My curious foray into poetry translation
I was generally an excellent student, but my worst and most disliked subject was foreign languages. I’m not sure why, except that I hated having to memorize lists of words. I took Spanish because I was told it was easier than French – certainly the spelling was easier. But I still found it difficult, although I learned enough to get by at a fairly undemanding high school level. By now, I’ve forgotten almost all the Spanish I ever learned, which wasn’t much in the first place.
However, I recall that one day when I was in high school I resolved to translate a poem into Spanish. This was an exceptionally odd decision of mine, and it was definitely not an assignment. Granted, I loved poetry. But not only did I hate learning Spanish and knew relatively little, but translating poetry is exceptionally difficult and one needs exceptional skills to do it. I didn’t have those skills, to say the least.
Why the thought even occurred to me is a great puzzlement. I must have been bored that day, and was probably procrastinating about doing my other schoolwork. It was a weekend, most likely a Sunday. The challenge must have appealed to me. At any rate, armed with a large Spanish/English dictionary – which I would need for about 80% of the words – I proceeded to try.
What poem did I choose to translate? That’s very strange as well; it was A. E. Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young.” Granted, I liked the poem and still do. But it’s not an easy poem even in English, with some archaic words, and I also had to follow the rhyme scheme. But I went about doing it.
I never knew if my translation made any sense once I was done, because I never showed it to anyone who could speak Spanish. Sadly, I’ve lost most of my translation of the poem. But the other night, while looking for something else, I found a remnant of three stanzas. And so I’ve decided to put them here, and anyone who can speak Spanish (or anyone at all, for that matter) can give an opinion on them.
First, here’s the original poem in English. It has seven stanzas, and I translated them all. But only the last three of my translation survive. Here are those three in Housman’s original English:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
And here’s my translation. I believe that it’s probably missing some of the accent marks, alas, and I don’t know enough Spanish now to have a clue where the missing ones should be:
No aumentaras el gran numero
De estos con honor pasajero
Corredores de quien fama salio
Y antes del hombre, el nombre murio.Pongas, antes de marchitan los ecos
El pie rapido en los bordes lejos
Y leventas al dintel bajo
La taza defendiste por su trabajo.Y a esa cabeza de laurels coronado
Leventaran par aver el cuerpo de debilado
Y, en los rizos, la guirnalda sera
Más breve que lo de una niña.
I tried to translate back to English what I had written, and this is what I thought at the time that I’d said:
You will not increase the large number
Of those with fleeting [or transient] honor,
Runners from whom fame departed
And before the man, the name died.Put, before the echoes fade
The fleet foot on the far border
And raise to the low lintel
The cup defended by your work.And to that head with laurels crowned
Will flock to see the weakened body
And, on the curls, the garland will be
That is briefer than that of a girl.
And what does handy online Google Translate say that I wrote? Why, this:
You will not increase the great number
Of these with fleeting honor
Runners from whom fame came
And before man, the name died.Place, before the echoes fade
The swift foot on the far-off edges
And raise to the low lintel
The cup you defended for its work.And that head crowned with laurels
They will rise to see the weakened body
And, in the curls, the garland will be
Shorter than a girl’s.
Not half bad, I think.
And by the way, although Google says “shorter” rather than “briefer” in that last line, when I ask for the word in Spanish for “brief,” it gives me “breve.” So breve apparently means either short or brief.
Your likes and dislikes were a mirror image of mine. I liked Spanish. I had been to Mexico the summer before I started high school, so I saw the utility of learning the language. From high school on, I disliked poetry, courtesy of the Junior Literary Critic model being forced down my throat. Though I did remember some poetry from junior high—a few lines from Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Robert Frost’s evocations of the New England landscape enchanted me, as they described what I had seen with my very own eyes.
Then there was Mad Magazine’s parody of Joyce Kilmer’s Trees. Junior high memory:
Schlitz? 🙂 Well, not today.
