The Eight Stages of Translation
Stage 2 of Bly's proposed stages feels particularly apt to my situation this week. I am still stuck on Proust's image of souls wandering in an ancient ruin and rebuilding the edifice of memory, and what that means for "passé ancien"--only close interpretation of meaning, past the literal language, can decide how heavily to read that phrase. Wish me luck!
Separately, I'm not sure I agree that an interpreter needs to believe a poet's beliefs in order to accurately translate. I like that Bly shows the need for acknowledging biases and understanding how the poet's beliefs may differ from the translator's, but I don't think that deep, personal feeling is necessary to write a good line of poetry, nor to understand one. I'm also not sold on Bly's assertion in stage 5 that American English only has one lower/sensual tone left available for use. His view here is partial and omits the successful use of higher register by poets like Richard Wilbur or Elizabeth Bishop, as well as precludes its successful use by some modern poets like Patricia Smith or A.E. Stallings.
Translation as (Sub) Version: On Translating Infante's Inferno
I think that one of Levine's unwieldy assertions is something like: any text which attempts to exist on/create a ground for common understanding via clarity, forbearance, or the use of inherited terms like "mother tongue" is phallic in nature. I don't see why, in her extremely liberal application of pun and alliteration, she stopped short of rhyming Balzac with ballsack.
I don't think I have enough experience with translation to speak on ideas that are so abstracted, except to say that they seem very self-involved and make me disinterested in reading the book.
Robert Frost on 'The Sound of Sense' and on 'Sentence Sound'
Frost is as bombastic here as in most of his letters and editorial work. I understand the truth behind what he's saying and he certainly had an excellent ear to prove he knows what he's writing about, but by emphatically foregrounding the sound of spoken language, he has also exposed the inability of that concept to fully describe poetry. Now that we have audio recordings of speech spanning over 150 years, it's easy to notice that spoken language evolves so drastically, and differs so much across cultures and subcultures, that Frost's belief in a common soundscape is a bit reductive. The dialogue in "Snow" which feels perfectly natural to him still reads a little unnaturally to modern audiences, more so to folks not from New England.
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