<Deleted User>
Poetry in translation
I'm studying the above module in the next semester and as my poetry is only limited to English and Urdu, I was wondering if anyone else on here speaks more than one language (writes in it too or can translate). I would really like to see other egs of translation and how it works, if at all, in poetry. Anyone? you can email me directly. It will help with my understanding, learning and development
Thank you
Thank you
Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:13 pm
L'amour Franglais
Bonjour Duck
Comment you? Like.
Je am Bill
et you?
Genevieve?
OK. Funny name for a lass.
Anyway John.
Voulez vous a beer avec me?
Vous est a bit of a joli lass vous.
Er! Bon tits.
Voulez vous snoggez moi?
Shovez votre gob ici.
Yeah!. Bloody bien
Je suppose un shag
ce n'est pas dans le questionne?
Non. Thought not.
Sorry Nabila. Couldn't resist it.
To try to be a little serious. No, I don't think translation really works in poetry. Let's face it, poetry is about the manipulation of language so that it does something different from prose. If you convey the meaning of a poem (assuming it has meaning) into another language the linguistic devices will be lost and you have prose broken into stanzas.
This is a highly controversial view with which many would disagree, but I have struggled to enjoy poetry in translation without much success and the people who sepak in its support seem usually to be talking rubbish or saying nothing much at all.
Bonjour Duck
Comment you? Like.
Je am Bill
et you?
Genevieve?
OK. Funny name for a lass.
Anyway John.
Voulez vous a beer avec me?
Vous est a bit of a joli lass vous.
Er! Bon tits.
Voulez vous snoggez moi?
Shovez votre gob ici.
Yeah!. Bloody bien
Je suppose un shag
ce n'est pas dans le questionne?
Non. Thought not.
Sorry Nabila. Couldn't resist it.
To try to be a little serious. No, I don't think translation really works in poetry. Let's face it, poetry is about the manipulation of language so that it does something different from prose. If you convey the meaning of a poem (assuming it has meaning) into another language the linguistic devices will be lost and you have prose broken into stanzas.
This is a highly controversial view with which many would disagree, but I have struggled to enjoy poetry in translation without much success and the people who sepak in its support seem usually to be talking rubbish or saying nothing much at all.
Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:50 pm
I should also say that I really have no right to comment because I can only speak English and that is rather limited.
Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:52 pm
Hmmm, tricky one, translation, because you don't want to alter the rhythm (taken care of by the fact that (if translating into a language wherein the vocabulary is extensive) there are many ways of saying the same thing ), but also you ned to reflect cultural differences in individual tastes by native speakers of the two different languages. One of my favourite German language poems is by Matthias Claudius - I will try and translate it underneath in a way that takes into account modern English parlance and keeps it characterful:
Viktoria! Viktoria! Der Kleine weisse zahn ist da.
Du, mutter, komm - und gross und klein
im haus - kommt und kuckt hinein
und seht den hellen weissen schein
Der zahn soll Alexander heissen.
Du liebes kind - Gott halt (?) ihn dir gesund
und geb (?) dir zaehne mehr in deinen kleinen mund
und immer was dafuer zu beissen
I put ?s where the verb endings seem incorrect.
Oh superb! Marvellous! A little white tooth has grown.
Dear, come here, and... EVERYONE,
come here - look there - in her mouth
and see the shiny bright white tooth
This tooth shalll be called Alexander.
My little love! God keep it in good health
and fill your little mouth with lots more teeth
and always food for them to bite on
As you can see, my attempt at translating the poem has lost the rhyme pattern. However, when I tried to copy the pattern, the English translation seemed contrived and didn't convey the sense of delight that the original in German was putting across. Can't remember the title of the poem though.
Viktoria! Viktoria! Der Kleine weisse zahn ist da.
Du, mutter, komm - und gross und klein
im haus - kommt und kuckt hinein
und seht den hellen weissen schein
Der zahn soll Alexander heissen.
Du liebes kind - Gott halt (?) ihn dir gesund
und geb (?) dir zaehne mehr in deinen kleinen mund
und immer was dafuer zu beissen
I put ?s where the verb endings seem incorrect.
Oh superb! Marvellous! A little white tooth has grown.
Dear, come here, and... EVERYONE,
come here - look there - in her mouth
and see the shiny bright white tooth
This tooth shalll be called Alexander.
