The Poetry of Translation

The Poetry of Translation
Author: Matthew Reynolds
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2011-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191619183

Poetry is supposed to be untranslatable. But many poems in English are also translations: Pope's Iliad, Pound's Cathay, and Dryden's Aeneis are only the most obvious examples. The Poetry of Translation explodes this paradox, launching a new theoretical approach to translation, and developing it through readings of English poem-translations, both major and neglected, from Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue. The word 'translation' includes within itself a picture: of something being carried across. This image gives a misleading idea of goes on in any translation; and poets have been quick to dislodge it with other metaphors. Poetry translation can be a process of opening; of pursuing desire, or succumbing to passion; of taking a view, or zooming in; of dying, metamorphosing, or bringing to life. These are the dominant metaphors that have jostled the idea of 'carrying across' in the history of poetry translation into English; and they form the spine of Reynolds's discussion. Where do these metaphors originate? Wide-ranging literary historical trends play their part; but a more important factor is what goes on in the poem that is being translated. Dryden thinks of himself as 'opening' Virgil's Aeneid because he thinks Virgil's Aeneid opens fate into world history; Pound tries to being Propertius to life because death and rebirth are central to Propertius's poems. In this way, translation can continue the creativity of its originals. The Poetry of Translation puts the translation of poetry back at the heart of English literature, allowing the many great poem-translations to be read anew.

Art of Translating Prose

Art of Translating Prose
Author: Burton Raffel
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271039051

The Translator of Desires

The Translator of Desires
Author: Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0691212546

A masterpiece of Arabic love poetry in a new and complete English translation The Translator of Desires, a collection of sixty-one love poems, is the lyric masterwork of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240 CE), one of the most influential writers of classical Arabic and Islamic civilization. In this authoritative volume, Michael Sells presents the first complete English translation of this work in more than a century, complete with an introduction, commentary, and a new facing-page critical text of the original Arabic. While grounded in an expert command of the Arabic, this verse translation renders the poems into a natural, contemporary English that captures the stunning beauty and power of Ibn ‘Arabi’s poems in such lines as “A veiled gazelle’s / an amazing sight, / her henna hinting, / eyelids signalling // A pasture between / breastbone and spine / Marvel, a garden / among the flames!” The introduction puts the poems in the context of the Arabic love poetry tradition, Ibn ‘Arabi’s life and times, his mystical thought, and his “romance” with Niẓām, the young woman whom he presents as the inspiration for the volume—a relationship that has long fascinated readers. Other features, following the main text, include detailed notes and commentaries on each poem, translations of Ibn ‘Arabi’s important prefaces to the poems, a discussion of the sources used for the Arabic text, and a glossary. Bringing The Translator of Desires to life for contemporary English readers as never before, this promises to be the definitive volume of these fascinating and compelling poems for years to come.

Poetry & Translation

Poetry & Translation
Author: Peter Robinson
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1846312183

`The conviction, pleasures and gratitude of committed reading are evident in his affirmation of the poetic contract between readers and writers.' Andrea Brady, Poetry Review --

Poetry Translating as Expert Action

Poetry Translating as Expert Action
Author: Francis R. Jones
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2011-07-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027286817

Poetry is a highly valued form of human expression, and poems are challenging texts to translate. For both reasons, people willingly work long and hard to translate them, for little pay but potentially high personal satisfaction. This book shows how experienced poetry translators translate poems and bring them to readers, and how they not only shape new poems, but also help communicate images of the source culture. It uses cognitive and sociological translation-studies methods to analyse real data, most of it from two contrasting source countries, the Netherlands and Bosnia. Case studies, including think-aloud studies, analyse how translators translate poems. In interviews, translators explain why and how they translate. And a 17-year survey of a country’s poetry-translation output explores how translators work within networks of other people and texts – publishing teams, fellow translators, source-culture enthusiasts, and translation readers and critics. In mapping the whole sweep of poetry translators’ action, from micro-cognitive to macro-social, this book gives the first translation-studies overview of poetry translating since the 1970s.

