1. Lecture 5: Poetry translation
Dr Jacob Blakesley

2. Outline Impossibility of translation (?) Poetry: definitions
Theories of poetry translation
Translating poetry
Greek (Homer)
Chinese (Du Fu)
Persian (Omar Khayyam)
Japanese (Basho)
English (Beowulf, Chaucer, Dickinson, Shakespeare)

3. George Steiner, 1975
‘No two speakers mean exactly the same thing when they use the same terms; or if they do, there is no conceivable way of demonstrating perfect homology. No complete, verifiable act of communication is, therefore, possible. All discourse is fundamentally monadic or idiolectic’.
George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford, 1975), 263.

4. David Bellos, 2011
‘Any thought a person can have, the philosopher Jerrold Katz argued, can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language; and anything that can be expressed in one language can also be expressed in another. What cannot be expressed in any human language (opinions vary as to whether such things are delusional or foundational) lies outside the boundaries of translation and, for Katz, outside the field of language, too. This is his axiom of effability. One of the truths of translation—one of the truths that translation teaches—is that everything is effable’.
David Bellos, Is that a fish in your ear? Translation and the meaning of everything (Faber and Faber, 2011), 153.

5. Ladmiral, 1979
‘Can one imagine another human activity, comparable in importance and, extent and continuity, see its existence denied in law, despite the facts observable daily? Will it be demonstrated that it is impossible for us to walk?’
Jean-Rene Ladmiral, Traduire (Paris: Payot, 1979), 85.

6. Poetry: definitions
Edgar Allen Poe: ‘I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty’.
William Wordsworth: ‘I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.
William Hazlitt: ‘Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life’.
Shelley: ‘Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred’.

7. Poetry: definitions
T. S. Eliot: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’.
Carl Sandburg: ‘Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes’.
Robert Frost: ‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation’.

8. Dante, 1307
‘E però sappia ciascuno che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si può della sua loquela in altra transmutare sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza ed armonia’.
Dante, Convivio

9. John Dryden, 1683
‘No man is capable of translating a poetry who, besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author’s language, and of his own’.
‘To be a thorough translator, he must be a thorough poet’.
Dryden, ‘Preface concerning Ovid’s Epistles’

10. P. B. Shelley, 1821
‘It were as wise to cast a violent into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed or it will bear no flower – and this is the burden of the curse of Babel’.
Shelley, The Defense of Poetry

11. Robert Browning, 1877
‘I should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language’.
Browning, preface to Agamemnon

12. Ezra Pound, 1917 ‘There are three kinds of poetry’:
Melopoeia: ‘wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property’
Phanopoeia: ‘which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination’
Logopoeia: ‘the dance of the intellect among words’

13. Ezra Pound, 1917
Melopoeia: ‘practically impossible to transfer or translate it from one language to another, save perhaps by divine accident, and for half a line at a time
Phanopoeia: ‘can…be translated almost, or wholly, intact’
Logopoeia: ‘does not translate’; ‘you may or may not be able to find a derivative or an equivalent’
Pound, ‘How to read’

14. Paul Valéry, 1944
‘Where poetry is concerned, fidelity to meaning alone is betrayal’
Paul Valéry, Variations sur les Bucoliques

15. Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1946
‘La traduzione è la prova del fuoco di quanto [la poesia] sia individuale e inimitabile. Non è traducibile il ritmo […] Non è traducibile la qualità sillabica […] Non è traducibile il contenuto […] Non è traducibile infine né la forma né lo stile, in cui tutto l’altro s’assomma, si fonde e vive, e si fa commovente’.
Giuseppe Ungaretti, “Poeta e uomini,” in Vita d’un uomo: Saggi e interventi, ed. Mario Diacono and Luciano Rebay (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 739.

16. Eugenio Montale, 1956
“Fedele o infedele che sia, una traduzione è sempre un’altra cosa; può essere anche migliore dell’originale, ma è diversa.”
Cit. in Mario Picchi, “Del tradurre,” La Fiera Letteraria, June 3, 1956, 6.

