“Poetry must be translated by a poet.” - Eghishe Charents According to the Oxford English Dictionary, poetry is “the art or work of a poet”. Another depiction of poetry is given by John Ruskin in his “Lectures on Art” (1870): “What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions”. According to T.S. Eliot, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”. Percy Bysshe Shelly describes poetry as the eternal truth: “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth”. And, at last, according to Robert Frost, “The figure a poem makes: it begins in delight and ends in wisdom”. This any translator must know, so as to acknowledge the real virtue of the work he deals with. Translation is very often referred to as an art. So the task of a translator is to make an art from art, keeping the aesthetic value of the work. Robert Frost once described poetry as “what gets lost in translation”. He meant, of course, that it is impossible to carry over from one language to another the special qualities of a poem - its sound and rhythm, its meter, syntax, and connotations. Some critics have felt that in translating poems “translators betray them, inevitably turning the translation into something which at best may approximate, but which invariably distorts, the original”. This point of view, however, has not prevented translators from continuing their difficult, but important work. Translation of poetry is one of the most difficult and challenging tasks for every translator. Returning to Robert Frost’s definition, according to which “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”, we can say that this statement could be considered a truthful one to a certain extent, because there is no one-to-one equivalent when comparing two languages. Even if the translators possess a profound knowledge in the source language, they would not be able to create a replica of the original text. translationdirectory/articles/article1224.htm
Posted on: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 10:33:11 +0000
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