dumbfoundry

"I have often been asked -- in interviews and at cocktail parties -- whether translating poetry isn't 'terribly difficult.' Quite honestly, I have never known what the question meant or how I was to answer it. Difficult in what way? Like doing long division? Or hitting a target at 100 meters [328 feet]? Or skiing the Kandahar run? From my school days I remember Ovid's statement in his autobiography 'Quidquid temptabam scribere versus erat' [Whatever I tried to write turned into a verse] and from later reading I knew Alexander Pope's 'I lisped in numbers and the numbers came.'

"It would, of course, be absurd and presumptuous to compare myself to those two poetic giants -- and yet, a similar mechanism must have been at work when I translated poetry. Without any conscious effort a translated line -- sometimes the opening line, more often the final line -- would stand ready, in my mind."

Thus spake the translator of Jiri Mucha, Egon Hostovsky, Miroslav Holub, Karel Capek, Ivan Klima, Zdenek Sverak (Kolja), Arnost Lustig and the 1984 Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert from Czech into English (as well as the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney into Czech); Josef Goebbels, Kurt Waldheim and Thomas Bernhard (plus the correspondence between Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal) from German into English; Miroslav Valek from Slovak, four poets from Bulgarian, several from Macedonian and 13th-century Armenian love poetry. [...]

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Thursday, March 18, 2004 at 5:12 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.