Poetry in Translation

Dernièrement, nous sommes tombés par hasard sur un site Internet intitulé Poetry in Translation  qui donne gratuitement accès à des œuvres poétiques traduites en anglais à
partir d'une douzaine de langues dont le français. Le site héberge un
énorme choix d'œuvres en  anglais, avec par exemple une anthologie de
1.400 citations de Shakespeare, classées par thèmes. La section
française propose des traductions anglaises des œuvres de Guillaume
Apollinaire, de Charles Baudelaire, de François de Chateaubriand, de
Pierre Corneille et de bien d'autres.

Voici la suite de cette explication, rédigée par M. Anthony Kline, mathématicien, poète et traducteur, qui anime ce site, riche en contenu littéraire :

The ‘Poetry In Translation’ Website –
Background
and Intentions

           Though Robert
Frost, the great American poet, half-humorously interpreting Dante’s comments
in the Convivio, suggested that
‘poetry is what is lost in translation’, the authors involved with the Poetry
In Translation website clearly believe that the truth of the matter is somewhat
more complex than Frost’s witty statement allows.

          The website, created in 2000, was
designed with the intention of making as many key texts of Western poetry as possible
freely available, both online and offline, to the world-wide audience. In order
that replication of the material could be rendered free for non-commercial use
in modern language, the authors set out to re-translate selected key authors,
either through whole works or at least in sufficiently large selections to
allow an in-depth appreciation of those authors rather than through the limited
snapshots achieved by multi-author anthologies.

          The website creators regard
translation as a hugely important task that each generation must undertake to
ensure that the richness of past culture flows into the present, inspiring and
energising future literary activity. True, as Frost identifies, there are
elements of felicitous usage, of music, in the texts of a given language that
can rarely be replicated in another tongue. But translation communicates
something other than the original music. It is a re-interpretation and in the
same breath a re-transmission of the meaning and intent of the original. A
translation that fails to communicate meaning and intent, feeling and response,
as well as a new music, derived from the original, will fail of its aim. Translation
that succeeds brings new perspectives and new ideas to another and current mode
of language. Frost, like many another poet, found his own work enriched by his
appreciation of foreign and even alien streams of poetry. Translation is an
essential task, which also conveys a meeting of cultures in the predilections
of the translators.

          It is not enough, the website authors
believe, to preserve and defend a language and a culture. It is necessary to
develop and broaden it, extending its scope and widening its embrace. It is not
a given that the rich Western culture of the past, including its poetry, will
survive as a living force. It is not even a given that its existing languages
will survive and without massive alteration. English as a language has
benefited inestimably from inflows of words, ideas and modes of feeling
deriving from the mainstream European culture and from elsewhere, take the
Elizabethan imports as an example, or Ezra Pound’s ‘discovery’ for major poetry
of Occitan, Chinese and Middle English sources. Latin and Classical Greek are
dead languages, which have been and still are vitally incorporated within
modern Western culture. Translation is T. S. Eliot’s ‘compound ghost’. It is
Petrarch’s ‘other voice sounding’. It is the blending of dead mastery and
living skill in the creation of a new spirit and another manner of speaking.

          It could be argued that most of the
works translated already exist elsewhere in previous translations. Often this
is indeed true, but the works are rarely available, especially to students, in
a free and fully modern translation, and where the material can be swiftly replicated
in all major digital formats, and extracts merged with the reader’s own work,
without concerns over copyright restrictions. Freeing the word is a key intent
of the website creators, and in keeping with that aim the website is free of
all marketing and advertising material, and sets out to raise no revenue, other
than that realised by donations from its readership. It indirectly set out to
show that self-publishing is a reality, that editors and publishers, other than
the authors themselves, are not required to achieve its aims, that the means of
production are in the hands of the creator, and that the costs of displaying
and distributing literature, at all hours of day and night, to the world, are
now negligible, through the all-embracing medium of the worldwide web. In the
thirteen years since its creation the website has grown steadily in breath of
offering, visitor numbers, and is now a key web resource for many students in
particular.

          Poetry In Translation is not aimed at
the erudite reader. It is not aimed at any specific ‘market’, since the concept
of a market is alien to that of a freely available literature. It is there for
any purpose and for any readership. It aims, in Emerson’s words, to be ‘a
better mousetrap’ and for its presence to be signalled by unpaid search engine
and word of mouth alone. Clearly it has only succeeded by offering a worthwhile
experience. I have  concentrated on providing a wealth of translations
from Latin, the modern Western languages, and Chinese. George Theodoridis has
concentrated on the Greek Classical playwrights. A few works have been created
with other collaborators.