My Spanish teacher occasionally brought in a tape recorder—which was an expensive machine in those days—for us to learn some songs in Spanish. Besame Mucho, for example. In retrospect, I wish he had done that more often. A language lab with songs on tape w the lyrics to read would have been good.
My aunt gave my sister some record albums for Christmas presents–presents that I made much more use of than my sister did. I liked my aunt’s gift of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado, and asked and received a bunch of G&S albums for my 10th birthday—songs which I learned and still know today. My aunt also gave my sister an album of Cuban music. The album is long gone, but I still remember some songs from that album. Toda Un Vida, for example. One song I remember, Cubano de pura raza soy.. (I’m a Cuban of the pure race), I cannot find on YouTube. Perhaps the title is so offensive these days that PC deleted it. (A local Mexican station bills itself as “musica de la raza” —music of the race. race music??).
I took two classes in grad school that involved translating poems. One was a course on translation. It was extremely interesting. We actually all worked with the same poem: a Chinese poem. None of us knew any Chinese. (We were all students of some foreign language from different departments.) We discussed what made poetry, poetry — whether it had to do with rhyme, meter, tone, imagery, etc. and how that factors into translating a poem. Ultimately, we had to translate the poem into the language we were studying.
The other class was a theater class. We had to translate a poem into… something. One student in the class translated it into dance. I translated it into Hebrew. We had to write a paper about our process and the decisions we made. The professor liked mine so much, she asked to share my translation and my paper with the poet. I’m not sure how GOOD a translation it was for a native Hebrew speaker. An Israeli might have thought it was goofy or stilted or just plain bad. But the process was interesting for me. The earlier translation class helped a lot in thinking about how to not just translate the poem literally, but to translate it into a poetic structure of the languages your translating from and to, and to think about how to express the poetic imagery of original in less literal ways.
Neo:
Not half bad, I think.
Agreed. When your translation gets translated back by a third party, and the retranslated is close to the original—not half bad, indeed.
My experience w Google Translate in Spanish is that it is not bad.
I had to take 2 semesters of Spanish in order to graduate with a B.A. in Mathematics. I couldn’t understand the logic of that at the time. I had taken 2 years of Latin in High School and I still remember much more Latin than Spanish and I find Latin much more interesting. I wonder if I willed myself to subconsciously forget Spanish in an act of defiance for having to take the courses.
I have been reading a lot in the last 2 years about how men (especially American men) think about the Roman Empire more than would most people would have expected. Does anyone know if there is any truth to that or is it just a hoax? And why do men think of the ancient Empire
Anytime an automated translator is referenced, I inevitably remember the old joke from when they were first being invented. A translation of the proverb “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” from Russian became “the vodka is good but the meat is rotten.”
I hadn’t actually expected to find a Google hit on that subject, but this was the top of the list!
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/1997/10/16/a-gift-of-tongues
“JOKES about the uselessness of machine translation abound. The Central Intelligence Agency was said to have spent millions trying to program computers to translate Russian into English. The best it managed to do, so the tale goes, was to turn the famous Russian saying “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” into “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.” Sadly, this story is a myth. But machine translation has certainly produced its share of howlers. Since its earliest days, the subject has suffered from exaggerated claims and impossible expectations.”
Long ago on a gaming forum a Argentinian man told me Google translation isn’t perfect but at least geys you on the right path. I use it often as need to translation of historical data.
In high school thought learning Russian would be a good idea, kept that idea for some time but never tried, learning outlet being the big stop.
Thats very good ive tried babelfish is a correspondence with a dutch correspondent once he wasnt impressed
There are ideomatic elements that dont readily translate there are some who have done english versions of certain novels better than their origin manuscript and vice versa for volpi garcia vasquez and others along those lines
My worst subject by far was poetry.
The lowest exam test grade I ever got (from 1st grade through grad school) was a grade of 18% on a poetry exam in my high school English class.
A perfect score would have been 100%
A passing score would have been 65%
I got an 18%.
