Sherod Santosexcerpt from "A la Recherche de la Poesie Perdue (Poetry and Translation)"
...poetry, we've been told, is what is lost in translation. That, like Eurydice, it can't survive the translator's gaze. For all its quotability, Frost's famous adage may be more complex than it first appears, or than Frost himself intended - he went on to say, less ambiguously, "It is also what is lost in interpretation." But while the general impression has it that a rendering is necessarily the poetic inferior of the original, even common sense would seem to suggest that things aren't really as simple as that. For is a translator somehow ethically bound to work as hard as possible to make a translation, not only as good as the original, but also no better? And given a brilliant translator and a minor text, couldn't a rendering actually exceed the original? As Wordsworth put it in his "Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads" - and he was speaking of the relative impossibility of "translating" into the language of a poem even the original passion that prompted it:as it is impossible for the Poet to produce upon all occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as that which the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he should consider himself as in the situation of a translator, who does not scruple to substitute excellencies of another kind for those which are unattainable by him; and endeavors occasionally to surpass his original, in order to make some amends for the general inferiority to which he feels he must submit. (454)So what's to say that these "excellencies of another kind" can't surpass the "excellencies" - and hence the poetry - of the original?
But the Frost's maxim doesn't actually say that a translation is necessarily a lesser poem. What it says is that "poetry" - some specifiable quality that exists in the original - gets lost in the process of carrying it over from one language into another. And if, for Frost, poetry amounts to a particular combination of sounds which collectively suggest a particular set of feelings, images, and ideas - what he called the "sound of sense"- then of course you can't alter those particular sounds (however faithful you are to the images, feelings, and ideas) without fundamentally altering the effect we refer to as "poetry." And since any poem's effect depends, by nature, on the preservation of its verbal uniqueness, on the degree of its resistance to a reducible meaning, then you can't have the poem in any other words than those of the original.
Which is not to say that one can't have a poem, another poem, which attempts to carry across - through a figuring-forth of images, rhetorical levels, schematic, and associative uses of sound - something like that original effect. In that sense translation becomes a kind of metaphor for the original, and, as such, it opens itself to the same aesthetic criteria, the same independent evaluation, that any original poem would. To put it another way, even while conceding that poetry is what is lost in translation, one might just as easily assert the opposite: Poetry is what is gained in translation. In his essay "The Presence of Translation," Charles Tomlinson, the editor of The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, recounts the story of a twentieth-century Hungarian poet who, when asked to name the most beautiful poem in his language, replied, "Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' in the translation of Arpad Toth."
Sherod Santos's most recent book of poems, The Pilot Star Elegies, was released this year from W.W. Norton. A book of essays, including this one, will appear from the University of Georgia Press in spring 2000.