My little love! God keep it in good health
and fill your little mouth with lots more teeth
and always food for them to bite on
As you can see, my attempt at translating the poem has lost the rhyme pattern. However, when I tried to copy the pattern, the English translation seemed contrived and didn't convey the sense of delight that the original in German was putting across. Can't remember the title of the poem though.
Sun, 11 Jan 2009 10:18 pm
<Deleted User>
Thanks DG - I only want serious comments back - no time wasting messages as I don't have time or want to waste brain energy - thanks mate ok to use in my notes or not? I will quote you . All your work
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:28 am
I've translated Appollinaire from the French several times. There's two kinds of translation: word for word and concept for concept, and every translation is somewhere between the two. Word of word never quite works, because you always miss the nuances of words, and the particular idioms sometimes even of a regional accent, if you stick too rigidly to it. Wheras concept for concept tends sometimes to the paraphrase rather than the translation.
Also, with the rhythm, you have to find an English equivalent. Greek, Latin and French poetry, for instance, have slighlty longer lines generally - 12 sylables rather than 10 (the "alexandrine" in French or the "heroic couplet in Greek/Latin.) I don't know what the regular metre is for Urdu poetry, but I guess they would have an equivalent. It doesn't translate well to English, where the regular metre is iambic pentametre. So for something written in, say, alexandrines, you might want to use pentametre. You need to find a rhythm that conveys the spirit of the original; alexandrines would be unusual in English, and would draw attention to themselves.
It's a difficult task, but actually doing it means that you get to have a closer understanding of another poetry. It's something I'd recommend to all poets to have a go at, even if the results are not great, at least as an exercise. It also gets us English poets away from that terribly insular superiority, when we realise that great poetry comes from all over the world.
Also, with the rhythm, you have to find an English equivalent. Greek, Latin and French poetry, for instance, have slighlty longer lines generally - 12 sylables rather than 10 (the "alexandrine" in French or the "heroic couplet in Greek/Latin.) I don't know what the regular metre is for Urdu poetry, but I guess they would have an equivalent. It doesn't translate well to English, where the regular metre is iambic pentametre. So for something written in, say, alexandrines, you might want to use pentametre. You need to find a rhythm that conveys the spirit of the original; alexandrines would be unusual in English, and would draw attention to themselves.
It's a difficult task, but actually doing it means that you get to have a closer understanding of another poetry. It's something I'd recommend to all poets to have a go at, even if the results are not great, at least as an exercise. It also gets us English poets away from that terribly insular superiority, when we realise that great poetry comes from all over the world.
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:09 pm
Yep, you're fine to use it in your notes, but I should point out that it is not a word-for-word translation, rather one that a) focuses on the emotional aspect of the poem and b) attempts to keep the prosody similar to the original.
The reasons for my deviations from the original text are a) it needs modernising - eg. Du liebes kind (You dear child) - Europeans don't really speak like that anymore, b) Cultural difference - eg. du Mutter kommt (you, mother, come) - in England these days, very few couples call refer to each other as Mum or Dad, although there was a spate of it in the seventies and eighties, c) Absurdities in translation - ex. 1 Viktoria! Viktoria! (Victory! Victory!), nobody would say that in this context - ex. 2 Komm' gross und klein im haus (come big and small in the house), ditto.
The reasons for my deviations from the original text are a) it needs modernising - eg. Du liebes kind (You dear child) - Europeans don't really speak like that anymore, b) Cultural difference - eg. du Mutter kommt (you, mother, come) - in England these days, very few couples call refer to each other as Mum or Dad, although there was a spate of it in the seventies and eighties, c) Absurdities in translation - ex. 1 Viktoria! Viktoria! (Victory! Victory!), nobody would say that in this context - ex. 2 Komm' gross und klein im haus (come big and small in the house), ditto.
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:56 pm
<Deleted User>
<Deleted User> (5763)
Isn't language about ideas?
Let's say five English speakers who have lived in England all their lives (and who have never heard another language) read a poem written in English, and that they are then asked to give their description of that poem. Each will give a different description according to their temperament, range of vocabulary, social background etc... .
Now let's say five native French speakers who are fluent in English read that same poem; each of them will give varying descriptions. But the chances are that the French speakers' description will vary from those of the English speakers even more, because their 'ideas' about the poem will be influenced by their mother tongue. Have I made any sense?
