The summer has hit and with it whole new themes that literary magazines are interested in! Woo! A few summers ago I got into ekphrastics (you can check out The Ekphrastic Review if you're interested) and now I think it's time for a change. During my MFA I had a professor give us a few poems in other languages to attempt to translate. Now, we had to use Google Translate for this assignment, but it was actually really interesting how many people came up with different translations for the same poem.
One poem I worked on was Federico García Lorca's 'Arbolé, Arbolé . . .':
From poets.org
My translation came out as:
Tree, tree
dry and green.
The girl with the beautiful face
is picking olives.
The wind, prince of towers,
he grabs her by the waist.
Four horsemen pass
on Andalusian ponies,
in suits of blue and green,
with large capes obscure.
“Come to Cordova, girl.”
The girl does not listen.
Three bullfighters pass
skinny waists,
with clothes colored orange
and ancient silver swords.
“Come to Seville, girl.”
The girl does not listen.
When the sun set
and light spread, purple,
a young man passed carrying
roses and moon myrtles.
“Come to Granada, girl.”
and the girl does not listen.
The girl with the beautiful face
keeps picking olives,
with the grey arm of the wind
belted at her waist.
Tree, tree.
Dry and green.
Of course, Federico García Lorca does have an official English translation of this piece which you can see here.
What I liked about this assignment, which I think others find controversial, is that we didn't need to completely understand the language to create our translations. With a little research we could still find various word choices to fit the poem while maintaining the meaning.
Many schools of thought exist when it comes to translating poetry. Chinese University of Hong Kong shares a paper online called "Notes on Translating Poetry" by Stephen C. Soong which states that in order for poetry to be translated, it simply requires a poet. Rebecca Gayle Howell, in an interview she did with ArabLit Quarterly, mentioned how she chose to work with a partner for her translated work, as she needed someone fluent in the original language. Others state that simply sticking to the meter and maintaining meaning are all that is really necessary for a translation, coming back to the idea that writing is a something that can be updated over the decades. This would then mean needing to understand the writing style of a given culture and time period.
These days, with the prevalence of translation tools and AI, it doesn't seem as challenging in the past to attempt translation. Is that good thing? Who knows. We might get some interesting works translated to other languages soon that we may not have seen otherwise.
All this to say, I'm thinking about translating Chinese works into English, especially seeing as how it can be a good language learning tool, is currently popular with lit mags, and is commonly published!
What about you guys? What language of works would you translate if given the opportunity?
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