A Log Cabin Out of Stone: - Dartmouth College

Translating the Invective
While the difficulties mentioned apply to any sort of poetry, there are further
difficulties in translating invective. The difficulties begin at the verbal level with
problems in rendering particular words and phrases, but extend into conveying a whole
invective context. To understand and convey the peculiar power relationships among the
all the various characters in the poems is very tricky.
First, translating an insult is at the core of invective poetry. Gregory Rabasa
believes in translating the purpose of words, rather than the formal equivalences. In his
essay No Two Snowflakes are Alike published in 1989, he says,
In English when we insult someone’s maternal descent, we call the person
a ‘son of a bitch.’ While in Spanish he is an hijo de puta, ‘son of a
whore.’ The closest in English to this latter is the archaic “whoreson,”
which even if understood, would not arouse much more than a ripple of
indignation. 20
Rabasa’s understanding of insults is very important in translating the epodes. Because
translating the words simply will not translate the insult, it is definitely not enough.
Furthermore, we cannot translate the insult unless we understand what is being said. The
problem that Rabasa raises with his example is that when calling someone a ‘son of a
bitch’ we are not trying to say literally that we think they were born from a dog—we are
trying to insult the person. Since in Spanish, people don’t insult women by calling them
bitches (female dogs), “whore” is a better term to choose. It really is less important what
the words are, the phrase is what carries the meaning. Translating the hijo de puta into
English would sound awkward if we were to call someone a “son of a whore” or a
20 Rabassa, Gregory “No Two Snowflakes Are Alike: A Translation as Metaphor.” In Craft of Translation
Ed. John Biguenet and Peter Schult, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3.
23