17. Roman Jakobson, 1959
Poetry is ‘by definition untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible’.
Jakobson, ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’

18. Robert Lowell, 1962
Strict metrical translators still exist. They seem to live in a pure world untouched by contemporary poetry. Their difficulties are bold and honest, but they are taxidermists, not poets, and their poems are likely to be stuffed birds…I believe that poetic translation—I would call it an imitation—must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and rightness of hand as an original poem’.
Robert Lowell, Imitations

19. Vladimir Nabokov, 1964
‘In transposing Eugene Onegin from Pushkin’s Russian into my English I have sacrificed to completeness of meaning every formal element including the iambic rhythm, whenever its retention hindered fidelity. To my ideal of literalism I sacrificed everything (elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar) that the dainty mimic prizes higher than truth. Pushkin has likened translators to horses changed at the posthouses of civilization. The greatest reward I can think of is that students may use my work as a pony’.
Nabokov, Foreward to Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse

20. Edoardo Sanguineti, 1979
Devo insistere […] che nella traduzione, piaccia o non piaccia, non c’è realmente altro locutore che il traduttore.” The translator moves from being a medium to being the original author: “Il traduttore [...] traditore travestito, quello è il nostro contemporaneo.”
Sanguineti, “Il traduttore, nostro contemporaneo,” 185.

21. Franco Buffoni, 2008
‘Ci sono due grandi malattie che occorre sempre tentare di debellare: l’idea che la traduzione possa essere la riproduzione di un testo; e l’idea che sia una ricreazione’. 


22. Categories of poetry translation
Mimetic translation: same or formally similar
Analogical translation: functionally equivalent
Organic translation: content-derivative
Phonemic translation: reproducing sound
Prose translation: in prose, not verse
Imitation / Adaptation
A. Lefevere, Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint (1977); J. Holmes, Translated! papers on literary translation and translation studies (1988)

23. Mimetic translation
Translation written in same or formally similar meter
“Optimistic” as regards cross-cultural communication
Criticized as a “very rigorous straightjacket imposed on the target text”

24. Mimetic translation
‘Meters in verse are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted…they cannot be replaced by each other and especially not by free verse’.
Joseph Brodsky

25. Examples of mimetic translation
Translating Petrarch’s 11-syllable sonnets into 11-syllable English sonnets.
Translating Italian sonnet (2 quatrains and 2 tercets) into 2 quatrains and 2 tercets, and not translating into three quatrains and a couplet (English sonnet)

26. Analogical translation
Functionally equivalent or prestigious meter
Translating Petrarch’s hendecasyllable verse into English iambic pentameter

27. Organic translation
Deep in the mountain wilderness Where nobody ever comes Only once in a great while Something like the sound of a far off voice, The low rays of the sun Slip through the dark forest, And gleam again on the shadowy moss. [Wang Wei, 4 verse poem, translated by Kenneth Rexroth]

28. Prose translation
I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of Troy and came to Italy to the shores of Lavinium; and a great pounding he took by land and sea at the hands of the heavenly gods because of the fierce and unforgetting anger of Juno.
David West, 1990

29. Prose translation
‘to attempt…a translation of a lyric poem into prose, is the most absurd of all undertakings, for those very characters of the original which are essential to it, and which constitute its highest beauties, if transferred to a prose translation, become unpardonable blemishes.
A. Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation

30. Phonemic translation (Catullus 70)
Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat. dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua. (Catullus) No one my woman says would want to marry More than me, not even if Jupiter himself asked. She says: but a what a woman tells a passionate lover Should be written on wind and in rapid water. [literal translation] Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all whom but me, none see say Jupiter if she petted. Dickered: said my love air could be o could dickered a man too in wind o wet rapid a scribble reported in water. [Louis and Celia Zukofsky]

31. Imitation Pierre Ronsard (1578) W. B. Yeats (1893)
Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant:
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.
Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,
Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.
Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os:
Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos:
Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,
Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.
Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain:
Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.
When you are old and gray and full of sleep  
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,  
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look  
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;  
How many loved your moments of glad grace,          
And loved your beauty with love false or true;  
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,  
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.  
And bending down beside the glowing bars,  
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled   
And paced upon the mountains overhead,  
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