Poems Under Saturn

Poems Under Saturn
Author: Paul Verlaine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2011-02-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1400838207

The first complete English edition of Verlaine's important first book of poems Poems Under Saturn is the first complete English translation of the collection that announced Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) as a poet of promise and originality, one who would come to be regarded as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century writers. This new translation, by respected contemporary poet Karl Kirchwey, faithfully renders the collection's heady mix of classical learning and earthy sensuality in poems whose rhythm and rhyme represent one of the supreme accomplishments of French verse. Restoring frequently anthologized poems to the context in which they originally appeared, Poems Under Saturn testifies to the blazing talents for which Verlaine is celebrated. The poems display precocious virtuosity, mingling the attractions of the flesh with the longings of the spirit. Greek and Hindu myth give way to intimate erotic meditations and wickedly satirical society portraits, mythological landscapes alternate with gritty narratives of mid-nineteenth century Paris, visions of happiness yield to nightmarish glimpses of deep alienation, and real and imaginary characters—including Achilles, Valmiki, Charlemagne, and Spain's baleful King Philip II—all figure as the subject matter of a supremely ambitious young poet. Poems Under Saturn presents the extraordinary devotion and intense musicality of an artist for whom poetry remained the one true passion.

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
Author: Robert Chandler
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2015-02-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0141972262

An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet. Robert Chandler is an acclaimed poet and translator. His many translations from Russian include works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, while his anthologies of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales are both published in Penguin Classics. Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and co-founder of the StoSvet literary project. Her most recent collection is 2013's Ophelia i masterok [Ophelia and the Trowel]. Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews and translator of many books from Russian, including, most recently, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (2014).

Silk Dragon

Silk Dragon
Author: Arthur Sze
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2013-06-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1619321025

Arthur Sze has rare qualifications when it comes to translating Chinese: he is an award-winning poet who was raised in both languages. A second-generation Chinese-American, Sze has gathered over 70 poems by poets who have had a profound effect on Chinese culture, American poetics and Sze's own maturation as an artist. Also included is an informative insightful essay on the methods and processes involved in translating ideogrammic poetry. MOONLIGHT NIGHT by Tu Fu can only look out alone at the moon. From Ch'ang-an I pity my children who cannot yet remember or understand. Her hair is damp in the fragrant mist. Her arms are cold in the clear light. When will we lean beside the window and the moon shine on our dried tears? Sze's anthology features poets who have become literary icons to generations of Chinese readers and scholars. Included are the poems of the great, rarely translated female poet Li Ching Chao alongside the remorseful exile poems of Su Tung-p'o. This book will prove a necessary and insightful addition to the library of any reader of poetry in translation. The poets include: T'ao Ch'ien Wang Han Wang Wei Li Po Tu Fu Po Chü-yi Tu Mu Li Shang-yin Su Tung-p'o Li Ch'ing-chao Shen Chou Chu Ta Wen I-to Yen Chen Arthur Sze is the author of six previous books of poetry, including The Redshifting Web and Archipelago. He has received the Asian American Literary Award for his poetry and translation, a prestigious Lannan Literary Award, and was recently a finalist for the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. from A Painting of a Cat Nan Ch'uan wanted to be reborn as a water buffalo, but who did the body of the malicious cat become? Black clouds and covering snow are alike. It took thirty years for clouds to disperse, snow to melt. -Pa-ta-shan-jen (1626-1705) The Last Day Water sobs and sobs in the bamboo pipe gutter. Green tongues of banana leaves lick at the windowpanes. The four sur

Poetry Translation through Reception and Cognition

Poetry Translation through Reception and Cognition
Author: Andrea Kenesei
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2010-04-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443822108

The observation of poetry translation is an interdisciplinary field, comprising the translation-linguistic aspects of poetic language and one or more supplementary methods which enable critical assessment. This necessitates the involvement of supplementary disciplines, for example, reader response and its amalgamation with cognitive linguistics. Chapter One provides a short historical review of text research, translation theory and cognitive linguistics, highlighting the common points where possible. Chapter Two outlines the practical implementation of the research. Chapter Three outlines the common points of information processing (as assumed in mental conceptual units) and readers’ interpretations. Chapter Four provides an outline of poetry translation with the cognitive approach to it. Chapter Five discusses the results of reception as measured through conceptualisation on the global level of the whole poem. Chapter Six is devoted to the observation of data as gained by conceptualisation on local level. Chapter Seven contains the model of poetry translation criticism, which is based on 9 categories.