Translating Poetry -- Alex

 "So much is lost in translation that a great deal must be put back in." I really like this quote by Arther Waley which Janine Beichman quotes in her article, because it seems to make translating poetry "possible" again. Of course, it always was "possible", but because of the intricacies unique to poetry, i.e. rhythm, rhyme, tone, etc., it is arguably impossible to have a 100% accurate, one-to-one translation from the original. 

However, perhaps a 100% accurate translation isn't what we should seek for. Not to bring out Jay Rubin again, but "you're not trying to explain the original, but recreate it so that it works in all the same gut levels." I think this is especially true with poetry, especially in the case of Japanese and English, where it would be arguably absurd to assume that the intricacies of poetry could be 100% transferred over such different languages. Therefore, perhaps a "translation" of poetry may be more of a "rewrite" -- keep the original author's ideas and themes (to make it still identifiable with the original), but rewrite it in a way suitable for your language, adding in your own rhythm and rhyme and other "sparkly poetry elements". Roger Pulvers' translation of Miyazawa Kenji's Ame ni mo Makezu is a good example of this: changing the negative form of "makezu" in Japanese to the positive form of "strong" in English. Not only does this reduce wordiness ("not losing to rain / I won't lose to rain" --> "strong against rain"), but also recreates the parallelism Miyazawa had created in the first three lines of the poem using repetition. In the Japanese original, parallelism between rain, wind, and summer heat and snow; in English, strong, strong, strong, thereby giving an equally powerful performance in English as in Japanese.