32. Yeats v. Montale W. B. Yeats Eugenio Montale
When you are old and gray and full of sleep  
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,  
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look  
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;  
How many loved your moments of glad grace,          
And loved your beauty with love false or true;  
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,  
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.  
And bending down beside the glowing bars,  
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled   
And paced upon the mountains overhead,  
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Quando tu sarai vecchia, tentennante
tra fuoco e veglia prendi questo libro,
leggilo senza fretta e sogna la dolcezza
dei tuoi occhi d’un tempo e le loro ombre.
Quanti hanno amato la tua dolce grazia
di allora e la bellezza di un vero o falso amore.
Ma uno solo ha amato l’anima tua pellegrina
e la tortura del tuo trascolorante volto.
Cùrvati dunque su questa tua griglia di brace
e di’ a te stessa a bassa voce Amore
ecco come tu fuggi alto sulle montagne
e nascondi il tuo pianto in uno sciame di stelle.

33. Choice of target form Literary system and tradition of target language
Aesthetics of translator
Editorial policy
Translation waves
Prestige of source language, author, text, genre
Historical and political situation

34. Target language changes
Vocabulary (slang, idioms, cliches)
Grammar, syntax
Cultural, historical, literary references
Poetics, literary tradition
“Every generation needs a new translation”
Lydia Davis

35. Difficulties in translating poetry
Its physical shape
Its use of inventive language
Its sound and structure
Its openness to different interpretations
Its demand to be read non-pragmatically

36. Types of compensation
compensation in kind: “making up for one type of textual effect in the ST by another type in the TT”;
compensation in place (such as “using different sounds in different places [in the text]”)
compensation by merging (e.g., translating two French terms into one combined English term)
compensation by splitting (e.g., translating one French word into two English words)
Sandor Hervey and Ian Higgins, Thinking Translation: A Course in Translation Method: French to English (London: Routledge, 1992)

37. Compensation (Vinay and Darbelnet)
‘one of the major concerns of translators is to ensure that the translation preserves the content of the original without losses; any loss, regardless of whether it is of meaning or tone should be recovered by the procedures of compensation’.
Vinay and Darbelnet, Comparative Stylistics of French and English (1995)

38. Compensation (Vinay and Darbelnet)
“the stylistic translation technique by which a nuance that cannot be put in the same place as in the original is put at another point of the phrase, thereby keeping the overall tone.”
Vinay and Darbelnet

39. Compensation (Steiner)
‘The final stage or moment in the process of translation is that which I have called ‘compensation’ or ‘restitution.’ The translation restores the equilibrium between itself and the original, between source-language and receptor-language which had been disrupted by the translator’s interpretative attack and appropriation. The paradigm of translation stays incomplete until reciprocity has been achieved, until the original has regained as much as it has lost’.
George Steiner, After Babel (1975)

40. Compensation (Steiner)
‘Translation fails where it does not compensate, where there is no restoration of radical equity. The translator has grasped and/or appropriated less than is there. He traduces through diminution. Or he has chosen to embody and restate fully only one or another aspect of the original, fragmenting, distorting its vital coherence according to his own needs or myopia’.
George Steiner

41. Compensation (Newmark)
‘compensation is the procedure which in the last resort ensures that translation is possible.’
Peter Newmark, About Translation (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 1991), 144.

42. Interlingual poetry translation

43. Iliad Dactylic hexameter (stress + 2 unstresses): quantitative meter
Meter based on quantity, not on stress
No rhymes
‘This is the | forest pri | meval. The | murmuring | pines and the | hemlocks’
Four ‘feet’ either dactyls or spondees, fifth dactyl foot, and then either a spondee or trochaic foot
Caesura is in the 3rd or 4th foot

44. Iliad
Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε δαῖτα· Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

45. Iliad, read by Stanley Lombardo

46. Literal translation of Iliad
Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή·
The wrath, sing, Goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles, Destructive, which placed many griefs on the Achaeans, Sent forth many valiant souls of heroes To Hades, made them prey for all dogs and vultures. And the will of Zeus was done.

47. Types of translation of the Iliad
Rhyming 14 syllable verses: G. Chapman (1614)
Rhyming heroic couplets: A. Pope (1720)
Spenserian stanzas: P. Worsley (1868)
Hexameter: R. Merrill (2007)
Sonnets: F. Light (2009)
Loose iambic pentameter: R. Fagles (1990)
Blank verse: W. Cowper (1791)
Prose: E. V. Rieu (1950)
Imitation: C. Logue (2002) and A. Oswald (2011)

48. John Keats, 1816 Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; 
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’

49. Ballad meter and heroic couplets
Rhyming 14 syllable verses (ballad meter)
Achilles’ bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse, that imposd
Infinite sorrowes on the Greekes, and many brave soules losd
From breasts Heroique—sent them farre, to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their lims to dogs and vultures gave. [G. Chapman]
Iambic pentameter heroic couplets
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain… [A. Pope]
Classical scholar Richard Bentley: ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer’

50. Hexameter
Sing now, goddess, the wrath of Achilles the scion of Peleus,
Ruinous rage which brought the Achaians uncounted afflictions;
Many the powerful souls it sent to the dwelling of Hades,
Those of the heroes, and spoil for the dogs it made of their bodies,
Plunder for all of the birds, and the purpose of Zeus was accomplished—
R. Merrill, 2007

51. Sonnet form O Goddess, chant it out, the choler grown
In Peleus’ son, aggrieved Achilleus,
Simply deathful, sheerly doleful for
Achaians; wholly numerous warrior souls
It sent to Hades but to dog-throngs down
By Troy and divers birds the corporal dead
In piles it highly proffered, all for prey,
And Zeus’s will thus came to pass outright,
As this began when first Atreyedes,
Monarch of chiliad-lancers, and Achilleus, bright
With God, in breaching closed like enemies.
Which of the Gods to rupture in a fight,
Provoked them? Leto’s son, whom Zeus begot,
For he a fulsome plague on Argives brought.
Frederick Light, 2009

52. Loose iambic pentameter
Loose 5 beat line
‘Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
Murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
Hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
Great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
Feasts for the dogs and birds,
And the will of Zeus was moving towards its end’.
Robert Fagles, 1990

53. Prose
‘Anger—sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that accursed anger, which brought the Greeks endless sufferings and sent the mighty souls of many warriors to Hades’.
E. V. Rieu

54. Imitation ‘Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet’.
Christopher Logue, War music: an account of books 1-4 and of Homer's Iliad (2002)

55. Imitation ‘The first to die was PROTESILAUS
A focused man who hurried to darkness
With forty black ships leaving the land behind
Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs
Where the grass gives growth to everything’.
Alice Oswald, Memorial: A version of Homer’s Iliad (2011)

56. Bowdlerisation
‘Bowdlerisation, in fact, was a major strategy of both Neoclassical and Romantic translators, all of whom justified the omissions and manipulations that were designed to make translated classical texts fit in with the current ideological representation of propriety—the ‘licentiousness’ of Greek and Latin authors was a recurring problem’.
John Gilmore, ‘Tibullus and the British Empire: Grainger, Smollett and the Politics of Translation in the Mid-18th Century’

57. Bowdlerisation Bowdlerisation named after Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825)
He published The Family Shakespeare
In Hamlet, Ophelia accidentally drowns and doesn’t commit suicide

58. Antiquated style
‘The entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that of a translator ought to be as much Saxon-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning’
F. W. Newman

59. T’ang poetry: In China during Tang dynasty, 618-907
Great practitioners:
Li Bai (‘poet-immortal’)
Du Fu ( ‘poet-sage’)
Wang Wei (‘poet-Buddha’)

60. Middle Chinese language
Not inflected
No required indicators of subject
No required indicators of tense
No required indicators of plurality

