2/18 Readings - Lane

    Both of these readings reminded me that translation is, in fact, the closest of close reads. Bly’s approach to translating poetry in eight stages seems to be concerned initially with only the poetic, what with emphasis on sound and the translator’s poetic ability, but I believe it can be just as easily applied to prose translation. Both poetic and prose translation warrant a human hand and a translator with the ability to be a writer—the note about “‘translatorese,’ a language never spoken but a language translators know and laugh about’” rang true even in my experience as a prose translator. In my translation process, the first stage is always a literal rendition (though it typically occurs mentally and is not written down). I appreciated that Bly’s second stage is immediately considering “what does the poem mean,” but I thought it was too late—I always consider “what does it mean?” in the original language before I translate it, either literally or definitively. I think that a close read prior to any meaningful translation is beneficial in that it allows you to absorb the text fully within the context of the original language. Levine’s description of the protagonist being absorbed into the womb and reborn as a writer in Infante’s Inferno seemed to oddly resonate with this perspective on translation to me—if translation is a “passage” that we as translators make, it requires us to be surrounded by the text, by something external, to make it through to the other end and allow the text to be reborn.