[lit-ideas] Re: Poetry x 2 = Sabbatical
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 10:29:57 -0230
Who was it that said something to the effect of: "Poets are just philosophers
who have never learned to write or live clearly."?
Walter O.
Memorial U.
Quoting John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> > There was a Russian poem I stumbled across 7 or 8 years ago and I
> > cannot for the life of me remember either the poem's title or the
> > author. But after some searching I the net I found 5 different
> > translations of it. They were all vastly different. It's my thinking
> > that poetry cannot be translated, though prose can, at least more
> > clearly & accurately.
>
> I suspect that there are two connected problems. One is the translation
> itself; of course one looses something. But often, if the translator is
> a poet, one gains something. I first read Dante in the Chiardi
> translation, which tried to keep some of the rhyme.
>
> The second issue is that translators end up with different translations,
> not just because translating is difficult, but because the original poem
> is opaque. It's not the translator's problem, it's the poem's problem.
> Poems can mean as many things even in the original language as they can
> mean in different translations; the translations simply reveal the
> ambiguities more clearly. Prose is typically more precise and less
> opaque, so it's easier to translate.
>
> > I have some vague notions about why but have not been able to pin
> > them down. Perhaps the author's intent in prose is more clear than
> > the author's intent in poetry. Perhaps poetry relies so heavily on
> > metaphor and symbolism that another language's words for those
> > metaphors and symbolisms mean something different. Perhapas it has a
> > lot to do with cadence.....
> >
> > Julie Krueger
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> "Never attribute to malice that which can be
> explained by incompetence and ignorance."
> -------------------------------------------------
> John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Lisle, IL, USA
>
>
>
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