CLUES IN TRANSLATING POETRY

According to Hegel, poetry is “the art of speaking, the totality which 
unifies the two extremes, that is the plastic arts and music, on a superior plan, in the field of spiritual inwardness itself.” The complexity of poetry seen as a synthesis of all the other arts is described more clearly by Hegel furthermore: “Just like music, poetry involves the principle of inwardness perceiving itself as inwardness; like sculpture and painting, it develops in the field of representation, intuition and feeling as an objective world."

The lyric genre raises some specific problems for a translator which shall be 
discussed upon in this article. In translating poetry, both translation and interpretation are involved. A complete analysis of the poem to be translated implies its critical interpretation. James Holmes had devised a diagram to show the interrelationship between translation and critical interpretation. (apud Bassnett, 1988:100)

Poem
Critical essay in language                                       Poem inspired by poem
of poem 
Critical essay in another language                           Poem ‘about’ poem
Prose translation                                              
Verse translation (metapoem)                                 Imitation

  Interpretation                                                                  Poetry


The verse translation rests on the axis point where types of interpretation 
intersect with types of imitation and derivation.

The translation of poetry is, according to Bantaş, the most challenging 
form of literary translation. From a strictly linguistic point of view, poetry appears as a superior form of synonymy at all levels: lexical, grammatical, syntagmatic. The first step in the translation process is a “translation-oriented text analysis” which will present the poem as a number n of elements disposed in one or more types of series, chosen or adopted by the poet. A poem may have or not a fixed form, it can be perfectly or imperfectly constant from the point of view of rhyme and metre. Its vocabulary may be either simple, belonging to everyday language, or sophisticated, full of connotations. The syntax of a poem may be either normal or distorted for the sake of versification. Its general meaning may be either explicit, clear, or esoteric, hidden. A complete analysis of a poem will thus disclose the existence of a pattern which is at the same time grammatical, stylistic and prosodic. In the case of free verse, the translator should make sure that, on the contrary, there are no patterns to be detected within the poem. 

The second stage in the translation process transforms the translator into 
a poet who is supposed to re-write the original poem in TL. In translating it, he should resort to the same structures and patterns which form the original SL code: rhymed verse or free verse or blank verse. The translator is not supposed to break these patterns or to introduce rhymes when the poet chose free verse. The same rule (no loss, no gain) should apply to the level of content: the translator is expected to reproduce the poet’s metaphors, vocabulary, style and metrical code. The poetic code of a poem, whether clear or hermetic, should remain unchanged through translation.

To summarize the ideas of Bantaş, the translator willing to and capable of 
playing the part of a poet in front of the TL audience, has two major ‘obligations’:
1. to decipher the semantic code of the original (denotation and 
connotation) as well as its formal system (images, figures of speech, prosody);
2. to render the same elements on the same levels, avoiding both semantic 
and expressive losses and semantic, expressive and clarity gains.
Through the complex analysis, the translator unveils the author’s system, 
either in general or in particular. The reproduction of this system, that is the inner mechanism of the work, can be regarded as an application of synonymy at all levels. Therefore, the ideal translator possesses a superior ‘bilingual’ linguistic competence. This linguistic competence involves his being aware of the semantic and stylistic values of the words, idioms, phrases, patterns of current language in both SL and TL. It enables him both to correctly decipher the SL code and to render it into TL as identically as The linguistic ‘bilingual’ competence, doubled by talent are not enough for a good literary translation. A literary analysis of the poem and of its literary context, not only in the SL literature, but also, comparatively, in the TL literature, is ecessary. Therefore, a superior literary competence characterizes the ideal translator. His knowledge of the poet’s entire work and also of the work of other SL and TL poets belonging to the same literary trend will make his work less difficult and undoubtedly The difficulty in translating poetry is that the translator is supposed to render as accurately as possible all the intellectual processes the poet himself has known, his emotional state, his mental disposition, his experiences and searches while trying to find the most effective (‘catchy’) word. In other words, a translator should choose the same path, either straight or winding, that the poet himself has ‘walked’ on.

After the thorough analysis of the original, when the poem becomes clear 
and entirely explicit for the translator, he runs the risk of making the poem, through his version of it, more explicit, even easier and more ostentatious than the original. That is why the analysis and interpretation of the poem are made for his own use; then, while translating, he should keep to the limits traced by the author as far as clarity is concerned. Otherwise a certain ‘gain’ in clarity may distort the author’s intention as well as the general view of the reader on the author and on his poem. Translation should neither increase nor facilitate the difficulties in understanding a poem.

In point of semantic clarity, it is easy to guess that the less explicit a poem, 
the more difficult to be translated. At the same time, the more connotations and sound effects, the more difficulties in rendering them into another language. When a translator, after having studied the critical work in point, still fails to decipher the meaning of a stanza or of an entire poem, he should rely on his own ability of decoding the meaning of the original. Sometimes, the choice between several possible interpretations can be made for the purposes of versification.

It is often claimed that hermetic poetry is untranslatable. Actually, if its 
particular code is not betrayed, a hermetic poem can be successfully translated. Bantaş states that the existence of similarities on the denotative and connotative levels between the SL and TL vocabulary represents a condition for translating a hermetic poem. The difficulties which appear in this case are divided into objective and subjective difficulties. Among the objective difficulties, one can mention polysemy (which is very rich in contemporary English, thus giving birth to ambiguities that were not originally intended by the author), implicit allusions which lead to strange or ‘local’ connotations. 

A subjective difficulty in translating hermetic poetry appears when the translator tends to betray the original code and system (by making certain meanings more esoteric or, on the contrary, more exoteric than originally intended.)

André Lefevere, quoted by Susan Bassnett, finds various methods of 
translating a poem which are deficient in that they overemphasize one or more elements of the poem at the expense of the whole. They will be mentioned here in order to mirror types of mistakes that should be avoided by a translator of poetry:
1. Phonemic translation, which attempts to reproduce the SL sound in the 
TL while at the same time producing an acceptable paraphrase of the sense. This can be successfully applied only to onomatopoeia.
2. Literal translation, where the emphasis on word-for-word translation 
distorts the sense and the syntax of the original.
3. Metrical translation, where the dominant criterion is the reproduction 
4. Poetry into prose, which leads to distortion of the sense, communicative 
value and syntax of the SL text, but not to the same extent as in the case of the literal or 
5. Rhymed translation, where the translator ‘enters into a double bondage’ 
6. Blank verse translation, where the translator changes the form of the 
original, but obtains a greater accuracy.
7. Interpretation, where the terms of version and imitation are discussed. In 
Lefevere’s view, the version retains the substance of the SL text but changes its form, and the imitation is a poem produced by the translator himself which has only ‘title and point of departure if those, in common with the source text’.

Bibiography
Bantaş, A, Croitoru, E.. 1998. Didactica traducerii,  Teora, Bucureşti.
Bassnett, S. 1988. Translation Studies, Routledge, London and New York. 
Hegel. 1979. Despre artă şi poezie, Minerva, Bucureşti.

(from E. A. Poe's Poetry in Romanian. A Critical Translation Study by Cristina Miron, Editura Universităţii din Piteşti, 2009, pp. 19-25)