This is an appropriate moment to reiterate my working assumptions about translation, since I’ve been posting so many translated poems of late, some of which would not pass muster before the literalist translation police.
Put simply, I consider a translated poem to be one poem about another one.
Those who spend time pondering the mysteries of translation will recognize this as a variant of the 17th century French description of successful translations as captured in the title above, one alluding to the now politically incorrect but also dubious dictum that women can be either faithful or beautiful, but not both.
Proponents of beauty in this context believe that the translator should facilitate moving the reader towards the writer by respecting the reader’s own experience and values, seducing them by relying on their prejudices and needs, though the translator may well thereby be unfaithful to the source.
The second camp, those who espouse fidelity, would bring the source text towards the new reader by strictly respecting the meaning of the original. The idea is to show those damned ignorant readers exactly what this text in a foreign language means. Often this results in awkward and convolute turns of phrase which have little to do with poetry as such. Thus: laide fidélité.
Underlying this latter principle is the precept that meaning should trump other criteria, musicality say, such that a rhymed poem can be stripped of its rhyme if necessary to preserve the “message” of the poem. This is a corollary of the belief that poems first and foremost convey messages which it is the duty of readers then translators in turn to decrypt. Not how I see it, since I consider the message to be peripheral to the experience of the poem, and faithful, professional, academic translators to be slaves to meaning.
To be sure, my goal is not to compose poems which respect anyone else’s sense of propriety or bienséance, as was the case in 17th century France. Instead, I find myself inspired by one poem to write yet another, one related to but not bound by the first. They are poems in their own right. They should stand on their own legs. Or not.