What We Can Learn From Multiple Translations of the Same Poem

Translating a poem into another language—its content, its form, its tone, its nuance—is, as almost everyone who has done it knows, a difficult business. But it also has enormous rewards: for the translator, for the reader, for poetry itself.

Some years ago, I was asked to teach a workshop about this impossible process. Among other materials, including essays about translation, I gave the participants two side-by-side English translations of a poem by Pablo Neruda, along with the original Spanish. Those translations proved to be the most valuable resource I offered. Seeing what different translators have done with the same poem immediately eliminates easy assumptions that beginning translators often make: that there is a single way, a most correct way, or a best way to translate a poem.

The packet of materials began to grow. Soon I had made several compilations of translations, illustrating different kinds of choices translators invariably make, whether they do so consciously or not. Sometime after that, I began asking the students themselves to compile multiple translations of a single poem for class presentation. Their compilations, added to mine, became our most essential “textbook,” and gave us an excellent basis for asking important questions about literary translation.

We might begin by asking where, on a continuum ranging from the most “literal” to the most “free,” a particular translation lies. Where, on another continuum between most loyal to form and most free of it, does a translation of a formal poem lie? What is gained by attempting to replicate meter and/or rhyme, and what is lost? What about levels of diction? More generally, what is the stylistic “register” of a translation, ranging from formal to colloquial, or is there a mixture of styles? If the latter, does this reflect the original poem, or is it an unfortunate (or deliberate) result of the translation? If the poem isn’t contemporary, what is gained and what is lost by moving the poem toward modern and even contemporary English? Beyond style, does a translation substitute contemporary references for original ones? At what point does a translation become (in a term introduced by John Dryden in the seventeenth century and used by Robert Lowell in the twentieth) an “imitation”—or, beyond even that, a poem in its own right that might make reference to the original by inscribing “after Pablo Neruda” (or whomever) beneath the title?

In addition to these general “continuum” questions are more-specific ones. An examination of multiple translations will confirm what any dual-language dictionary tells us: there are many ways to translate even single words. This is especially true in English, which has, thanks to its multiple origins, an enormous vocabulary. At the same time, other languages have many words to express what we in English consider to be not only a single word but a single concept; that English, having dispensed with “thee” and “thou,” has only one word for “you” is an obvious example.

And then there is syntax, the principles by which words are arranged in sentences, which differs considerably from language to language. A so-called literal translation of a French or Spanish poem would have us saying “the tree bare” instead of “the bare tree”—a distinction that might be especially interesting if a line break occurred between the noun and the adjective, since the Romance language would allow us to perceive the general term before its modification. Does a translation attempt in some way to replicate the order in which the original words appear, or is it more interested in keeping the stylistic simplicity or complexity of the original syntax?

All of this is not to mention the knottier problems. A translation may go smoothly for a while, and then come upon a section or line that, for any number of reasons (semantic, syntactic, stylistic, cultural), runs into trouble. The trouble spots are the places where multiple translations are most apt to differ. Looking at them carefully can take us more deeply into the nuances of both the original language and English—and, more generally, challenge our assumptions about how language itself works. More specifically, multiple translations can give us a much better sense of the poem than a single translation can, so that even if we can’t read the poem in the original language, we can come closer to that experience.

All these benefits began to suggest that an anthology of multiple translations might be a good idea, even a necessary one. There were, as I discovered, a few related resources. One of them, an invaluable essay by Margaret Sayers Peden that presents nine versions of a sonnet by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, appears in a book of essays I was using, John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte’s The Craft of Translation (1989). Then I found Eliot Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987), a pocket-size anthology of 17 translations, plus the original and a transliteration into the Roman alphabet, of a four-line Chinese poem, with short commentaries on each. Similarly, an essay by Joshua Cohen, published in The American Voice in 1988,  includes  several  translations—a  “Choral  Rendering,”  Cohen  calls it—of Carlos Oquendo de Amat’s poem “Rain,” written in Spanish. Still later I would find Hiroaki Sato’s One Hundred Frogs (1995), with its many translations of a famous haiku by Bashō, and Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (1997), which includes 88 translations of a 16th-century French poem, ranging from close-to-the-original to off-the-charts free. I finally discovered an actual anthology of multiple translations, compiled and edited by the distinguished translator Rainer Schulte. But the book, which was custom published and included no commentary, was so thoroughly unavailable that the only way I could get it was to accept the editor’s generous gift of one of his few copies. Useful as these resources were, they made the need for a new anthology seem even more pressing. And so began a great deal of deliberation, leading to conversations with Kevin Prufer about how multiple translations of several poems might be compiled and presented. Out of that deliberation and those conversations came an anthology, Into English.

