Poetry Megathread: so much depends upon a little forums thread glazed with

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Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Stravinsky posted:

What are peoples opinions in regards to translations of poetry. I always have been wary of anything that was not originally written in English because poetry hinges on word choice. Especially so if you have a situation where a word does not really have a companion word in the language your translating to.

It takes a poet approximately as skilled in the "to" language as the original writer was in the "from" language. Ednay St. Vincent Millay has a lot of interesting thoughts on the subject in her introduction to her translation of Fleurs du Mal:

quote:

To translate poetry into prose, no matter how faithfully and even subtly the words are reproduced, is to betray the poem. To translate formal stanzas into free verse, free verse into rhymed couplets, is to fail the foreign poet in a very important way.

With most poets, the shape of the poem is not an extraneous attribute of it: the poem could not conceivably have been written in any other form. When the image of the poem first rises before the suddenly quieted and intensely agitated person who is to write it, its shadowy bulk is already dimly outlines; it is rhymed or unrhymed; it is trimeter, tetrameter, or pentameter'; it is free verse, a sonnet, an epic, an ode, a five-act play. To many poets, the physical character of their poem, its rhythm, its rhyme, its music, the way it looks on the page, is quite as important as the thing they wish to say; to some it is vastly more important. To translate the poetry of E.E. Cummings into the rhymed alexandrines of Moli�re, would be to do Mr. Cummings no service.

Yet this is precisely the sort of thing which is done in a majority of instances when poetry is translated from one language to another. The translator takes the poem, no matter what its form may be, and forces it into the meter and form to which he is most accustomed, the one in which he writes most easily. There are notable exceptions (John Payne and W.J. Robertson, for example, both of whom have translated into alexandrines and managed them very skillfully). But for the most part the translator -- and no wonder -- give himself every possible help and advantage at the outset; a French poet translating verse, no matter what its metrical scheme may be, into French, will, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, translate it into alexandrines; an English poet will translate alexandrines into pentameter. In Les Fleurs du Mal there are only two poems in lines of ten syllables -- Le L�th�, which opens this collection, and Le Portrait, which appears further on.

.. . . When George Dillon wrote me that he was translating some of Les Fleurs du Mal into English verse, and that he was using in every instance the meter and the form used by Baudelaire in the original poem, I was very much interested; this had always seemed to me the only way to go about such a task. It is true that the translator, who is hard put to it enough in any case to transpose a poem from one language into another without strangling it in the process, here takes upon himself an added burden; but he is more than rewarded when he finds that his translation, when read aloud directly after the original, echoes the original, that it is still, in some miraculous way, the same poem, although its words are in a different language. One impertinence at least, of the many impertinences almost necessarily involved in re-writing another person's poem, has not been committed: the poem has been pretty roughly handled, possibly, but its anatomy at least is still intact.

http://hectocotylus.blogspot.com/2009/06/edna-st-vincent-millay-baudelaire.html

Her translation(s) are good enough that I've had my copy of that collection deliberately stolen by a friend of mine, so that's probably a good sign. For an example from her translation, check the link here: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/129, the one listing George Dillon as author. When you compare the version keeping the original meter with the various other translations that didn't the difference is really striking.

I also really like the Black Marigolds collection of translated Asian poetry by E. Powys Mathers (quoted in Steinbeck's Cannery Row; Powys Mathers is also the translator of the Mardrus and Mathers edition of the complete, four-volume Arabian Nights). Mathers was a really interesting translator who sometimes invented his original sources out of whole cloth as an excuse to sell his own poetry as coming from a foreign land, but Black Marigolds is an actual (though somewhat free) translation of the Indian Chaurapanchasika.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/bilhana/bil01.htm

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Feb 13, 2014

# ¿ Feb 13, 2014 15:32

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Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Yeah, I was thinking about posting some Old English poetry but it seemed like the thread was trending more modern. I absolutely *love* that stuff. It's not too hard to teach yourself the pronunciations -- it takes a few weeks of practice and study but it's not anywhere near as utterly alien as it appears when you first look at a pagefull of "hwaet"'s. The anglo-saxon poets paid attention to the sound of what they were saying in a way modern poetry tends to drift away from.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2014 16:23

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

There's only so much of it. There's The Wanderer, Caedmon's Hymn, and Beowulf and a few other scraps, mostly biblical. The Boethius translation, I suppose? That's one reason it's so easy to learn -- you can read all of it in a few weeks of dedicated study, with time to practice pronunciation while you read. I haven't actually read the Pearl Poet but my understanding is it's far closer to old English than, say, Chaucer is, just because Chaucer happened to be writing in the London dialect that modern standardized English was mostly heavily influenced by.

As far as actually learning OE, the textbook I & my wife both used was Millward's Biography of the English Language and it was a useful introduction but it still might be hard to get the "ear" for the pronunciations right without actually listening to some recordings. It's useful for learning what the old-style letters correspond to and so forth though. Once you figure out what the letters stand for, reading the stuff is no harder than piecing together a latin passage out of modern roots, and from there the next step is getting the sound right. I mean, you won't turn yourself into the next Tolkien or anything but it's not hard to get enough for a basic appreciation.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 20, 2014

# ¿ Feb 20, 2014 18:28

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

e e cummings was pretty awesome. He's easy to dismiss as the gimmicky poet who didn't use punctuation but he's very much worth reading.

If you like cummings you might also like Gerard Manley Hopkins, though most of Hopkin's stuff is religious.

quote:

I CAUGHT this morning morning�s minion, king-
dom of daylight�s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate�s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,�the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sh�er pl�d makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Apr 19, 2014

# ¿ Apr 19, 2014 13:10

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Been reading a lot of Napoleonic War era stuff lately so this stuck in my head:

'What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I.'

Walter de la Mare, Napoleon

# ¿ Oct 20, 2014 13:43

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