Magin_Edward-thesis

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2.2 On translating poetry
The opinions and attitudes concerning the translation of poetry vary widely, from
it cannot be done and therefore should be left alone to the opposite extreme, it is possible
and should be done. Most scholars minimally agree that a translation of a poem is never
truly a translation. It can never be to a reader what the original poem was to the original
audience. Raffel (1988:12-13) states that “no two languages” are the same
phonologically, syntactically or lexically. Neither do any two languages have “the same
literary history,” nor the same prosody. He writes, “the impossibility of exact re-creation
does not preclude the very real possibility of approximation – and it is precisely on
approximation that good translation of poetry must be built” (Raffel 1988:12-13). While
Lewes agrees that translation of poetry is approximation, he expresses a more doubtful
opinion as to its success in his autobiography The Life of Goethe:
Several times in these pages I have felt called upon to protest against the
adequacy of all translation of poetry. In its happiest efforts, translation is
but approximation: and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may
be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the
original. It may be a good poem; it may be a good imitation of another
poem; it may be better than the original; but it cannot be an adequate
reproduction; it cannot be the same thing in another language, producing
the same effect on the mind. And the cause lies deep in the nature of
poetry…The meanings of a poem and the meanings of the individual
words may be reproduced; but in a poem meaning and form are as
indissoluble as soul and body; and the form cannot be reproduced. The
effect of poetry is a compound of music and suggestion; this music and
this suggestion are intermingled in words, to alter which is to alter the
effect. For words in poetry are not, as in prose, simple representations of
objects and ideas: they are parts of an organic whole – they are tones in
the harmony; substitute other parts, and the result is a monstrosity, as if an
arm were substituted for a wing; substitute other tones or semitones, and
you produce a discord. Words have their music and their shades of
meaning too delicate for accurate reproduction in any other form; the
suggestiveness of one word cannot be conveyed by another. Now all
translation is of necessity a substitution of one word for another: the
substitute may express the meaning, but it cannot accurately reproduce the
music, nor those precise shades of suggestiveness on which the delicacy
and beauty of the original depend. (Lewes 1864:466)