Our first step was to ask several translators whose work we knew to choose a poem and three translations of it, and then to write a commentary about what they had chosen. We aimed for a range of languages and periods, but knew from the beginning that several compromises would be necessary. Foremost among them: the book could not claim to be representative of the enormous diversities of people and poetries in the non-English-speaking world, past and present. We would be limited to a tiny sample.

Beyond this, each poem in the book would have to have been translated several times. At a time when the vast majority of established non-English-language poets aren’t translated for English-speaking readers at all, we knew we’d be drawing from a very small pool of very well-known poets, mostly poets of previous generations who have achieved renown internationally, whose works have been assessed and reassessed by readers, often over decades and even centuries. While this kind of selection says a great deal about the values and sensibilities of poets, scholars, and translators of the past and present, it also says a great deal about the limitations of our English-speaking literary culture, which has for the most part been as Eurocentric as our general culture. A notable reality is that the book includes not a single poet from Africa. Readers will also notice that we’ve included more than one contribution from Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish—languages pursued much more frequently by English and American translators.

For similar reasons, female poets are also underrepresented. Although our contributors include slightly more women than men, a large majority of the poets they chose to discuss are male. This is not surprising. Historically, recognized male poets have, due to educational opportunities as well as cultural biases, far outnumbered female poets. Since it takes time for poets to achieve the kind of recognition that makes translations of a work common, multiple English translations of male poets far outnumber those of female poets, and the contents of the book necessarily reflect that unfortunate fact.

The book, arranged chronologically, ends up reflecting in a very general way a history of literary translation into English, and in the process begins to suggest the importance of that history (as well as its limitations). For without translation, our poetic tradition would be a radically different thing, and a poorer one.

For example, there would have been no literary Renaissance in the 16th and 17th centuries without the classics, represented here by Virgil’s Latin, or the influence of Italian and French poetry. As the mention of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad in George Kalogeris’s commentary implies, the importance of literary translation extended into the 18th century, and the early 19th century produced one of the most famous poems ever written on the subject. Often cited as a poem about poetry, John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is in fact also a poem about translation—for without Chapman, Keats could not have read Homer.

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen: Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—nd all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

A new planet, a new-to-European-eyes ocean—that’s what George Chapman’s translation was for Keats.

By the late 19th century and into the early 20th, translations of poems had begun to appear more rapidly, more frequently, and with more attention to accuracy. Particularly important for their influence on what we now call “modern” poetry were the late-19th-century French poets, represented here by Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. While writers like T.S. Eliot were reading these poets in the original (as many earlier poets had read the classics), translations brought them to a wider audience of poets and readers, and thus extended their influence. In the same early modern period, influenced by the imagist movement, Chinese and Japanese poetry began to be more widely read, often, in the former case, through the medium of Ezra Pound’s translations. As their appearance in this anthology suggests, translations from both languages have continued to proliferate and influence a wide range of readers and writers; witness, among other trends, the popularity of Japanese haiku.

In the middle of the 20th century, many American poets began to read and translate more-recent works from both South America and an expanded Europe. Robert Bly and W.S. Merwin were among the poets who began to translate more widely from Eastern European, Scandinavian, and Spanish-language poetry. New Directions had been publishing translations in their annual anthologies for some time, and Bly’s editorship of the magazine and press called The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies) expanded both the readership and the geographical reach of translation; other magazines and presses followed, including FIELD magazine and its translation series. Of the poets represented in Into English, César Vallejo and Federico García Lorca in Spanish, Rainer Maria Rilke in German, and Tomas Tranströmer in Swedish are among those who most expanded the horizons of American poetry during this period, encouraging poets to adopt and experiment with new approaches and techniques.

And now we are in another period of expanding literary translation, a kind of literary globalization, which has produced more translations from a wider field of languages, including Arabic, modern Hebrew, and a growing number of European languages. These later contributions move us closer to, and even into, our own times, and begin to suggest the wider diversity that translations of the future may offer us.

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Adapted from the introduction to Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, ed. Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer. Copyright © 2017 by Martha Collins.