Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The belief that the poeticalness of poetry is just that relationship between sound and sense is widespread in the teaching of English and other modern languages. However, it doesn’t follow from this at all that once a poem is translated it has lost its poeticalness. The new poem in the new language representing and re-creating the poem in the old also possesses a relationship between its sound and its meaning. It is not the same as the original, but that is no reason—no reason at all—to claim that it is devoid of poetry. Of course, the new poem may be awful when the original was sublime. Few poets write sublime verse every time. But it stands to reason that the quality of a poem in translation has no relation to its having been translated. It is the sole fruit of the poet’s skill as a poet, irrespective of whether he is also writing as a translator.

You may not like the poem by Douglas Hofstadter quoted at the start of this book. You may like the poem by Clément Marot much more. But all that you could reasonably say about the difference is that Hofstadter is (in this instance) a less charming writer of poetry than Marot. If you didn’t know that Hofstadter’s trisyllabic verse transposes sentiments first expressed by someone else in a form that has a quite strict relationship to it, you might still not like it—but you wouldn’t think of justifying your disappointment by saying that poetry is what has been lost in translation. And since that is the case—as it is the case with many lines of poetry you undoubtedly know in your own language without knowing they have semantic and formal correspondences to lines or stanzas written in another language before them—you can’t justify your dislike of Hofstadter’s translation by saying that its less than perfect quality is related to the way that poetry gets lost in translation. Exactly the same argument applies if you like Hofstadter’s poem much more than you like Marot’s. Or if you had been led to believe that Marot’s French, far from being prior to it, had been inspired by “Gentle gem …” In fact, for the vast majority of poems, the ordinary reader has few reliable ways of establishing whether and to what degree it can be counted as a translation. Poets have been imitators, plagiarists, surreptitious importers, and translators since the beginning of time.

Dante, Joachim du Bellay, Alexander Pope, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Jacques Roubaud, Robert Lowell, C. K. Williams—think of a great poet, and you’ve almost certainly thought of a translator, too. In the Western tradition there is no cutoff point between writing poems and writing translations or writing poems in translation. Poetic forms—the sonnet, the ballad, the rondeau, the pantoum, the ghazal—have migrated among languages as diverse as French, Italian, Russian, Persian, English, and Malay over the last eight hundred years. Poetic styles—Romantic, Symbolist, Futurist, Acmeist, Surrealist—are common European properties, as typical of German as of Polish poetry. Every so-called poetic tradition is made of other traditions. Against the dubious adage that poetry is what is lost in translation we have to set the more easily demonstrable fact that, from many points of view, the history of Western poetry is the history of poetry in translation.

Despite this, toward the end of 2007 there were 666 Web pages in English that quoted the adage “poetry is what is lost in translation”;[84] and by April 2010, when I ran the search again, the tally had risen to 15,100. Even more stunning is that in all but a handful of cases this adage was attributed to the American poet Robert Frost. But nobody has ever been able to find Frost saying anything like it in his works, letters, interviews, or reported sayings.[85] Like so many other received ideas about translation, this one turns out to have no foundation in fact.

All the same, it is true that poetry provides translators with a task that is not only difficult but in some senses beyond translation altogether. Like many people, I have a great fondness for poems that I learned in my youth. I’m attached to them in a special way and treasure the very sound as well as the sense that they have. As I was a student at the time, I read poetry in foreign languages—mostly in order to learn the language they were in. I struggled to understand them, and probably for that reason they have stuck in my mind ever since.

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein.