page_title: Translation
section_title: Poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Translation / Literary translation / Poetry
caption_attribution_description: English: Douglas Hofstadter in Bologna, Italy
context_page_description: Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source language text by means of an equivalent target language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction between translating and interpreting; under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.
  A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source language words, grammar, or syntax into the target language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages. Translators, including early translators of sacred texts, have helped shape the very languages into which they have translated.
  Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator. More recently, the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated "language localization".
context_section_description: Views on the possibility of satisfactorily translating poetry show a broad spectrum, depending largely on the degree of latitude to be granted the translator in regard to a poem's formal features (rhythm, rhyme, verse form, etc.). Douglas Hofstadter, in his 1997 book, Le Ton beau de Marot, argued that a good translation of a poem must convey as much as possible not only of its literal meaning but also of its form and structure (meter, rhyme or alliteration scheme, etc.).
  The Russian-born linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson, however, had in his 1959 paper "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation", declared that "poetry by definition [is] untranslatable". Vladimir Nabokov, another Russian-born author, took a view similar to Jakobson's. He considered rhymed, metrical, versed poetry to be in principle untranslatable and therefore rendered his 1964 English translation of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in prose.
  Hofstadter, in Le Ton beau de Marot, criticized Nabokov's attitude toward verse translation. In 1999 Hofstadter published his own translation of Eugene Onegin, in verse form.
  Gregory Hays, in the course of discussing Roman adapted translations of ancient Greek literature, makes approving reference to some views on the translating of poetry expressed by David Bellos, an accomplished French-to-English translator. Hays writes:
  Among the idées reçues [received ideas] skewered by David Bellos is the old saw that "poetry is what gets lost in translation." The saying is often attributed to Robert Frost, but as Bellos notes, the attribution is as dubious as the idea itself. A translation is an assemblage of words, and as such it can contain as much or as little poetry as any other such assemblage. The Japanese even have a word (chōyaku, roughly "hypertranslation") to designate a version that deliberately improves on the original.
caption: Hofstadter
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:06:04 01:59:50", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7449", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "484", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "600"}