Fixed a grammatical error in yesterday's entry: from "if only the glass were half-full" to "if the glass only were half-full." The first sounds a little better to my ear, but as I used to drum into high school juniors when I was teaching ACT prep, DON'T TRUST YOUR EARS! They haven't a clue - the ears, I mean, but of course also the juniors.
I have been working on a villanelle for - what, two years, maybe - with the 'if only' motif: "you speak if only you are spoken to// and write if only I have written you." Ungrammatical too, alas. Ah, the rigors of iambic pentameter. Poems that can't get finished are signs that they SHOULDN'T be finished, probably.
Robert Bly has a new volume of international translations out. He has an interesting collaborative relationship when he doesn't know the language very well: he works with a translator and presumably that person helps with shades of meaning but then Bly works on the art of the poem in English. The review article gave a little snippet from Rilke translated by Bly and by someone else to showcase his poetics in the comparison.
One of my friends - let us call him A. - gave me a volume of Rilke a couple of years ago and I was so intrigued by the poems that I went off to find them in the original German. A revelation! - so far from word-for-word! Ridiculous analog: if I say "la porte est ouverte" and you translate "I feel a presence at the door" I think you are overlaying YOUR interpretation onto my words and I don't think it's a proper translation.
In short, issues like this are why I'm planning to study Polish: so I can read Symborska in the original. Despite all the post-capitalist gobbledygook I wrote in my fellowship application...
Posted by otto0114 at June 30, 2004 09:24 AM