          The main authors and translators are
not primarily linguists. Their qualifications are the ability to write well in
English, combined with an excellent grasp of written literature in the source
languages and the associated cultural context. That doesn’t guarantee either of
the site creators could ask their way to the nearest rail station in any
specific town, and almost certainly not in Latin or Classical Greek! The test
of translation is always the end result. If a translation lives on the page, it
has achieved its primary aim. If not it fails regardless of its purity,
accuracy or erudition. As any reader of academic translations knows, a higher
degree is not a guarantee of the ability to write well and attractively in the
native language. Poets often prove the best translators of poetry, due to their
instinct and ability for fresh creation and interpretation. Edmund Spenser,
Christopher Marlowe. Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell are prime examples in English
of that claim.

          In surveying European literature in
particular the creators have tried to focus on those writers who were highly
innovative, highly influential and highly distinctive voices. Inevitably they
cannot produce a totally representative view of thousands of years of culture,
and that is not their aim. Too much representation and they would be converging
on being a Wikipedia of literature and diluting the impact. Nevertheless they
have sought to represent the poetic tradition such that if the present day
culture vanished, key elements of the previous culture would be retrievable. So,
for example, the website without the French Symbolist poets or the Russian
Silver Age would be unthinkable, without the modern Spanish poets impoverished,
without Goethe and Rilke marginalised, and without Dante and Petrarch devoid of
the two supporting arches of the Medieval Renaissance and European cultural
development. The presence of the major Latin authors and the Greek Classical
playwrights, the foundations of complex Western literature, are taken as given.

          The website also contains original
poetry and critical essays, and has not hesitated to stray outside of the
poetic canon in focussing on very great but neglected authors, such as
Chateaubriand, and outside of the strict definition of English translation by,
for example, modernising Chaucer, compiling quotations from Shakespeare, and
rendering John Donne in prose to aid understanding. Nor have the authors
constrained themselves to translating rhyming or metric verse by corresponding forms.
Prose versions and free-verse are preferred where they communicate meaning more
clearly, for example prose in the case of the Divine Comedy and its complex
sentences, a mixture of rhyming and unrhymed verse in the case of the Russians.

          If the website possesses an over-
riding purpose it is in the transmission of meaning. We value the great poets
not merely because they created beauty through language, but because they
captured something essential in the development of the culture and their times,
its and our meaning. Reading great poetry should lead the reader not only to
link elements of the culture together and see the pattern in the round and in
depth, but also tempt the reader to explore the sources, understand the
original authors’ context and environment, wander history, expand horizons, and
comprehend that ignorance of one’s past fosters ignorance of one’s present and
future. The website creators are not specifically Europeans, they consider
themselves citizens of the modern world, but their primary language, English,
and their cultural determinants arose in Europe and through Europe, and they
place great value on the tradition established in Greece and Rome, and subsequently
transmitted throughout the continent and eventually the world, which led to
sophisticated democracy, a developed moral and legal structure, and the
realisation of the free citizen within the bounds of a fundamentally decent
state.

          Though never wholly realised that is
the ideal which the site creators believe is most conducive to the survival of
a free and unfettered literature, expressing the whole range of views and
emotions at play within society. It may be argued that Ovid, Dante, Goethe,
Pushkin to name but a few, lived in societies far different from that ideal.
That is true, but all those writers, even if not subscribing to that exact
ideal or rather differing in their interpretation of its implementation,
expressed a broad humanism and empathy, and expressed enduring truths which
transcend the place and time, and point to the development of Western art
towards that ideal. They were individuals, and expressed Individualism in one
of its highest forms, poetry. The website creators wish to see that tradition
alive and vigorous in the societies of the future, and in a small way are
seeking to keep alive the flame and further the realm of literature.

          The website will have achieved its deepest
impact if its worldwide reach (it is regularly accessed in more than one
hundred and fifty countries, and occasionally in many more) allows, say, the
African or Asian child with developing English language skills and limited
facilities but with some kind of access to the web, increasingly through mobile
phone, or tablet, to read the greatest Western literature in a clear and
straightforward manner without being expert or qualified or erudite. ‘Anyone
can play’: that is the message of the internet, and the website. And anyone can
contact the authors politely, who will always try to respond simply and
helpfully to any interest shown in poetry and literature, without regard to
age, race, gender, beliefs, or country, since we are all one species, and all
need each other to survive the challenges of the future.

          These comments have strayed well
beyond the seemingly modest achievement of the website itself, in order to
re-iterate the website creators’ primary vision, that only by developing and
extending the scope and reach of a language and a culture, in their case
English, and the culture founded primarily in Europe, can that language and its
culture hope to provide the flexibility of meaning and application that will
support future linguistic needs and guarantee its survival in a world where
little is guaranteed.

          The website will remain free to all,
and any reader uncertain of whether its material can be used for a given
purpose, need only contact the authors. Our mutual literary heritage is too
valuable to be left in the hands of those who view it primarily as a commodity
and only secondarily as the touchstone of our essential humanity.

A.S. Kline 18th May 2013