As someone who has never really translated in more than two stages (maybe I should?) it was both fascinating and intimidating to be given a peep under the hood into Bly’s very intensive and systematic process of translation. I could see the logic in the way he progressed from one stage to another and concurred with most of it except for stage 4, “translating into [the local contemporary language of your intended readership].” Mainly my objection is: is there no room for writing in the style of a different era or place in the interest of conveying a text’s cultural or historical or linguistic context? (Or even for the pleasure of it?)
One thing that did stand out to me and that I’ve not yet come across in other papers on translation theory/practice is the counter-cultural wisdom that sometimes I translator should exercise restraint: “If we don't, we should let the poem alone and not translate it; we'll only ruin it if we go ahead.” We’re not often told to not translate something, in fact, as a student in a Literary Translation MFA programme we’re very often made to translate things that I don’t feel even slightly qualified or sometimes particularly compelled to translate. A cliche: we’re so busy asking if we could, that we forget to ask if we should. It takes some arrogance to be a translator—this I know—but maybe there is a time and place for humility too.
The section in Suzanne Levine’s paper, “Marginality” reminded me of Emma Ramadan’s talk a few weeks ago in which she also mentioned works that present translators with opportunities for “play,” in the way they challenge the pliability of the language they were written in—in this framework, writer and translator are partners in the crime of linguistic subversion.
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