Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER

        Almost everyone who cares about poetry will say that poetry, or at least good poetry, cannot be translated into another language.  They may quote Robert Frost, who knew a thing or two about it, as saying, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”  They may point to nuances and subtleties of meaning and sound that cannot be carried over into another tongue; they may refer to an inner “spirit” of a language that differs in essence from the spirits of all other languages.  They may say there are no true cross-linguistic synonyms.  And so on.

        And yet quite a few great poets have translated poetry—Chaucer, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, Longfellow, Yeats, Millay, Heaney, and New Hampshire’s own Charles Simic, to name a few who worked in English.  Why did they do it, if it cannot be done? 

        You could argue that what they really wrote were not translations but poems in English inspired by poems in foreign tongues, something like what the French call imitations.  That may be true of some works supposedly in translation, such as Pope’s Iliad, which is brilliant but not very much like Homer’s Iliad, yet many translators have worked very hard to come as close as they can to conveying everything important in a foreign poem.  They wouldn’t have called it a translation if they didn’t think it was.

        In any case, what are we to do?  We can’t learn more than a few second languages, and those who say poetry is untranslatable usually also say that only native speakers can appreciate it.  So only those lucky enough to be bilingual or trilingual from childhood can fully take in poetry in two or three languages.  But most of us aren’t so lucky, and there must be hundreds of languages that have some fine poetry, and maybe several thousand languages, since song and rhythmical music and verbal play are found in every society on earth.

        Frost did not actually say “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” but something a little less quotable.  He said, in a conversation, “I like to say, guardedly, that I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.”  Poetry, then, is a certain something that may be found in prose as well as verse, but only in the original language. This something seems to be what John Denham in 1656 referred to: “Poesie is of so subtile a spirit, that of pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate.”  Poetry is a spirit, or a gas, it seems, that evaporates from its vehicle, a liquid, when it is poured from one container to another. 

        It’s certainly true that many subtleties of sense and sound cannot be poured from one language into another.  Rhyme and other sound-effects, for example, are rarely transferable.  Here is a good example.

        One of the most beloved poems in German is Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Night Song”:

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch.

Here is a clunky word-for-word version in English: Over all summits / Is rest; / In all treetops / Feelest thou / Scarcely a breath; / The little birds are silent in the woods. / Wait only, soon / Restest thou too.  Even this awkward rendition will convey the stillness of the scene and the suggestion of oncoming evening, with all that evening might imply..

But it has a tight rhyme scheme: ababcddc.  If you want to capture it, you have a large problem.  Hauch must be translated as “breath,” and it needs to come at the end of its short line, but it rhymes with auch (“too” or “also”).  You can’t use “too” or “also” or “as well” or anything of the sort as a rhyme.  In fact there is only one rhyme for “breath” in English, besides proper names and the short form of “methamphetamine.”  That word is “death,” the perfect rhyme-mate for “breath.”  Shakespeare rhymes them three times in the same scene in Richard II.  But do you want “death” at the end of this delicate little poem?  It seems too much, too blunt, for the little suggestion that our “rest” tonight is like our final rest in some night to come.  What to do?

I think Longfellow did as well as one can by using a half-rhyme or off-rhyme, that is, “rest” itself:

O’er all the hill-tops

 Is quiet now,

In all the tree-tops

 Hearest thou

Hardly a breath;

 The birds are asleep in the trees:

 Wait, soon like these

  Thou, too, shalt rest.

He keeps “breath,” and experienced readers will expect “death,” so it will hover silently, as it should, over “rest.”  Rita Dove, in a recent translation of this poem, though it differs from Longfellow’s at many points, resorts to the same half-rhyme.  There is probably no better answer.

So, if many subtle aspects of poetry are lost, what can be translated?  Well, metaphor usually comes across.  Akhilleus leon esti is the same metaphor as “Achilles is a lion,” though perhaps to an ancient Greek leon had slightly different connotations, since European lions were somewhat different from the African lions we normally think of.  Metaphors are essential to a lot of poetry.  Structure and form, too, can usually be preserved; the Petrarchan sonnet, for instance, has been a favorite form for poets in dozens of languages for hundreds of years.  The argument or plot of a poem can also survive the pouring.  These are not trivial aspects. 

        So keep reading translations, if you like poetry, and don’t worry too much about what you are missing.  You’re not missing everything, and if some things get lost other things get found.

        I am happy to hear from readers with comments or questions: mferber@unh.edu.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.