61. Form of Regulated Verse (Wuyan Lüshi)
8 verses
5 characters per verse (40 total)
Mandatory alternation of rhyming and non-rhyming couplets
Tripartite structure – beginning, middle, end
Four stage progression: qi (begin), cheng (continue), zhuan (make a turn), he (conclude)

62. Metrical patterning
Middle Chinese characters have either level tone (flat) or oblique tones (falling-rising, short falling, and entering)
Maximum tonal contrast between two lines of a couplet
All rhyming words must be in level tones
Five characters means an ‘odd one out’

63. Du Fu, ‘Spring scene’ 感 時 花 濺 淚 (feel) (time) (flower) (shed) (tear)
感 時 花 濺 淚
(feel) (time) (flower) (shed) (tear)
恨 別 鳥 驚 心
(Hate) (separation) (bird ) (startle) (heart)
I feel about this wretched time so badly that even flowers make me shed tears.
I hate separation so much that a bird’s call startles my heart.
Feeling affected by the seasonal flowers, I shed my tears.
Hating to see the straying bird, my heart is startled by its call.
As I feel the wretched time, flowers shed tears.
As I hate separation, birds are startled in their hearts.
Feeling the wretched time, flowers shed tears.
Hating separation, birds are startled in their hearts.
Feeling time—flowers shed tears.
Hating separation—a bird startles the heart.

64. Omar Khayyam,
Rubai: four hemistiches, each hemistich 5 moras
Monothematic and epigrammatic genre
Rhyming scheme AAAA or AAxA
Specific metrical pattern, usually 13 syllables
Khayyam most famous as a mathematician
His Rubaiyat were philosophically skeptical

65. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1893) 1st translation of Khayyam in 1859
AABA rhyming quatrains
Iambic pentameter
‘Epicurean pathos’; ‘savage against Destiny’

66. Orientalism
‘It is an amusement to me to take what Liberties I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little Art to shape them…Their Religion and Philosophy is soon seen through and always seem to me cuckooed over like a borrowed thing, which people, once having got, don’t know how to parade enough’.
Edward Fitzgerald, Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. 2, p. 261

67. Omar Khayyam 447 editions [WW1] Omar ‘dining clubs’
Omar ‘tooth powder’
‘During the war, dead soldiers were found in the trenches with battered copies tucked away in their pockets’ (

68. Omar Khayyam (FitzGerald)
One moment in Annihilation’s Waste One Moment of the Well of Life to taste – The Stars are setting and the Caravan Starts for the Dawn of Nothing – oh, make Haste!

69. Omar Khayyam (FitzGerald)
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the Dust descend; Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and – sans End!

70. Haiku
Haikai no renga (comic linked verse) developed in the 16th century
Developed in contrast to formal renga, which prohibited nonelegant words
Two types of haikai: linked verse (renku) and starting verse (hokku [later called haiku]).

71. Haiku
Haikai verse used everyday language (referring also to sexuality), Buddhist expressions, words of Chinese origin.
Hokku [haiku] established as a genre by Basho [ ] and his disciples.
[17 moras]
The use of seasonal words and cutting words

72. Basho, The Narrow Road to The Deep North (1694)
夏草や 兵どもが 夢の跡 [Natsugusa ya / tsuwamono-domo ga / yume no ato] Natsugusa ya [Summer grass(es) + (caesura) ] tsuwamono-domo ga [warriors + (possessive)] yume no ato [dream + (possessive) + aftermath]

73. Natsugusa ya / tsuwamono-domo ga / yume no ato
Cutting (caesura) word: ya
Season word: natsugusa [summer grass]
Gloss translation
Summer grass:
Warriors’
Dreams’ aftermath

74. Natsugusa ya / tsuwamono-domo ga / yume no ato
ato = mark/trace, ruin, aftermath
yume = dream, ambition, glory, illusion
Summer grasses are the ‘marks/traces’ and ‘ruins’ and ‘aftermaths’ of ‘dreams’ and ‘illusions’

