3.Translation and the Nature of Poetry
q Poetic translation is considered as writing which captures the spirit or the energy of the original poem.
One way of making this abstract notion more concrete is to equate it with style, because style can be seen as the result of the poetic choices.
This focus on style as central to poetic translation is found especially in the writings of
(i) translators who are themselves poets and can be assumed to have an inherent knowledge of how this works and
(ii) critics who take the view that a theoretical understanding of poetry is essential not only to the reading of translated poetry but also to the act of translation.
q There have been many debates about the characteristics of poetic style and whether they distinguish poetry from prose or indeed literally from non-literally texts .
Some of the elements that have been put forward as distinctive of poetic style are:
It’s physical shape including use of lines and spaces on a page
It’s use of inventive language and in particular, patterns of sound and structure
It’s openness to different interpretations
It’s demand to be read non-pragmatically.
q The layout in lines can be seen as a signal to read the text in a particular way: as a text in which style is the main repository of meaning (Boase-Beier 2006a: 112). Typically, writers will speak of recreating particular aspects such as metaphors and ambiguity (Boase-Beier 2004); all these are stylistic resources which, though present in non-poetic language, are used in greater concentration in poems and add up to Eagleton’s sense of ‘inventiveness’ .
q Ambiguity, in particular, is a stylistic device which allows for different interpretations and thus its preservation in translation enables the poem to retain its ability to fit different contexts (Verdonk 2002: 6f).
q Discussions on the nature of poetry suggest that there might be poetic characteristics that are universal; yet poetic traditions vary from one culture to another and, as Connolly (1998:174) points out, this is also an important consideration in translating poetry.