Translating Poetry – Aaron

I agree that poetry is translatable (after all, never say never!), but it is definitely extremely difficult in some cases. In a previous reading we saw a brief discussion on Japanese translations of Shakespeare, and how they will inevitably lose much of the rhythm that Shakespeare's writing has. To say that no adequate translation of Shakespeare into Japanese can exist would be extreme in my opinion, but the fact that it may be extraordinarily difficult to find is significant, too.

With that being said, though, I think the idea that poetry can be translatable if the voice of the original author is preserved makes perfect sense, and echoes the mindset we have been drilling into our heads throughout this class. The added idea that translating poetry is like rewriting the poetry entirely in another universe is also an echo of the very nature of translation between such different languages as Japanese and English. Of course, poetry presents this challenge to a much larger extent because it relies on the nature of the words in the language to convey its emotional message, meaning a literal translation of a poem can lose the entirety of its substance. So, a translator must instead forget about the words of a poem entirely, and instead absorb the meaning, emotions, and characteristics of the work, and do their best to recreate those in the target language using methods that work best in that target language.