The two articles made me realize that translation isn't a mechanical transformation, but rather a creative act of interpretation. The metaphor of the translator as a "transformer," dragging the poem through a "wormhole" into another linguistic universe is incredibly ingenious. It acknowledges the inevitable distortions of the translation process while upholding the principle that the essence of the poem must be preserved.
Driven by this insight, I researched more of Beichman's work and found one article detailing her translations of the Japanese poet Ōoka Makoto.
The piece illuminated Makoto as a profoundly modern voice infused with classical sensibility, but it was his own definition of poetry that struck me with immense force.
Precisely the process
by which all psychological scenes
proceed to total extinction.
This concept of poetry as a fleeting, vanishing process seems to be the ultimate argument for its untranslatability. But her work on Makoto’s poetry is a living testament to the idea that translation is the art of enabling this process of "extinction" to be "reborn" in another language. We can see this in her steadfast refusal to add words for clarity, ensuring the pristine, vanishing trajectory of a thought in "Winter Song" remains intact. We hear it in her rendering of "Rhymopolis," where she uses a colon and colloquial terms like "so" and "don't" to perfectly capture the soft, casual tone of the original Japanese, allowing us to hear the specific sound of that psychological scene fading away. This is the embodiment of her belief that "tone is everything. Furthermore, the design of her bilingual edition, with its flip-book format creating two entrances into the work, is a physical manifestation of her "wormhole" metaphor. It constructs a space where the reader can experience the poem from bilingual perspectives.
I am therefore looking forward to our poetry translation exercise next week. I think poetry and fiction will be very different translation experiences.
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