20 years ago, i read it for the first time in English. That English translation was, at that time, the only authorized version, you weren't going to find any other (don't know if the copyright has expired on it yet or not). That translator renders the phrase as: "There's nothing i can do about it." My point? Well, throughout the English version, Mersault is protrayed as something of a whiner, rather than the self-possessed and largely diffident character who comes through in Camus' original. I strongly suspect that the copyrighted translation was done by someone who not only did not understand Camus' philosophy as expressed through this character, but was somewhat hostile to it. For this reason, i go along with Fbaezer to the extent that i can read French comfortably, and always prefer to read something from such a source in the original. Sadly, i don't read any other languages with such facility (except Anglo-Saxon, for which there isn't a great body of literature).

Setanta, your Camus example (which you have cited before)

a) comes from prose, not poetry

and b) involves the correct translation of an idiomatic phrase...

two issues that have nothing to do with the question at hand, namely, is poetry translatable?

Experiencing the work of a poet through translation is only slightly better than experiencing reality by studying from inside a cave, the shadows projected from the real world outside.
(to borrow from Plato's metaphor)

Nevertheless, for those of us who don't understand the original author's language, it is that or nothing.

As I said on another thread, I love Stanley Kunitz' translations of Ana Akhmatova's poems.
How faithful are they to the originals? I don't know.

Rabindranath Tagore is one of the most famous examples of the negative answer to this question -- revered as master poet in his own language, little known in any other.

I like Setanta's point (and think it is entirely pertinent) that the translator's own biases may well get in the way.

The question I was asking was specifically about the risks and rewards of translating POETRY, not the prose of Albert Camus. And there is a world of difference between miscontruing an idiom (as the Camus translator evidently did) and translating with a built-in verbal bias which consistently prevents you from rendering accurately.

"Perhaps the most famous verse of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, and with good reason
- it is hard to think of any way in which it could possibly be improved.
That's one of the things I most like about short poems, actually - at
their best, they can attain a self-contained, gemlike perfection that
longer pieces are hard-pressed to match, and the Rubaiyat definitely take
their place among the best of the breed."

"And to think Fitzgerald was largely an unknown translator till the likes of
Swinburne and Wilde resurrected a copy from a second-hand bookshop..."

(notes from http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/545.html)

To me, the translation of poetry is a noble, if doomed attempt to resurrect a poet's full intent. As such, the interest raised by translation, especially one that is pleasing in its own right is not to be scoffed at. I expect that most any originating poet, were he or she alive, would welcome these attempts at understanding.

I like D'artgnan's point that every translator inevitably gives his or her own flavor to a work. It is alarming to think that a translator would not be sympathetic to the author.

The bilingual versions for languages that you can read "with a crutch" or the multiple translations in the same language are probably the best for getting an accurate, though inevitably flawed reflection of translated poetry.

My favorite poem (The Raven) was translated into Portuguese by a great poet (Machado de Assis).

The translation retains the rythym, mood and meaning of the original and even archaic equivalents for Poe's twisted vocabulary are included.