Poetry Readings - Sydnee

  I found that reading the end of the Beichman article really emphasized the labor of translation. The experience the original author might have, scribbling as they multitask or as an impression comes to them, is a workflow I can’t imagine for translators of poetry (or anything else, really). It then seems all the more difficult to make the translated product have both the potency of the original and the voice, whether it be measured or effortless and fleeting. In her analogies of hometowns and second selves, Beichman figures the poetry and translator as living beings interacting with each other, an idea that has been explored in other readings but in a different way, with perhaps more tension between the ‘meaning’ of the original and translated texts than with poetry, but less struggle to capture the essence of the work on a deeper level.

Poetry, more so than other written forms, rely on impressions and feelings passed between members of a group, in my opinion. Where poetry seems to transcend these boundaries, I think it actually is an example of how many impressions can be created from the same source, like many ripples from a disturbance in water. As Beichman highlights, however, this is far from a sign that the translation of poetry is futile– she stresses the influence of western poetry on modern Japanese poetry and how beautifully such translations can be done. It was a reminder to me of the importance of communication through art and how it can be just as much about the principle of sharing and exchange as it is about communicating things in the ‘right’ way.

Going back to the idea of the relative experiences of writing poetry versus translating it, Pulvers asks ‘how’ good translations of poetry can be done, and to be sure offers useful tools and considerations. In the time that I’ve been writing this I thought of Ink Dark Moon, a collection of poems translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, and between them Hirshfield is primarily a poet and Aratani acted as the language specialist. There is something stressful about the thought of capturing the poet’s voice in such a small space that there scarcely seems room for collaborators, yet when reading some of their translations (I didn’t read the whole collection) there were no such issues. From this, the translation process for poetry could be just as diverse as the writing of poetry, just along different axes.