First of all, I thought it was a bit funny that both authors chose to start with the same Robert Frost quote: "Poetry is what gets lost in translation," and then build their thoughts off of it. Translating poetry certainly requires a lot of creativity, since poems tend to carry such a wealth of meaning and nuance in so few words. In that way, it reminded me of trying to translate the opening to Snow Country, since I was thinking and researching for hours over how best to reconstruct only first two lines. Not only is 夜の底が白くなった very poetic in itself, I think the depth with which it's considered by Japanese people is also reminiscent of a poem. One of the core questions for me during that endeavor that I couldn't quite figure out how to answer was how natural or how esoteric it sounded in the Japanese. Are most Japanese speakers immediately able to picture what is meant by 夜の底, or does it require some consideration? In the former case, I'd probably want to eschew a more literal translation in favor of a description that, while ideally remaining poetic, sounds more natural in English than "the bottom of the night turned white." In the latter case, the weirdness of "bottom of the night" as a phrase would be a better translation of how it feels in Japanese.
This all is to say that I have a significant amount of admiration for anyone who manages to translate poetry. Even before including the rhythmic aspects, translating poetry well requires not just fluency, but solid literary analysis ability in both languages. I really liked the Denham quote included in Beichman's article: "[Poetry] is of so subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language to another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum."
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