Translating Poetry - Dawson

 I absolutely agree with Pulvers that the resultant poem must be a poem in its own right to truly translate well.  Otherwise, there is not much point to it.  You lose the entire feeling that makes it a poem.  Unfortunately, this terrifies me for the upcoming poetry section.  You see, I have ZERO experience writing poems, ever...  Therefore, I cannot imagine I will be able to perform particularly well in the translation of an art from I have so little experience with...  Nevertheless, I will try my best, by focusing on translating the feel and rhythm of the poem to the best of my abilities.   For me especially, I struggle with small phrases that pack in a lot of meaning, which obviously does not bode well for poems, particularly Japanese poems, where that is main crux of them.  

To me, poetry is the most emotion filled of all possible written expressions of language.  It is very hard to beat the depth of emotion packed into a poem.  Unfortunately, the difficulty of translation generally seems to be directly correlated with how much emotion is packed into the words being translated.  Thus, naturally, poetry becomes the hardest of mediums to translate, along the likes of songs (in my opinion).  Not only do you face the grave task of translating the words that are already so much harder to translate, you face the task of matching rhyme schemes if they are present, preserving the length of the poem precisely in order to preserve rhythm, even more precise length requirements per verse for many poems, etc. etc..  I simply know I will be quite bad at it sadly...  Like I look at the Ishikawa poem and translation, how how Carl realized he could write "her mouth on mine", completely omitting the 不意 but still maintaining the surprise of it perfectly without any words that convey that on their own...it's amazing...I can't do that...  

Poetry translation needs to be a lot more interpretive.  A lot more open to creativity.  A lot more "vibes" based, one could even say, to truly get across a poem.  I think the people who can do it are incredible.  I, on the other hand, am terrified for this section because I do not think I am one of those people (who can do it well at least).  I think the way Beichman frames it is beautiful.  A dialogue between languages.  I want to be able to do that.  I think it emphasizes an excellent, complete understanding of both languages, if you are able to do it well.  Maybe I'll be able to do it better after a few more years of Japanese experience (and I would probably need to read a lot more poems in general to be able to make the translation a poem of my own, as Pulvers emphasizes is essential)

Dawson