I am in the process of translating a poem by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore 'L'oreiller d'une petite fille' as part of a little personal project; Odds on that if 100 people did the same, the results would all be different because all our 'ideas' are different?
My point is that we ought not to pretend that a so-called 'accurate' translation can be made of any poem.
Let's say five English speakers who have lived in England all their lives (and who have never heard another language) read a poem written in English, and that they are then asked to give their description of that poem. Each will give a different description according to their temperament, range of vocabulary, social background etc... .
Now let's say five native French speakers who are fluent in English read that same poem; each of them will give varying descriptions. But the chances are that the French speakers' description will vary from those of the English speakers even more, because their 'ideas' about the poem will be influenced by their mother tongue. Have I made any sense?
I am in the process of translating a poem by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore 'L'oreiller d'une petite fille' as part of a little personal project; Odds on that if 100 people did the same, the results would all be different because all our 'ideas' are different?
My point is that we ought not to pretend that a so-called 'accurate' translation can be made of any poem.
Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:29 pm
Interesting observation Bill, but I think that it misses the central point.
Language is not about ideas. Language is the tool of communication by which ideas, and other things, are conveyed between human beings. Poetry is a creative use of language in which pleasure is induced in the reader, writer and listener by a beautiful use of language and/or the transmission of thoughts and emotions in a manner that is richer than if the same concepts had been delivered in prose.
Words don't have precise meanings and the uses of words are subtly different between different people. Because of this, as you rightly say, different nuances of meaning will always be drawn by different people reading or hearing something as complex as a poem.
If you take a sentence such as 'The door is shut', there is little scope for variance in its understanding and it could be translated into other languages without much risk of changing its meaning. Much more complex prose can be translated into other languages with a workably high degree of of faithful transfer of the contents of the piece such that a native reader of the new language will have a workably similar understanding of the text as a native reader of the original text. For this reason it is worthwhile to translate scientific, philosophical, political and many other pieces of work into other languages. There are limitations to this because different languages have wide differences in the richness of vocabulary in particular areas of human knowledge depending on the extent of historical attention that has been given to the subject area within the language concerned.
With poetry we are dealing with a work of art which uses language as its medium rather than paint, marble, camera or whatever. It doesn't need to be explained that paintings, sculptures and photographs cannot be translated into other languages, but people who have different cultures and languages than the artist are very likely to have a different range of understandings of the work than a similarly sized group of people who are from the same cultural and language background as the artist.
If a poem is translated there is a requirement to identify synonymous words and then to see whether the metaphor, simile, imagery, colloqialism, emotion and a host of other things have also been picked up. The use of synonymous words will immediately lose the metre, rhyme and rhythm which may be contained in the poem and will be an intrinisc part of it. Attempts to reproduce the original structure of the composition can never be anything like complete and will inevitably move away from all the other subtle components of meaning, emotion, etc. If the translator concentrates on being faithful to the content of the poem rather than its structure, the shape, rhythm and flow of the original language cannot be preserved.
Where a translator makes a serious attempt at reproducing everything contained in a poem in a new language they are not just doing a translation. What they are doing is writing a poem which they believe to have been what the original poet produced, but in a different medium. It is somewhat analogous, although not precisely so, to taking a watercolour and reproducing the painting in acrylic.
You are certainly right that it is not sensible to talk about 'accurate' translation of poetry. I am very sceptical about the value of translating poetry at all. I do recognise that great works can be brought to us, in part at least, which we would not otherwise be able to access. What should be recognised is that these are not just translations. They are poems written in a new language by a poet (regrettably this is usually a lesser poet than the writer of the original although in the case of people like Heaney and Beowolf that would be argued fairly strongly) who believes that their poem is a faithful rendition of what the original poet intended in their native tongue. I am pretty much a monoglot so I am not in a strong position to comment, but I am doubtful that this is often achieved.
Language is not about ideas. Language is the tool of communication by which ideas, and other things, are conveyed between human beings. Poetry is a creative use of language in which pleasure is induced in the reader, writer and listener by a beautiful use of language and/or the transmission of thoughts and emotions in a manner that is richer than if the same concepts had been delivered in prose.
Words don't have precise meanings and the uses of words are subtly different between different people. Because of this, as you rightly say, different nuances of meaning will always be drawn by different people reading or hearing something as complex as a poem.