75. Basho, The Narrow Road to The Deep North (1694)
Haiku generally written in hiragana (Japanese characters)
Basho here uses 4 Chinese characters (kanji), two of which, grass and dream, share one key component
夏草や 兵どもが 夢の跡
As though the grass and dream therefore were the same (Francois Jost)

76. Haiku in English 1 line Summer grass: where the warriors used to dream
[Sato, 1978]
2 lines
Ah, summer grasses wave! The warriors’ brave deeds were a dream!
[Asatoaro Miyamori, 1933]
3 lines Ah! Summer grasses All that remains Of the warriors’ dreams [R. H. Blyth, 1949] 4 lines A thicket of summer grass Is all that remains Of the dreams and ambitions Of ancient warriors [Yuasa, 1966]

77. Rhyme in haiku translations
Rhyme Asleep within the grave The soldiers dream, and overhead The summer grasses wave. (Porter, 1911) --- A mound of summer grass: Are warrior’s heroic deeds Only dreams that pass? (Britton, 1974)

78. Intralingual poetry translation

79. Periods of English 700-1066: Old English 1150-1484: Middle English
Beowulf
: Middle English
Geoffrey Chaucer
: Early Modern English
Shakespeare
1700-today: Modern English

80. Beowulf

81. Beowulf (8th – 11th century)
Hwæt! Wé
Gárdena in
géardagum
Lo! We
spear Danes (royal Danish family) In
olden days,
Þéodcyninga,
þrym
gefrúnon·
Of tribe-kings
(the) glory
heard hú ðá
æþelingas
ellen
fremedon.
how
the
(princes)
Brave (deeds)
did

82. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387-1400)
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour; When April with its sweet-smelling showers Has pierced the drought of March to the root, And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid By which power the flower is created;

83. Canterbury Tales

84. Shakespeare, King Lear (1606)
[Edmund]: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

85. Shakespeare: original and translation
Modern-day translation
[Edmund]: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
This is a classic example of the idiocy of the world: when we’re down and out — often because of our own excesses — we put all the blame on the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if they forced us to be bad, or the heavens compelled us to be villainous or stupid. As if we become thieves and traitors according to astrological signs or obey planetary influences to become drunks, liars, and adulterers! As if some universal power pushed us into evil deeds! What a sneaky trick it is for lustful mankind to blame our horniness on some star! My father and mother coupled when the demonic moon was descending, and I was born under the Big Dipper, so it’s inevitable that I’m rude and oversexed. Christ! I would have been what I am even if the most virginal star in the heavens had twinkled at my conception.

86. Shakespeare Sonnet 116 Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love 
Which alters when it alteration finds, 
Or bends with the remover to remove. 
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 
It is the star to every wand'ring bark, 
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. 
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 
If this be error and upon me prov'd, 
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

87. Shakespeare Original Pronunciation: David and Ben Crystal
(5:50)

88. Literary prose
Lecture 6

89. Outline Genres of literary prose
Book clubs / assembly-line translation
Retranslations
Translator prefaces/notes
Case study
Publishing translated detective fiction in Nazi Germany

90. Genres Historical novel Bildungsroman Philosophical fiction
Romance novels
Science fiction novel
Western
Crime fiction
Legal thriller
Children’s literature
Prosimetrum
Graphic novel

91. Historical novel

92. Mantel, Wolf Hall
Names, titles, forms of address (Henry VIII -> Hendrik?)
Administrative/legislative bodies, offices, and measures
Material and social culture
Historical events and origin stories
Religious culture
Foreign language elements
Quotations

93. Mantel, Wolf Hall
‘the overwhelming majority of references in Wolf Hall were either borrowed (particularly in the case of proper names, transparent references pertaining to material or social culture, and foreign language quotations), translated literally (particularly in the case of government and household positions), or translated with an established equivalent (particularly elements of religious culture and measurements)’.
Suzanne de Jong, ‘The Translation of Cultural References in Historical Fiction: a case study of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall’

94. Bildungsroman David Copperfield (Dickens)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
Goodbye Columbus (Roth)

95. Bildungsroman
‘realization of the protagonist’s identity through his integration into society and its values’
‘a young male protagonist who, in the course of his story, gets his girl and a position in the world, marries and becomes a philistine like everyone else’

96. Philosophical fiction
Voltaire, Candide
Tolstoy, War and Peace
Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

97. Philosophical fiction
Type of translator
Target culture
Philosophical concepts
Goodness, morality, beauty
Religious concepts
God, devil, etc.

