Translation

Approaches to Translation

Literature has sometimes circulated widely in its original language, but world literature has most often been read in translation: as early as three thousand years ago, The Epic of Gilgamesh was being read around the ancient Near East in several different languages. Some works are so closely tied to their original time, place, and language that they never translate or travel well, but works that achieve lasting fame as world literature are ones that gain new resonance and a new kind of beauty as they move out into new contexts.

These gains can offset or even outweigh the losses that come in style and in immediate cultural reference when a work leaves its home country and language. As they seek to bring this about, translators face difficult choices as to which elements of the original they can convey in a new language, and often in a new era as well. This section of the Website presents a dozen poems (two for each volume of the anthology). These poems show a wide variety of knotty translational problems and creative solutions. Each poem is given in the original, with an audio link to a reading of the poem, so you can hear its verbal music as well as see it on the page. Each poem is then accompanied by two or three translations, chosen to show differing strategies translators have used to convey the sense of the original in new and powerful ways.

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Francis Petrarch: Canzoniere 52, “Diana never pleased her lover more”
From “Songs of the Aztec Nobility”: “Make your beginning, you who sing”