© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 1456 TRANSLATION Yoder, Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America (); the iambs and trochees of anglophone verse would be Th e Transcendentalists, ed. J. Myerson ()—esp. unrecognizable to those who fi rst used the terms. essays by R. E. Burkholder and Myerson (Emerson), Th e form Keats employs, moreover, likewise derives F. C. Dahlstrand (Alcott), F. B. Dedmond (Chan- from foreign sources, as its Italianate name suggests: ning), R. N. Hudspeth (Fuller), M. Meyer (Th oreau), without the th-c. Petrarchan sonetto , there would D. Robinson (Cranch and Very); L. Buell, “Th e be no th-c. Eng. *sonnet celebrating a th-c. trans. American Transcendentalist Poets,” Columbia History from the ancient Gr. Indeed, the plethora of prosodic of American Poetry , ed. J. Parini (); Encyclopedia terms, in Eng. and other langs., that owe their existence of American Poetry: Th e Nineteenth Century , ed. E. L. to trans., ancient and mod., points to the constant Haralson ()—esp. H. R. Deese (Very), L. Hon- “crossbreeding and hybridization” (Osip Mandelstam) aker (Cranch), P. T. Kane (Emerson), J. Steele (Fuller), that shape the Western poetic trad. Trans. not only sus- K. Walter (Channing), E. H. Witherell (Th oreau), G. R. tain the cultural “afterlife” of poetic works, as Walter Woodall (Alcott); S. Morris, “ ‘Metre-Making’ Argu- Benjamin states in “Th e Task of the Translator”; they ments: Emerson’s Poems,” Cambridge Companion to generate future incarnations: “I want Ovid . and Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. J. Porte and S. Morris (); Catullus to live once more and I am not satisfi ed with B. Packer, “Th e Transcendentalists,” Cambridge History the historical Ovid . and Catullus,” Mandelstam in- of American Literature , ed. S. Bercovitch, v. (); sists in “Th e Word and Culture.” Th e Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism , ed. J. My- Translating poetry is, the adage runs, impossible. It erson, S. H. Petrulionis, and L. D. Walls (), esp. S. is also, so Keats’s sonnet suggests, imperative. Keats’s Morris, “Twentieth-Century Poetry.” mod. poem springs from a work available to him only ᭿ Websites : Th e Emerson Society: http://www.cas. through the ling. mediation of others, and such media- sc.edu/engl/emerson/; Th e Margaret Fuller Society: tion, when successful, provides the immediate shock http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~jasteele/index. of the new that catalyzes further poetic creation. Th is html/; Th e Ralph Waldo Emerson Institute: http:// paradox is key not just to the hist. of verse trans. but to www.rwe.org/; Th e Th oreau Society: http://www.tho its analysis and reception. Various theorists and prac- reausociety.org/; Th e Web of American Transcendental- titioners have seen poetic trans. as dominated by one ism: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/. of three guiding principles. Th e translator may aspire S. Morris to () semantic accuracy or () prosodic accuracy; or he or she may aim instead for the kind of () “creative TRANSLATION . “Till I heard Homer speak out transposition” (Jakobson), “raid” (Heaney), or “imita- loud and bold”: many readers know that the eighth tion” (Lowell) that relies on “the muse of translation” line of John Keats’s famous sonnet “On First Look- (Young) to generate new inspiration. ing into Chapman’s Homer” () does not read this “Th e clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times way. Why not? Th e legendary Gr. name fi ts the iambic more useful than the prettiest paraphrase,” Vladimir beat as neatly as the less venerable “Chapman” that Nabokov insists in the intro. to his notoriously clunky takes its place. Th rough this unexpected substitution, trans. of Alexander Pushkin’s Evgenij Onegin. His fellow Keats calls attention to the key role that trans. plays exile and self-translator Joseph Brodsky was equally in the transmission and creation of poetic culture. By adamant on the need for “prosodic verisimilitude”: the relying on a trans., Keats admits that he cannot read translator must endeavor to reproduce, above all, the the original Gr., as his university-educated precursors rhyme and meter of the original poem. Robert Low- and contemporaries might have. He also fl aunts his ell, whose Rus. “imitations” Nabokov abhorred, freely unorthodox taste by spurning Alexander Pope’s then- “dropped lines, moved lines, moved stanzas and altered standard trans. in favor of George Chapman’s less meter and intent” in his eff orts to avoid translatorly favored Ren. version. He raises, moreover, the vexed “taxidermy.” Which approach is correct? None, or all issue of the translator’s relationship to his or her poetic of the above. Poetic trans. can be no more “pure” than source: the