98. Grand Inquisitor

99. Philosophical fiction
‘There is one difference between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In Dostoevsky, the narrator would be a person, a character. In Tolstoy, it’s Tolstoy’.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, ‘The art of translation’, The Paris Review

100. Romance novels
‘Boy meets girl, the two overcome obstacles, happy ending’
‘emotions translate easily’
‘Women’s fiction authors are either British or North American’ (Elisabetta Povoledo)

101. Romance novels
‘I don’t think that military and American uniforms are popular in the translation market’ (editor of Harlequin’s British imprint)
In France, 12 million romance novels sold yearly – all translations
German writers cannot use their own names
More than 160 million books a year in 25 languages

102. Science fiction American author of science fiction, Wayne Mark Chapman
Best selling science fiction in Hungary
Chapman’s home in New Hampshire, published by Pengdragon Publishing in London.

103. Westerns
USA
Setting
Ideology (racism)

104. Crime fiction
‘the central engagement with what, who , and why a particular behaviour or action is deemed deviant gives insight into the structures and ideologies of power and is indicative of cultural and societal anxieties at a particular time in a particular culture’.
Karen Seago

105. Conan Doyle: A scandal in Bohemia
Late 19th century London
Horses and carriages
Telegrams
Metric system
The narrator is not Sherlock Holmes, but Watson

106. Legal thrillers
Legal systems
Legal terminology
Definitions of crime

107. Children’s literature
Elena Ferrante,
The Beach at Night
(2016)
[La spiaggia di notte,
2007]

108. Ferrante, Beach at night
Elena Ferrante’s wondrous, newly translated picture book, “The Beach at Night,” is going to shock many Americans, especially those who might want to read it to young children. In Europe, darker picture books are common. Presumably just as the children of Europe willingly eat escargots and tripe stew at dinnertime, they fall asleep to picture books with titles like “My First Nightmare” and “A Visit From Death.” So Ferrante’s story of a lost doll’s utterly terrifying night at the beach…didn’t cause a stir when it was published in Italy in But it will very likely be a different story here. The audio publisher has classified the book, read by Natalie Portman, as for adults. First of all, there is an expletive in the book. That will not go over well with libraries and schools, not to mention with most American parents of younger children’.
Maria Russo, ‘Elena Ferrante’s Picture Book Embraces the Dark Side’, New York Times

109. Ferrante, Beach at night
Open your maw
I’ve got shit for your craw
Drink up the pee
Drink it up for me

110. Translation of children’s literature
Cultural context adaptation
Ideological manipulation
Dual readership
Features of orality
Relationship between text and image
Cecilia Alvstad.

111. Prosimetrum Petronius’ Satyricon 1001 Nights Dante’s La Vita Nuova
Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North

112. Prosimetrum – Vita Nuova
Mixture of poetry and prose
Artistic and technical competency of translator

113. Graphic novel

114. Graphic novels and comics
‘the study of translated comics may provide useful insights into an understanding of translation as a complex process of intercultural communication, involving quite a few people and much more than simply the replacement of written text in speech balloons’.
Federico Zanettin, ‘Comics in translation studies’

115. Maus reception Swastika (Germany, Russia) Pigs (Poland)
Apartheid (South Africa)

116. Clube de Livro book club
1) No ‘sub-standard language’ – standard Portuguese
2) No polyphonic elements – French, poems, puns, rhymes, etc.
3) Bowdlerization – sexual references eliminated, as well as scatological references
4) Religious censorship, satires of the Catholic Church cut
5) Political influence: ‘Red House’ -> ‘Yellow house’
6) Paternalistic: footnotes explain classical references, difficult words; warn against drinking alcohol and bad eating habits
J. Milton, Translating popular culture

