This can only be exacerbated by the inherent
properties of the genre.
2
One way to think of some of
the more obvious properties of poetry, from a
translator's perspective, is as a series of constraints which
must be met as nearly as possible to produce an
adequate translation. Arguably, any attempt to translate
a poem accurately equates to an attempt to recognise
and match all its constraints, which is to say everything
that marks it out as a piece of poetry as opposed to a
prose text.
Primary constraints
The formal elements of a poem, including such things as
syllable count, rhyming pattern, alliteration, patterns of
stress and intonation, stanza format, and perhaps even
grammatical tense and mood, constitute primary
constraints.
3
Different translators may wish to honour any
or all such primary constraints. I will argue that there is no
authoritative basis for the selection of formal constraints
to be respected in the course of any given translation of
a poem beyond the translator's idiosyncratic – albeit
culturally informed – interpretative intuition.
22 The Linguist Vol/57 No/5 2018
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A translator must interpret a poem before a translation
is even attempted, argues Steven Jefferson
I
n a moment of arch rascality, the literary theorist
Stanley Fish had his religious poetry class attempt an
interpretation of an alleged poem – in reality a list of
authors' names he had written on the blackboard for his
previous class. Their ingenious interpretations led him to
conclude that interpretation "is not the art of construing
but the art of constructing. Interpreters [i.e. readers] do
not decode poems: they make [i.e. interpret] them."
1
This assessment has obvious implications for translators,
as the interpretative reading of a poem takes place before
the translation is begun. Lest this anecdote should appear
to suggest that every reading of a poem is a unique and
valid interpretation in its own right, Fish goes on to stress
that although the reader creates the poem s/he does so
with the help of "interpretive strategies that… have their
source in a publicly available system of intelligibility".
As a matter of convention, poetry elicits a creative
response on the part of the reader and is, therefore,
fundamentally open to multiple interpretations. This
means that any translation of a poem is an interpretation
by definition, but also that a translator's understanding of
a poetic source text must, unavoidably, be interpretative.
Poetry elicits
a creative
response on
the part of the
reader and
is, therefore,
fundamentally
open to
multiple
interpretations
Poetic
concerns
