Translating Poetry

Poetry is a highly valued form of human expression, and poems are challenging texts to translate. For both reasons, people willingly work long and hard to translate them, for little pay but potentially high personal satisfaction. This book shows how experienced poetry translators translate poems and bring them to readers, and how they not only shape new poems, but also help communicate images of the source culture. It uses cognitive and sociological translation-studies methods to analyse real data, most of it from two contrasting source countries, the Netherlands and Bosnia. Case studies, including think-aloud studies, analyse how translators translate poems. In interviews, translators explain why and how they translate. And a 17-year survey of a country’s poetry-translation output explores how translators work within networks of other people and texts – publishing teams, fellow translators, source-culture enthusiasts, and translation readers and critics. In mapping the whole sweep of poetry translators’ action, from micro-cognitive to macro-social, this book gives the first translation-studies overview of poetry translating since the 1970s.

His book investigates the problems and possibilities in the translation of literature, especially poetry. The investigation is based on a comparison between Catullus' sixty-fourth poem and English translations of it published between 1870 and 1970. Several strategies for translating are analyzed, and their comparative merits and faults are discussed. The book also tries to describe the position translation and translation studies should occupy in the wider context of the study of comparative literature. --from publisher description.

This volume, with contributions in the form of narrations, or of work sheets, by leading British and American translators, shows what happens: how problems present themselves and how they are resolved.

Author of Encyclopedia of Translation Terminology (2007), A Dictionary of Translation and Interpreting (2002), and A Linguistic Study of the Development of Scientific Vocabulary in Standard Arabic (London: KPI 1987) Intended for poetry-translation scholars, teachers, students, and practitioners, this book provides an in-depth look at poetry translation as an act of creative recreation. Clearly written and amply illustrated, it is designed to help readers understand the nature of poetry, the key elements of its language, the various types of challenges frequently encountered in its translation, and the procedures, methods and strategies required to translate poems into poems. It provides important and penetrating answers to questions such as: What makes poetry translation a special case within literary translation?? Is poetry translatable?? Does poetry really get lost in translation?? How should a poem be translated? What makes a “good” translation? Is it preferable to translate a poem literally, or should the translator endeavor to recreate the effect of the original poem as a poem in its own right in the target language? Is poetry translation a matter of reproduction or an act of recreation? Who translates poetry? Should a poem be looked at as a “renaissance painting”? Why is poetry translation referred to as “the art of compromise”?

Translating Poetic Discourse argues in favor of a critical model that bridges between translation and women’s studies on theoretical and practical levels. It proposes key-elements to be integrated into the problem of interpretation of contemporary poetry by women, and discusses the links between gender markers and the speech situation in feminist discourse as a systematic problem. This book will be of interest to scholars of Translation Studies, Women’s Studies, Poetry, Comparative Literature and Discourse.

Great poets like Shelley and Goethe have made the claim that translating poems is impossible. And yet, poems are translated; not only that, but the metrical systems of English, French, Italian, German, Russian and Czech have been shaped by the translation of poems. Our poetic traditions are inspired by translations of Homer, Dante, Goethe and Baudelaire. How can we explain this paradox? James W. Underhill responds by offering an informed account of meter, rhythm, rhyme, and versification. But more than that, the author stresses that what is important in the poem—and what must be preserved in the translated poem—is the voice that emerges in the versification. Underhill’s book draws on the author’s translation experience from French, Czech and German. His comparative analysis of the versifications of French and English have enabled him to revise the key terms involved in translating the poetic voice and transposing the poem’s versification. The theories of versification from the Prague School of Linguistics, the French and Swiss schools of versification, and recent scholarship in metrics and rhythm in the UK and in the USA have been integrated into this synthetic but rigorously coherent approach to translating poems. The extensive glossary at the end of the book will prove useful for both students and teachers alike. And the detailed case studies on translating poems by Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson allow the author to categorize and appraise the various poetic and aesthetic strategies and theories that are brought to bear in translating Baudelaire into English, and Dickinson into French.