I will never forget this.
Ultimately I did get a decent grade in this English class, but only because we moved on to different topics – like literature – far removed from poetry.
As for foreign languages, I did OK; took French and German. I found them far easier than poetry but alas, I have forgotten almost all of French or German.
Speaking of never forgetting and my dislike of poetry I still remember a few lines of a poem I had to memorize in 5th grade (I was 10 years old):
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flags to April’s breeze unfurled
Here once embattled farmers stood
Firing the shot heard round the world.”
I have no idea why I remember these few lines of that poem. Maybe I was too young to realize I didn’t like poetry.
It’s really weird some of the stuff we remember; stuff like this:
“Crest toothpaste has been shown to be an effective decay preventive dentrifice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.”
The above was a TV commercial for Crest toothpaste that was constantly being shown on TV when I was a kid.
Why I remember this baffles me.
But trust me, the Crest commercial voice-over said those exact words.
Not bad as a literal translation, but not exactly poetry.
And sometimes a little off the mark. ” . . .de quien fama salio” for example I would translate as “. . .de quein salio la fama,” and even then it feels to me as if “. . .de quien superada la fama” is closer to the sense of the line. The verb “sailir” is more like “to go out, exit.” Think of the bilingual EXIT signs in stores: EXIT – SALE.
Or even “corredores que perdieron la fama,” or “corredores que perdieron la carrera a la fama.”
But it’s easy to get caught up in the weave and forget the tapestry.
John Tyler: God help me, I remember that Crest commercial, too. If asked to quote it I might have gotten a few words wrong but basically it has remained in my memory these 60+ years just as you have it.
Somebody stuck “LS/MFT” in a comment thread elsewhere about the LGBetc. abbreviation. I was not the only one who recognized it.
Such a store of important knowledge is going to die with us boomers….
Regarding the translation of poetry: after long consideration and frustration, I have accepted that it’s intrinsically impossible. It was a liberating conclusion. Now I simply evaluate the translation (into English) as an English poem, and don’t worry if it doesn’t seem to me to have the merit that those who read it in the original attribute to it.
Crest toothpaste?
==
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwu8S6Ekx9w&t=20s
Please see this previous post of mine about the value of memorizing poetry. This post is also relevant, as well as this one.
Gringo:
Thanks for the Mad Magazine poem. I remember reading one to my Mom, who responded, “The real one is this,” and she recited part of it.
As for the “raza pura” song, is it this possibly it…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NRbxrL7k6KE
? It’s sung by a Puerto Rican artist, not Cuban. In any case, the topic of pure race is still out there.
Gringo mentioned a Mad Mag beer-related parody of Kilmer’s “Trees.”
In 2013, the Michigan Bar Association magazine published an edition of its newsletter that focused on “Poetry and the Law.”
It included a court’s opinion, written in a similar, “Trees” parody style.
See page 2, here:
https://www.michbar.org/file/journal/pdf/pdf4article2241.pdf
Sometimes poetry can be translated and the thyme scheme kept, as the price of a little verbal awkwardness and minor changes in meaning. For example, here’s a poem by Heine:
Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,
Die hat einen andern erwählt;
Der andre liebt eine andre,
Und hat sich mit dieser vermählt.
Das Mädchen heiratet aus Ärger
Den ersten besten Mann,
Der ihr in den Weg gelaufen;
Der Jüngling ist übel dran.
Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bleibt sie immer neu;
Und wem sie just passieret,
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei.
…which somebody translated as follows:
A young lad loves a maiden
she likes another one
that other marries another
whose heart and hand he won
The maiden weds in anger
the first man she can snare
who comes across her pathway
The lad is in despair
It is an old, old story
yet new with every start,
and every time it happens
it breaks a loving heart.
…even with my mostly-forgotten high school and college German, I can tell that the line
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei
doesn’t say anything about “breaking a loving heart”–rather, if refers to “breaking a heart in two.” Also, the translation uses some rather strange English phrasings (new with every start?) Still, though, I think this kind of translation is a very nice supplement to the more-precise-but-drier translations which seem to be much more common.
