I've always wondered just how much gets lost when poetry gets translated to another language. The translator must take tons of liberties in order for it to read properly in the language it's being translated too.
sure, but this is true to a lesser extent for prose too. translation is partly a rewrite.
think of the pun about the east pole in winnie the pooh, that's not gonna work in any language where poles and poles arent homonyms.
but of course, the songs/poems in winnie the pooh needed even more work. eg, the pun about the trotechnician being always Alec only works if the name Alec is a homonym of the front part of the word electrotechnician.
(examples from the hungarian translation of winnie the pooh)
Dante's Divine Trilogy is a good example of a poem with a very specific rhyme scheme (the terza rima) that only infrequently gets retained in (English) translation. It's been translated so many times by so many different people, and the vibe can potentially be wayy off from the original language - to the point where there's a whole separate wiki page for the different translations.
Anyways read Pinsky's version of Inferno, he does a good job of keeping close to the Italian without sounding stilted
I've always wondered just how much gets lost when poetry gets translated to another language. The translator must take tons of liberties in order for it to read properly in the language it's being translated too.
sure, but this is true to a lesser extent for prose too. translation is partly a rewrite.
think of the pun about the east pole in winnie the pooh, that's not gonna work in any language where poles and poles arent homonyms.
but of course, the songs/poems in winnie the pooh needed even more work. eg, the pun about the trotechnician being always Alec only works if the name Alec is a homonym of the front part of the word electrotechnician.
(examples from the hungarian translation of winnie the pooh)
Dante's Divine Trilogy is a good example of a poem with a very specific rhyme scheme (the terza rima) that only infrequently gets retained in (English) translation. It's been translated so many times by so many different people, and the vibe can potentially be wayy off from the original language - to the point where there's a whole separate wiki page for the different translations.
Anyways read Pinsky's version of Inferno, he does a good job of keeping close to the Italian without sounding stilted
My translation of the Comedia says that Italian is a lot easier to rhyme in so they didn't bother lmao