If you take a sentence such as 'The door is shut', there is little scope for variance in its understanding and it could be translated into other languages without much risk of changing its meaning. Much more complex prose can be translated into other languages with a workably high degree of of faithful transfer of the contents of the piece such that a native reader of the new language will have a workably similar understanding of the text as a native reader of the original text. For this reason it is worthwhile to translate scientific, philosophical, political and many other pieces of work into other languages. There are limitations to this because different languages have wide differences in the richness of vocabulary in particular areas of human knowledge depending on the extent of historical attention that has been given to the subject area within the language concerned.
With poetry we are dealing with a work of art which uses language as its medium rather than paint, marble, camera or whatever. It doesn't need to be explained that paintings, sculptures and photographs cannot be translated into other languages, but people who have different cultures and languages than the artist are very likely to have a different range of understandings of the work than a similarly sized group of people who are from the same cultural and language background as the artist.
If a poem is translated there is a requirement to identify synonymous words and then to see whether the metaphor, simile, imagery, colloqialism, emotion and a host of other things have also been picked up. The use of synonymous words will immediately lose the metre, rhyme and rhythm which may be contained in the poem and will be an intrinisc part of it. Attempts to reproduce the original structure of the composition can never be anything like complete and will inevitably move away from all the other subtle components of meaning, emotion, etc. If the translator concentrates on being faithful to the content of the poem rather than its structure, the shape, rhythm and flow of the original language cannot be preserved.
Where a translator makes a serious attempt at reproducing everything contained in a poem in a new language they are not just doing a translation. What they are doing is writing a poem which they believe to have been what the original poet produced, but in a different medium. It is somewhat analogous, although not precisely so, to taking a watercolour and reproducing the painting in acrylic.
You are certainly right that it is not sensible to talk about 'accurate' translation of poetry. I am very sceptical about the value of translating poetry at all. I do recognise that great works can be brought to us, in part at least, which we would not otherwise be able to access. What should be recognised is that these are not just translations. They are poems written in a new language by a poet (regrettably this is usually a lesser poet than the writer of the original although in the case of people like Heaney and Beowolf that would be argued fairly strongly) who believes that their poem is a faithful rendition of what the original poet intended in their native tongue. I am pretty much a monoglot so I am not in a strong position to comment, but I am doubtful that this is often achieved.
Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:49 am
<Deleted User>
Good discussion - enjoyed reading it and it is opening up my own thoughts !
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:11 am
<Deleted User>
take a look at this - I believe it doesn't work - try to read it out aloud and you won't hear any rhythm or rhyme in the translations. You can hear the poetics in the original - it's all my own work by the way)
Koi jaldi mujhe is neend sey uthaye
Gum hu mein khayalo mein
Dard hey is neend mein,
Magar mazza bhi bohat aata hey
Someone quickly wake me from this dream
Lost am I in thought
There is pain in this sleep
But I enjoy it a lot too
Koi jaldi mujhe is neend sey uthaye
Gum hu mein khayalo mein
Dard hey is neend mein,
Magar mazza bhi bohat aata hey
Someone quickly wake me from this dream
Lost am I in thought
There is pain in this sleep
But I enjoy it a lot too
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:21 am
<Deleted User>
Long distance love
When you can’t sleep at night
and long to hold me tight,
remember I lie awake too.
When you see the moon,
I’m seven seas closer to you,
as I can see it too.
Jab tumhey raat ko neend na aye
aur meri baho meh rehna ho
yaad rakhna key meh be neendh ke bagair hu
Jab tumhe chand nazar aye
meh saath samundar paas hu
kui key mujhey bhi chaand nazar aata hey
In Urdu, you still can't hear the poetic structure - there is none, yet in the English it is neat and well formed and obvious.
When you can’t sleep at night
and long to hold me tight,
remember I lie awake too.
When you see the moon,
I’m seven seas closer to you,
as I can see it too.
Jab tumhey raat ko neend na aye
aur meri baho meh rehna ho
yaad rakhna key meh be neendh ke bagair hu
Jab tumhe chand nazar aye
meh saath samundar paas hu
kui key mujhey bhi chaand nazar aata hey
In Urdu, you still can't hear the poetic structure - there is none, yet in the English it is neat and well formed and obvious.
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:27 am