poem’s climactic moment comes when the the various trads. it shapes and is shaped by: “Th ere speaker hears not Homer’s voice but that of his latter- is no answer, there are only the choices people make,” day translator. Heaney remarks pragmatically. Much discussion of po- Th e two Homers Keats presumably knew suggest etic trans. focuses on the problems inherent in each of other questions of poetic trans. Both Pope and Chap- these three emphases and on the continuous negotia- man employ *rhyme and *meter in transmitting the tion among them that constitutes so much translatorly Gr. text. Chapman uses the epic *fourteener, while practice. Pope draws on a tidier iambic *pentameter with tightly What is a literal trans.? Nabokov curtails all debates rhymed neoclassical *couplets: neither aims to repro- with brusque effi ciency: “Th e term ‘literal translation’ duce the dactylic *hexameter of the original. Would is tautological since anything but that is not truly a the results have been more faithful if they had? Th ough translation.” Poets from Pope to Paul Valéry have seen Eng.-lang. *versifi cation derives from cl. sources, the things diff erently. Pope deplores “servile, dull adher- ling. structure of Eng. can only approximate, through ence to the letter” (“Preface to the Iliad of Homer”), *accents, the long- and short-vowel alternation that while Valéry upends the old cliché (itself translated shapes ancient Gr. *prosody. Th e very verse structure from the It.) about translators as traitors: “Where po- of Eng. is, thus, an imperfect trans. of its early model: etry is concerned, fi delity to meaning alone is a kind of © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. TRANSLATION 1457 betrayal” (“Variations on the Eclogues ”). In “Th e Poetry erning the individual poetic work. Th e Polish poet of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry,” Jakobson and translator Stanisław Barańczak suggests something insists on the inseparability of meaning and form—in similar in his notion of the “semantic dominant”: “Th e both its ling. and prosodic embodiments—that marks translator’s decision process can be described precisely poetic speech. “Sense in its poetic signifi cance is not as the process of realizing what in the ‘poetry’ of the limited to meaning,” as Benjamin comments. Poetic original is the most characteristic, important and ir- lang. transforms the very notion of literal meaning by replaceable; in other words, it is the process of forming activating semantic possibilities in places we do not or- for oneself a system of priorities, one valid solely within dinarily think to look for them. If one goal of poetic the precincts of this and not another poem.” lang. is to shake the reader loose from the fetters of Barańczak’s own practice as translator and poet sug- literal mindedness, then a literal rendering of a poetic gests ways in which creative fi delity to the forms of text, such as Nabokov’s Onegin , runs the risk of violat- meaning and the meaning of forms can lead in turn to ing more than just the spirit in its fi delity to the letter. the “form creation” that Mandelstam sees as activating What is poetic lang. deprived of poetry? poetic speech. Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “One It follows from Jakobson’s argument that too Art” () marks a creative revision of yet another strict a reverence for poetic form poses its own dan- poetic transplant, the *villanelle. Barańczak’s Polish gers. Brodsky’s insistently structured trans. of his own version retains both the original’s intricate structure poems often do violence not just to the virtuosic forms and, to a startling degree, the sense that this structure he borrowed in many cases from adoptive Eng. fore- embodies. He cannot salvage the seemingly crucial bears from John Donne to W. H. Auden but also to rhyme of “master” / “disaster”; nor can he duplicate the the extraordinary Rus. originals. Moreover, metrical eloquent series of rhymes and half rhymes that Bishop structures carry diff erent semantic charges from lang. builds around this pairing. And it is a loss, but it is to lang. and culture to culture. Czesław Miłosz takes not a disaster. Even the literal meaning of the mov- his inspiration, metrical and otherwise, from Auden’s ingly imperfect rhymes he employs in the stanzas’ sec- New Year Letter for his own—still untranslated— ond lines shows how closely he keeps to the original “Traktat moralny” (Treatise on Morals, ). But the poem’s sense: “foreboding,” “keys,” “to fl ee,” “pang,” familiar rhythms of Auden’s iambic *tetrameter come “won’t return,” “in art.” Most important, he sustains as a shock when translated into a lang. where fi xed pen- the villanelle’s structuring patterns of continuity and ultimate stress lends itself far more readily to trochees.