Translating Poetry: A thorny problem

[mount_oregano]

How do you translate words that exist in one language but not in another? Or ideas and animals specific to one culture or location? And what about puns?

In this article, I use some of my haiku to illustrate four strategies – compensation, paraphrase, adaptation, and wordplay – that sometimes work and sometimes fail more or less utterly. Read “Translating Poetry: A thorny problem” at Book Machine.

— Sue Burke

Comments

[cmcmck]

Funny thing is that when reading translated Italian poetry, I often find I can do it better due to being an Italian speaker I suppose and therefore able to get some of the nuances which some translators seem to miss. I find myself reading it back into Italian then back again into English.

This might also be why I rarely read in translation if I have the language.

[mount_oregano]

When I write a poem and translate it, I wind up with two different poems. Other bilingual poets say the same thing. Traductor traidore.