elektro80
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 Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 5:16 pm Post subject:
The Poet as Translator |
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Kenneth Rexroth compares and contrasts various translations of Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Catullus, Li Po, etc. Insanely interesting stuff!
| Quote: | When discussing the poet as translator, from time immemorial it has been the custom to start out by quoting Dryden. I shan’t, but I will try to illustrate Dryden’s main thesis — that the translation of poetry into poetry is an act of sympathy — the identification of another person with oneself, the transference of his utterance to one’s own utterance. The ideal translator, as we all know well, is not engaged in matching the words of a text with the words of his own language. He is hardly even a proxy, but rather an all-out advocate. His job is one of the most extreme examples of special pleading. So the prime criterion of successful poetic translation is assimilability. Does it get across to the jury?
If we approach the great historic translations this way it is easy to understand why they are great. It is obvious on the most general survey of English literature that the classic translations of the classics accompany the classics of English, occur in the periods of highest productivity and greatest social — what shall we say? cohesion? euphoria? Tudor, Jacobean, Caroline, Augustan or Victorian, many of the translations are themselves among the major English works of their time. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, North’s Plutarch, Pope’s Homer — and, of course, the King James Bible. All the great translations survive into our time because they were so completely of their own time. This means simply that the translator’s act of identification was so complete that he spoke with the veridical force of his own utterance, conscious of communicating directly to his own audience.
Of course, many such translations are ethnocentric to a degree — sometimes to the degree that they have turned the original into something totally different. This is not true of many of the greatest translations but it is true of some. Is FitzGerald a translation of Omar? Here the two cultures are so radically different, all that can be said is that FitzGerald was probably all of medieval Persia that Victorian England was prepared to assimilate. The only real problem is Urquhart. It is hard to imagine anything less like the benign humanism of Rabelais than this crabbed and cracked provincial euphuism. The point of Rabelais is that he was the opposite of eccentric — he was profoundly, utterly normal. Urquhart produced a Scottish classic, and so for Englishmen Rabelais will always be an oddity. This is unfortunate, but then, is Rabelais’ normality normal in the British Isles? I think not. Perhaps his Gallic magnanimity could only cross the Channel tricked out in tartan stripes for a harlequinade.
It is the custom to deride Pope’s Homer. Nothing could be less like Homer. But the eighteenth century certainly didn’t think so — on either side of the Channel. This was the Homer they were prepared to accept. Of course, Pope was a neurasthenic, a dandy in Baudelaire’s sense, or Wallace Stevens’s, a thoroughly urbanized exquisite who had professionalized his nervous system. Whatever his formal commitments (Pope was a Roman Catholic) his real system of values was only a specialized hierarchy of nervous response. Certainly, nothing less like Homer could be imagined. But each age demands its own image. The other eighteenth-century Homers are not Homer either; they are just mediocre or bad. Is Butler Homer? I suppose he is for those of us who are rationalist, utilitarian, humanitarian. He is a fine Reform Club Homer. I still prefer Butler to Butcher and Lang or William Morris, let alone T.E. Lawrence. However, it is simply not true that the Butcher and Lang version is any more false to the text than Butler. Butcher and Lang is Homer for the readers of The Idylls of the King. |
read the rest of this one over at:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/poetry-translation.htm
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Cyxeris
Joined: Oct 30, 2003
Posts: 1125
Location: Louisville, KY
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| Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 5:47 pm Post subject:
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Most interesting indeed.
Cyx
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Last edited by Cyxeris on Mon Feb 09, 2004 1:13 am; edited 1 time in total |
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