Viewing page 117 of 134
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
N.Y. Times Oct.21.84. A Possible Art [[image]] GALWAY KINNELL Galway Kinnell discusses the principles of translation in "American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work" (University of Illinois), a collection of interviews edited by Joe David Bellamy. A very "vexed" question, as they say: translation. When you try to disentangle certain understandings from the mother tongue it was written in and entangle them in another language, you may have lost - changed - so much that you wonder why you cannot just change everything. You know that for a moment the thing doesn't exist when you take it out of one language - it actually evaporates entirely before it takes body again in the next language - so maybe there's no connection at all between the one and the other. And it's now prevalent practice for poets who translate to feel quite free to use the original as a first draft, so to speak, and then to go on and write an original poem. But I have found in reading some translations that tried to be really faithful (even in some kind of plain, literal way) to the original, that much comes through...I've been terribly moved by Dante and Homer and be Rilke, and I don't know any of those languages. So something's happening. When I'm reading those translations, I'm also aware of feeling certain distress when I come to a line where I suspect the translator has gone off on his own. I feel some kind of maddening sense - what is this translator doing to me - leading me to think he's translating and then from time to time at his whim just putting in some of his own. Translation is a possible art and a nessary one, and I think that we do really want to know, insofar as it's possible, what Dante and others in the past thought and felt. The translator should try to understand how they thought and felt and try to completely suppress himself, or to put it the other way around, try to flow into that person he's translating and do it faithfully.
