[AskPhilosophers] Translation
Désiré Arnold
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Nate Yarinsky
you can translate between. There are extensive guidelines for
translating text. Each of them, relative to the languages, are time
consuming and complex. It is better to learn the language. Some
poetry is impossible to translate and receive the same message. Poets
often translate to send the same message or send a different one.
Usually the poetry has to be altered to convey the same message. Not
to be trivial, there is a factor you overlooked. The language barrier
often presents cultural differences. The key to understanding the
true message of the poem is understanding the translation and the
cultural differences. If something lost in translation then the
translator has failed to convey the original message. That is when
charades comes in. Poets are often translators and therefore artists.
A great example, a poem translated and modified by Ezra Pound:
The River-Merchant's Wife
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
This was originally written in the 1300's in china and later
translated by Ezra Pound. The message that was sent then is different
than our perception today. Modern humans have a slightly different
perspective. The key is to understand it from the perspective of the
original reader. Just like a writer today manipulates the readers
mind; a writer then did the same.
> A question on translation- is translation at all possible? If I take a poem,
> and compare it with any translation of the poem, is the poem still the same
> poem just in another language? Or did the translator create a new poem (with
> the creative input of reading the original poem). What does translation then
> mean? What is the work of a translator and how can you educate/teach
> "translation"? What gets lost in a translation, the essence of the words?
> What is a translated poem then- words without their essence? I wonder if
> there is something like "translation" at all. I believe a translator is in
> the same sense an artist than the poet itself.
>
> --
GW
Regarding the conceptual problem of determining whether what we speak of as a translation of a poem might not be more precisely thought of as a new poem perhaps based on or inspired by the other one in the different language - or the problem of what we really mean when we call call the one text a translation of the other - I must think of the vagueness of language and the near inevitability of borderline cases that come between the clear prototypes of so many concepts. The classical example are concepts like 'tall' - Labron James is tall; Mickey Rooney was short. But between these clear cases there are borderline cases, and no clear non-arbitrary line to be drawn that will determine when someone starts or stops being tall.
The same seems to be the case here with 'translation': 'my cup in on my desk' seems to be equivalent to, even synonymous with, 'meine Tasse steht auf dem Schreibtisch' - they express the same proposition or have the same meaning. Just a 'cup' seems a synonym of 'Tasse': in any sentence, to say 'cup' in English is just to say 'Tasse' in German; two words expressing the same concept. And 'Buch' (book) would clearly not be a translation of 'cup': those two words express different concepts. So a clear case of non-translation. Your poetry example contains propositions and concepts that can be translated with synonyms; others that can be translated only by different from overlapping concepts and propositions - as spirit in English and Geist in German have both differences and similarities: to don’t express the same, but analogous concepts. If the analogy in a particular use is strong, then we can also speak of a 'good translation', and if not, then not. But already that means something different than translation-as-synonymy or strict equivalence. Perhaps in some instances, you might find some that are not even translatable with analogical concepts (Geist and spirit are analogical in that they express similarities and differences). A strong analogy would be here: given the meaning-in-context, which provides the criterion of relevance, the similarities are highlighted and the differences recede to the background.
The 'feeling' of a poem is largely a function of the form and the sound (music). A limerick produces a certain effect in English; a German translation of the limerick would thus have to produce the same or an analogous effect, and thus either translate the verse form entirely or find a German equivalent that produced the same set of possible intelligible effects. So would add that to theory/hypothesis.
Same with sounds: hard sounds in German (k, ch,
etc) and certain meters correspond (like different kinds of music) to different
emotional states - equivalents or analogs to sound and rhythm would thus have
to be found.
So my hypothesis would be:
For all poetic texts, a rendition of, say, German language text G into English poetic language text E is a translation of G into E only to the extent that the propositions and concepts expressed in G are rendered with the synonymous or relatively strongly analogous concepts and propositions in E, and the poetic form in G is rendered in E in such as way so as to produce the same possible set of synonymous or relatively strongly analogous emotional effects in the readers of E as those of the readers of G, and the sound and rhythm of G is rendered by sounds in E so as to evoke the same or similar emotional atmosphere.