Friday, October 30, 2009








Expanding on my comment that translators should consider "...what poet does the original correspond to..." in the target language, and regard that as "the language register you can use": i call this Alibi Theory. So far i have (lightly) nominated Hopkins to translate Rilke into, Mina Loy for Tsvetaeva, Browning for Mandelshtam. Maybe Housman for the neo-classical side of Pessoa. Anyway, for what it's worth--even though i know many poet-translators consider the qualities of the poet they are translating, part of the reason they are doing so. Because those things don't already exist in your own language.

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