Here’s what Google Translate does with the original:
A young man loves a girl,
who has chosen another;
the other loves another,
and has married her.
Out of anger, the girl marries
the first man
who crosses her path;
the young man is in a bad way.
It’s an old story,
but it remains ever new;
and whoever it happens to,
will have their heart broken.
A few years ago I tried my hand at translating some Russian poems by Joseph Brodsky and Osip Mandelshtam. Here’s one:
Joseph Brodsky, “Stanzas” (“In no country or churchyard…”)
In no country or churchyard
Do I choose to lie;
To Vasilevskii Island
I shall come back to die.
Your dusk-colored wall
I shall fail to find,
To the asphalt I’ll fall
Between faded lines.
And headlong my soul
Through the mist will zoom,
And flash above bridges
In the Petersburg gloom.
And the drizzle of April,
And snow on my head,
And a voice that intones
“See you later, friend.”
And, pressing my cheek
To my indifferent country,
On the Neva’s far shore
Two lives I shall see:
As if playmates and sisters
From unlived years,
They wave to the boy
Through valedictory tears.
(1962)
My version is fairly faithful to the original until the last few lines. Here’s what Google Translate produces:
I don’t want to choose either country or graveyard.
I’ll come to Vasilievsky Island to die.
I won’t find your dark blue façade in the dark,
I’ll fall on the asphalt between the faded lines.
And the soul, tirelessly
hurrying into the darkness,
will flash over the bridges
in the Petrograd smoke,
and the April drizzle,
snow on the back of my head,
and I’ll hear a voice:
– Goodbye, my friend.
And I’ll see two lives
far beyond the river,
pressing their cheeks to the indifferent fatherland.
Like little sisters
from unlived years,
running out onto the island,
waving after the boy.
Pretty close, except I have the poet pressing his cheek to his indifferent fatherland, not the two apparitions on the far bank of the Neva. Given the context, I think that’s correct.
You can hear Brodsky reciting the original Russian at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pspV9iLvrGE
Sounds like a bootleg recording. By the way, I attended a Five College seminar on Mandelshtam that Brodsky gave at UMass in the early 1980s. He really did recite poetry in that chanting, nasal, sing-song manner.
neo:
E for effort and not half-bad! Just getting the lines to rhyme per Housman is impressive in my book. (Though Spanish is an easier rhyming language than English.)
You probably were procrastinating — so I suspect was that splendid fellow, who built a rope bridge for his cat. But I salute such efforts to make learning real and alive on one’s own terms.
Standard education can be so deadening. Hence, all the students who emerge from school hating poetry, foreign languages and math. Those three subjects are particularly poorly taught IMO. I love all three yet I understand why others don’t.
Richard Feynman tells the story about how he got his groove back for physics after his burnout following the Manhattan Project and the death of his first wife.
While in the Cornell cafeteria he saw a student spinning a plate and noticed how it wobbled. He began to work out the physics of the wobble, not because it was a cutting-edge problem, but just for the fun of it.
It worked and later Feynman remarked (after Hans Bethe had chastised him for his interest in the problem):
__________________________________
I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it!
There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
https://www.creativitypost.com/article/spinning_plates_and_the_serious_play_of_richard_feynman
__________________________________
Everything I got good at it, I got good exploring them on my own terms.
huxley:
Fascinating story.
In one of Feynman’s lectures at Cornell he describes the scientific method – see here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
There are some branches of “science” that find the scientific method to be an obstacle and have resorted to the “political / ideological” method to promote certain
agendas.
From the context of the original
https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/a-e-housman/to-an-athlete-dying-young
Poetry coming in from the cold?
“They Forgot to Sing”—
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/they-forgot-to-sing/
H/T Powerline blog.
It’s a June Foray, Bullwinkle!