Comments on Readings About Translating Poetry - Yang

 Roger Pulvers, "Poetry in Translation"

At first, I found this reading pretty abstract. The words used to describe the process of translating poetry all seemed very subjective: "tone," "vitality," "voice," etc, but then it made sense to me, as poetry itself is a very abstract and interpretive topic to begin with. I think it's interesting that Pulvers says the key to translating poems is actually "recreating" them, even though other readings so far have suggested that the translator should not aim to improve or change anything about the original and should instead only focus on reproducing the exact same material, as seen in Seidensticker's "counterfeiter" analogy. 

I thought it was smart how Pulvers translated the beginning lines of "Ame ni mo makezu." I feel like by changing "I won't give in to..." to "strong in/against the...", the translated poem now has a much closer match to the original poem when it comes to the flow and tone of the poem. I like how he continued the whole wormhole/universe analogy in the last paragraph of the article. It paints a clear and powerful message.

Janine Beichman, "Through a Glass Darkly: Is Translating Poetry Possible?"

It seems like Arthur Waley and Sir John Denham both agree with the aforementioned notion in the previous article of "recreating" the poem in some way when it comes to translating poems and that the need to "add a new spirit" or "put back in a great deal" is essential.

Although it doesn't stay true to the original poem, I liked Sesar's translation of "不意のくちづけ" as "her mouth on mine" instead of saying something literally like "an accidental kiss," as I feel like the former shows what's happening more vividly rather than just describing the situation.

As Beichman said, the differences between the original translation and the edited version of "My Songs" are very minute but create completely different images due to better word choice being employed. 

I think it's genius to structure the translation of the Akiko Tanka by gradually increasing the indent on the left so that the poem both visually and aurally has a sense of continuation, and this strategy works especially well with the addition of "fall" as it looks like the lines themselves are falling.

The conclusion that "the aim of translation is not to produce a clone, but rather to evoke a sense of difference" is directly the opposite of Seidensticker's school of thought regarding translation, which is very interesting. I know that this is mostly talking about translating poetry, but it's cool to see how these ideas can differ so much based on different literary genres as well as personal opinions. It's funny that Beichman refers to the translator as a "shape-shifter" as opposed to Seidensticker's "counterfeiter."