117. Collaborative translation
Lack of ‘sacredness of the author’
Translations collaborative: assembly line
Standardization of theme, language, style, size
Commercial strategies adapting for various readerships: female readers (Pride and Prejudice), children (Moby Dick)
No name of translator, or a pseudonym

118. Collaborative translations
Deadlines are more important than correct text – Virginia Wolff, George Elliott, etc.
Translation of William Gibson’s Count Zero: a character Ramirez is erroneously called by the author ‘Rodriguez’. Hungarian translation notes: ‘(!!! Error in original!!!)’. This is printed in the actual translation.

119. Retranslations Source texts change over time
Difference between revision and retranslation
Often arbitrary label of revision/retranslation
Often hybrid texts of both revised and retranslated passages
Translations for different markets (Canada, France; Spain, Latin America)
Passive v. active retranslations (Pym)
Cheaper to recycle already published translation than commission a new translation
‘Special translations’, Scrupulously revised’ -> ‘enormous cuts
Kaisa Koskinen & Outi Paloposki

120. Retranslation hypothesis; ageing; hot and cold translations
Antoine Berman: first translations can never be great translations (always domesticating)
Research shows this not to be entirely valid
Reviewers often claim translations age – but there are other reasons retranslations exist
Hot, contemporary translations v. cold, more knowledgeable translations

121. Publishers
Some publishers don’t list translators’ names on book covers – Faber, House of Anansi Press (Canada): ‘It’s an acknowledgment that it’s hard to get a readership to embrace a book that’s translated. The more we talked to readers and booksellers the more we realized that [translation] is a strike against the book in the marketplace’.

122. Translation prefaces
‘The translator is the link between the original text and the translation, and for anyone who is interested in translations and their quality, prefaces might at best offer a good starting point—perhaps a key to the translated text or a window on the world of the translator’ (Hartama-Heinonen)

123. Translator notes
‘Such self-presentations will indicate that the language of the translation originates with the translator in a decisive way, but also that the translator is not its sole origin a translator’s originality lies in choosing a particular foreign text and a particular combination o dialects and discourses from British and American literature in response to an existing cultural situation. Recognizing the translator as an author questions the individualism of current concepts of authorship by suggesting that no writing can be mere self-expression because it is derived from a cultural tradition at a specific historical moment’ (Venuti)

124. Translators’ notes
‘translators’ notes are often written in apology, as asides, endnotes or footnotes, introductions or afterwards, rather than communications from the space-between’ (Carol Maier, 1995)

125. Acknowledgment of translations
Rodney Troubridge, fiction buyer for Waterstone’s: ‘[Publishers] want people to assume that everything’s written in English’

126. 1945-, English translations of fiction
810 books
80% no prefaces
10% prefaces, but not about translation
10% prefaces discussing translation

127. Translator prefaces
Prefaces explicitly dealing with translation were about fiction translated from Arabic, Catalan, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Serbo-Croat.

128. Translator prefaces
Foregrounding differences of cultures and languages
Promoting understanding of the source culture
Promoting understanding of the translator’s role and interventions
Helping critics assess the quality of the translation
Useful as process documentation

129. Errors?
Some translators correct the errors, without silently or with the author’s encouragement
Others don’t correct

130. Lowe-Porter translator of Mann
Her translation could ‘not lay claim to being beautiful, though in every intent it is deeply faithful’ (Lowe-Porter)

131. Detective fiction in Nazi Germany
Such fiction considered ‘alien’ and ‘unGerman’
Called ‘trash’
1926 ‘Law against Filth and Trash’
1935 censorship law extended
Most popular genre during Nazi regime
‘literary vacuum’

132. Detective fiction in Nazi Germany
Ban on English and French translations in 1939
17 different institutions for censorship
More and more native German detective fiction
Clash between market (publishers, booksellers, readers) and institutions (regime and conservative intellectuals)

133. Polysystem and detective fiction
Detective fiction on the periphery of the German literary system
Translated detective fiction in the centre of the German literary system