In Robert Bly’s “The Eight Stages of Translation,” I liked how he described the first translation as a “thrust.” You are merely getting the literal version down and ignoring all nuances until later iterations when he brings meaning and clarity back to the piece. Bly then broke down how to consider meaning, spoken language, the poem's tone or mood, and the perspectives of native speakers, which I found very helpful in understanding translation processes.
I also liked how Bly compared plants and the earth to poems and human beings; how a poem cannot blossom without human touch, mind, feeling, voice, and body. He argues that it is not enough to know a poem, but it also has to be “sung” or carried by the body into music or sound.
This reminded me of how Chloe Garcia Roberts talked about making a translator’s work more visible in the age of AI, and how precious human touch and work are becoming. AI can only copy between languages (often sloppily or terribly) or produce translations based on what it has ingested or learned from. Only human minds and labor are capable of the important nuances and sensibilities that are required for translation, or creative writing in general. I liked how Roberts claimed that AI will always be at our heels, consuming what we feed it.
This is a small note, but I also loved how Bly talked about a Vallejo translation he remembered reading when he was young—how he knew the emotional range was something he did not understand and therefore could not enter into—these feelings of grief could not be faked, and Bly could not follow him there. I thought this was a nice reflection on encountering emotion that you know is not accessible or understood by you, yet.
In Levine’s essay, I liked how she talked about how translators can be most creative, inventive, or subversive on the level of language—playing with language, exposing its infidelity to itself, creating new literature by parodying the old. I also liked her interrogation of how Infante’s Inferno makes a distinction between speaking anf talking—of how women’s weapon is in their word in philosophical texts because they talk endlessly, chatter, overflow with sound, but they don’t actually speak in the book, as if they have nothing important to say. As a female translator of this “oppressively male” work, she had to decide how to either change or transfer these ideas, all while knowing it would never be a literal expression of herself. I liked how she defined it as “an activity caught between the scholarly and the creative, between the rational and the irrational” that is a route or passage through which fragments of language, texts, and oneself might be reconciled (94).
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