The title is click-bait; hope it worked.
Obviously, translation is possible. We do it all the time, and we are fortunate to have loads of translations that are useful, reliable, and good.
But is translation possible in every respect? The question is acute when it refers to poetry. According to Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost said that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” According to W.H. Auden, the closer a translation comes to poetry, the less faithful it is as a translation.[1] Are poetic forms incommensurable?
This may seem like a peculiarly modern question–I have just referred to two quintessentially modernist poets–but it is not. It was formulated already, in almost precisely the same form, by the Venerable Bede in the eighth century.
Actually, it wasn’t formulated as a question, but as a declaration. In Book 4 of the Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Bede tells the story of Caedmon and the beginnings of English poetry. In those days (that is, in the seventh century), it was common at soirées for the guests to take turns singing. But Caedmon didn’t know any songs. So when that time of the evening came, he would leave.
On one particular occasion, though, something funny happened after he had slipped out. He was asleep in the stable with the animals when a someone appeared to him in a dream and gave him the gift of song in the form of a hymn to the creator and his gift of creation.[2] Bede then quotes the hymn:
| Nunc laudare debemus auctorem regni caelestis | Now we ought to praise the maker of the heavenly kingdom | |
| potentiam Creatoris, et consilium illius | the power of the Creator, and his intention | |
| facta Patris gloriae: quomodo ille, | the deeds of the Father of glory: how he, | |
| cum sit aeternus Deus omnium miraculorum auctor exstitit; | since he is the eternal Lord of all miracles has been the author; | |
| qui primo filiis hominum | 5 | who first for the sons of men |
| caelum pro culmine tecti | heaven for a roof above | |
| dehinc terram custos humani generis | next, the earth, the keeper of the human-race | |
| omnipotens creavit. |
Or, perhaps to say that he “quotes” it is not quite right. For what you’ve just read is in Latin, and Caedmon didn’t sing in Latin. He sang in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. Thus Bede immediately appends the following comment:
Hic est sensus, non autem ordo ipse verborum quae dormiens ille canebat: neque enim possunt carmina, quamvis optime composita, ex alia in aliam linguam ad verbum sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri.
This is the meaning, but not the very arrangement of the words that he sang while sleeping. For songs, however well written, cannot be translated from one language into another world-for-word without the loss of their own beauty and dignity.
The translation is my own, with reference to those of L.C. Jane and J.E. King.
The “meaning” or “sense” (sensus) in another language, but not the poetic form: not a poem’s decus and dignitas (Jane renders the latter term “loftiness”), that is to say, what makes its language transcend; what makes its language a poem. To get that part, one must learn the language in which the poem was written.
Does that mean that translators should not worry about making their versions beautiful? No. Or, rather, some of them should, and some of them shouldn’t. It seems to me that, as Hillary Clinton might say, it takes a village to translate a poem. We need translations that strive for beauty and nobility in our own language, and we need translations that strive for the sense. And we need to read both together.
If we do that, we might not get the same experience as reading the poem in the original. But we will get something close: the expression of the thought in dignified language. And if we can get that–well, that’s not nothing.
References