4/20 Reflections

    Non Omnis Moriar, a poem that my fellow students in the MFA should know well, and now that I think about it, a large reason for why I decided that I would never willingly translate poetry in a language that I can understand. Knowing explicitly that in order to mimic the rhyming structure and meter of the original, things must be changed or added, or to maintain the semantic meaning and word order structure and meter had to be thrown aside, in a way almost completely dampens the joy I would have had reading it, the same way I enjoyed reading Boris's poems earlier this month. A thought that is only amplified by reading The Art of Losing, and the admittance that the translation of poetry is impossible. The ignorant reader who has no idea about the source material or the context it was written in is divorced from the struggles of the translator who is forced to make difficult decisions time and time again, repeated over each word of a poem. Then there is also the issue of necessary information; how wildly important context is in the case of Non Omnis Moriar, and even haikus, for that matter. How does the translator convey in a translation everything that is needed to be conveyed, while juggling decisions about what must be left behind? 

    Likewise in the Times article where two different translations were published in the same time frame, did the reactions to first time readers of Zuzanna truly differ that much? There are of course other ramifications of this double publishing, but without the context of the original poem, details about the structure and the context, I find it doubtful that any reader can make a precise judgement on either translation greater in detail then just stating that these nouns in this line elicit a certain emotional response, or relate to these lines here. It speaks to the reversed relationships between the informed translator who must bridge all these gaps between the reader and the writer, the language and the meaning, and the reader, who oftentimes does not even know there is a gap in their knowledge to begin with, happy to keep on walking forward through the translation blissfully unaware. A translator is lucky when they do not need to think about traversing the long and thorny path of translating a poem and all the problems it entails, and a reader is lucky when they know enough to enjoy a translation, but not enough that they would empathize with the problems the translator faced.

Steven