The Poetics Of Translation

In this volume, eminent poet, scholar and translator Willis Barnstone explores the history and theory of literary translations as an art form. Arguing that literary translation goes beyond the transfer of linguistic information, Barnstone emphasizes that the translation contains as much imaginative originality as the source text.

Poetry is supposed to be untranslatable. But many poems in English are also translations: Pope's Iliad, Pound's Cathay, and Dryden's Aeneis are only the most obvious examples. The Poetry of Translation explodes this paradox, launching a new theoretical approach to translation, and developing it through readings of English poem-translations, both major and neglected, from Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue. The word 'translation' includes within itself a picture: of something being carried across. This image gives a misleading idea of goes on in any translation; and poets have been quick to dislodge it with other metaphors. Poetry translation can be a process of opening; of pursuing desire, or succumbing to passion; of taking a view, or zooming in; of dying, metamorphosing, or bringing to life. These are the dominant metaphors that have jostled the idea of 'carrying across' in the history of poetry translation into English; and they form the spine of Reynolds's discussion. Where do these metaphors originate? Wide-ranging literary historical trends play their part; but a more important factor is what goes on in the poem that is being translated. Dryden thinks of himself as 'opening' Virgil's Aeneid because he thinks Virgil's Aeneid opens fate into world history; Pound tries to being Propertius to life because death and rebirth are central to Propertius's poems. In this way, translation can continue the creativity of its originals. The Poetry of Translation puts the translation of poetry back at the heart of English literature, allowing the many great poem-translations to be read anew.

The present book is a bold attempt at revealing the complex and diversified nature of the field of translated literature in Turkey during a period of radical socio-political change. On the broad level, it investigates the implications of the political transformation experienced in Turkey after the proclamation of the Republic for the cultural and literary fields, including the field of translated literature. On a more specific level, it holds translation under focus and explores the discourse formed on translation and translators while it also traces the norms (not) observed by translators throughout the 1920s-1950s in two case studies. The findings of the study suggest that the concepts of translation both affected and were affected by cultural processes in the society, including ideological and poetological ones and that there was no uniform way of defining or carrying out translations during the period under study. The findings also point at the segmentation of readership in early republican Turkey and conclude that the political and poetological factors governing the production and reception of translations varied for different segments of readers.

The translation of poetry has always fascinated the theorists, as the chances of "replicating" in another language the one-off resonance of music, imagery, and truth values of a poem are vanishingly small. Translation is often envisaged as a matter of mapping over into the target language the surface features or semiotic structures of the source poem. Little wonder, then, that the vast majority of translations fail to be poetry in their own right. These essays focus on the poetically viable translation - the derived poem that, while resonating with the original, really is a poem. They proceed from a writerly perspective, eschewing both the theoretical overkill that spawns mice out of mountains and the ideological misappropriation that uses poetry as a way to push agendas. The emphasis throughout is on process and the poem-to-come.

This book establishes an analytical model for the description of existing translations in their historical context within a framework suggested by systemic concepts of literature. It argues against mainstream 20th-century translation theory and, by proposing a socio-cultural model of translation, takes into account how a translation functions in the receiving culture. The case studies of successive translations of "Hamlet" in France from the eighteenth century neoclassical version of Jean-Francois Ducis to the 20th-century Lacanian, post-structuralist stage production of Daniel Mesguich show the translator at work. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the changing theatrical and literary norms to which translators through the ages have been bound by the expectations both of their audiences and the literary establishment.

In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."