translation – Page 5 – don't confuse the narrator

like it or not

I started writing this blog back in 2007 and there are currently 875 published posts. At the beginning I didn’t tell anyone I was blogging and the readership grew very slowly. Even now, although there are usually a few people who press the ‘like’ button each time I update, the posts don’t inspire many comments.
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transcreation

Catalonia coastline — Catalonian coastline

After I posted about poetry translation last week, Ben came by and left a comment. So off I went to look at his blog, the recently started Project Poesía, an Anglo-Catalán poetry project.

I started tinkering with one of the pieces he had there, making a translation based on La Barceloneta, an original by Alexandre Plana; Ben has now added my draft translation to his blog as a guest post. (You can also read the original and Ben’s translation)

I’ve always thought that you need to feel some empathy with a poem to make a good translation. But now I’m beginning to wonder what happens if you feel too much empathy.
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drafts and re-drafts

scarlet seeds of iris foetidissima — all alike; all unique

Years ago, after talking to the Catalán poet Joan Margarit, I wrote down in my notebook:

Form, metre, rhyme etc. are superficial elements of a poem. What gets translated is something more essential.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry translation, and I’m trying to work out what that “more essential” something is.

It’s clear – to me at least – that the complexity of poetry, its inherent weaving of different linguistic techniques, makes it impossible to translate everything: the only way to get an exactly equivalent poem would be to repeat the original. (At which point, it is probably relevant to mention the Borges short story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.)
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resisting temptation

Single tree in field — outstanding in the field

I have a difficult few days ahead, working on a translation dealing with geotechnical investigation surveys. The difficulty is not the translation, but the temptations involved: I must not talk of experts in the field using cutting-edge technology to lay the foundations for success.

And I probably shouldn’t complain that the work is boring. (Though it certainly isn’t earth-shatteringly interesting.)

high days and holy days

I’m not a great one for remembering and celebrating the International-Day-of-This and the World-Day-of-That, but this week there were two such days I felt were worth noting: Monday was the feast of St Jerome, patron saint of translators, and Thursday was National Poetry Day in the UK.
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