Pulvers and Beichman Comments - Kadin

 I already knew that translating poems is significantly harder to translate than texts from a story, given that the amount of pure meaning needed to be conveyed needs to be done using less words. This alongside the inclusion structural and linguistical literary techniques makes it the more harder to translate than simple prose. This makes me think that translating a poem is almost akin to making one yourself. As Pulvers said, "The translated poem has to come naturally out of the voice of the translator in the new language. In other words, no matter how 'faithful' it is to the text and the spirit of the original, it has to be a poem in its own right."

Something that I learnt from the texts is that the sound of words matters a lot more when you translate a poem. As Beichman said, the words itself need to connect to the meaning, while maintaining an 'instinctive feel for sound and rhythm'. The flow of the poem matters as well. Translation of poems need to be constructed in a way such that the artistic feel of the poem itself cannot be tampered, yet the everything else must change in order to be understood.

After reading both texts and thinking about it, it really boggles my mind that translating poems challenge the freedom of interpreting and rephrasing, yet at the same time confines it to the fact that you are conveying someone's else's art while making your own. In a sense, you are also creating art without getting as much credit. When you think of a famous poem and its translated variants, I feel that efforts involved in the latter is much more underrated and overlooked, which seems obvious but is something that I had never thought much about before.