What a coincidence. I was working on a project related to Arthur Waley's translation of The Tale of Genji. Unlike modern Japanese texts, Genji employs a combination of proses and poems in its narrative. Instead of giving direct translation, Waley sometimes paraphrased the poems. This gave me the impression that poems indeed were more difficult than proses to translate.
Waley’s solution is to partially avoid the difficulty of translating poems, but this is not the only solution. Both Pulvers and Beichman argue that poems are translatable and offer some guidelines. Pulvers’s solution centers on preserving the voice in a poem. The translator must absorb the poem to understand its tone and apply their skills to mimic the poet. Beichman’s solution, then, is to embrace and cherish the discrepancy between the translation and the original. The goal is not to present the original poem to a foreign audience but to share a personal interpretation of the artistic work.
Some strategies presented by Pulvers and Beichman were unexpected. I was shocked to learn that Beichman would change the form of Yosano Akiko’s poems in her translation. But after hearing her explanation of Yosano’s unrestricted writing style, I thought Beichman’s edits were brilliant and delivered the spirit accurately. This example further reminded me of a translation of the epic Gilgamesh, where I commented on a unique use of repetitions that was actually added in by the translator. I only found out about it when the professor read my paper! Without Pulvers and Beichman’s insights, I still would not understand why certain choices were made in translations of poems.
- Marcus
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