The ATA Chronicle - July/August 2021 - 26

If a translator is too
beholden to a literal
translation of the
poem and its structure,
they might end up with
a pretty bad poem.
translated work. I always
had this suspicion that I
was ultimately missing
out on something, being
cheated somehow by the
filter of a translation. I
would think: " Do I actually
love Baudelaire, or do I love
David Paul's translations
of Baudelaire? " Ultimately,
it didn't matter. I couldn't
stay away. The greats in any
language are magnets and
their translated works are
beautiful offerings.
I don't think meaning
is lost per se, but there's
no perfect one-to-one in
translation-that's where a
lot of nuance and inherent
depth in poetic choices can
be lost. For example, my
friend, poet and translator
Daniel Coudriet, and I were
discussing differences in
translations of the Spanish
poet Federico García Lorca.
Daniel is fluent in Spanish
and can read the original
and appreciate that sueno
means both sleep and dream
simultaneously and cielo
can mean both heaven and
sky. There's no English
equivalent that works the
same way. The translator
has to pick. I, as a nonSpanish
speaker, miss out
on some of that complexity.
The fact that there are many
translations of Lorca, as
well as Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda, Bohemian-Austrian
poet and novelist Rainer
Maria Rilke, and many other
writers indicates that each
new translator believed that
those who came before didn't
get it quite right.
The greats in any
language are magnets
and their translated
works are beautiful
offerings.
For me, there are two
types of meaning in poetry-
technical and emotional.
Great poems are a perfect
synthesis of sound, rhythm,
form, and overt meaning,
but it doesn't end there. A
poem lives and is great to
us because of what's in the
gaps, between the words
and lines. I'm referring to
what the poem evokes
that is or had been ineffable
to the reader. There are
mystical aspects to the
great poems that persist
and reach through, despite
the limitations of the
language into which they
are being translated.
PETRA: How close do
you think the translation
of syntax is tied with the
translation of sound and
rhythm? How close should
the translator stick to the
verse form?
KAREN: Not being a
translator or linguist myself,
26 The ATA Chronicle | July/August 2021
it's difficult for me to
answer the first part of your
question with authority.
From what I understand,
syntax is tied with sound and
rhythm a great deal. While
preserving one, the other
slips and vice versa. Articles,
adjectives, and prepositions
are ordered very differently
across languages (or don't
even exist in some), so the
translator is faced with
this very sticky issue when
trying to preserve sound but
operate within syntactic rules
of a language.
Things can get even more
complicated if the poet
purposefully manipulates
the syntax of the native
language for a play on
words, slang, or an affected
structure. The translator
has the difficult choice of
deciding which aspects of
the work are integral to the
experience of the poem and
the poet's intentions and
how that can be conveyed
in the contemporary target
language. This is daunting, to
say the least.
Regarding your second
question, writing great
poems in verse form is an
incredible achievement. And
if someone is considered a
formalist poet, that aspect of
the work is very important to
them. How could anyone ever
dream of translating Robert
Frost or Richard Wilbur
without preserving form? I
mentioned Baudelaire earlier,
and there are incredible
translations of his Flowers
of Evil poems that preserve
the formal structure and
rhyme schemes of his poems
without straying too far from
the original text. There are
some additions that were
made by the translators to
achieve that structure, but
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