Translating Poetry - Sloane

 Translating Poetry

    If the key to successfully translating literature is to preserve the effect of the original words rather than strictly capturing the literal meaning of them, then translation's purpose in the realm of poetry seems to be preserving the experience of how the original text is read. Faithfulness to literal wording seems even less important here than in literature. However, there's that added element of sound and rhythm that complicates the process. Janine Beichman's faithfulness to the tanka syllabic structure in her translations (5-7-5-7-7) is impressive to me. The original poet was confined only by those syllables when composing their original work, but keeping yourself limited to that structure as a translator essentially doubles the difficulty of the task at hand. Now you must not only pick the correct number of beats while maintaining a pleasant rhythm, but also have to choose from the limited number of ways you have to express the original work's sentiment, while paying attention to tone, rhyme, etc... I understand why there is so much debate about how best to accomplish this. I think I would prefer to keep the sentiment of the original alive rather than sacrifice it for flow and rhyme if I had to choose, but I know that you also don't want to sound awkward or lose all sense of melody. 

Sloane