On Translation
"Translation should be similar [to the original] but not the very same; and the similarity should not be like that of a painting or a statue to the person represented, but rather like that of a son to a father, where there is a shadowy something-akin to what painters call one's air-hovering about the face, and especially in the eyes, out of which there grows a likeness that immediately, upon our beholding the child, calls the father up before us."
- Petrarch
- Petrarch
"In a successful translation we observe the renewal of the living tissue; the original undergoes the process of transformation."
- Ilya Kaminsky, “Correspondences in the Air”
- Ilya Kaminsky, “Correspondences in the Air”
"The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here or elsewhere."
- Paul Celan
- Paul Celan
"John Dryden, writing his seventeenth-century preface to Ovid's Epistles, suggested that translations could be divided into three categories. The first one Dryden called "metaphrase," which translates the poem word by word, line by line, from one language to another. The second is "paraphrase," or what Dryden called "translation with latitude," which permits the translator to keep the author in view while changing words of the original. Dryden's third category is closer to "imitation" - a translation in which the poet works with the original text but allows the departure from its meaning and words where necessary to produce the best final result in a new language."
- Ilya Kaminsky, “Correspondences in the Air”
- Ilya Kaminsky, “Correspondences in the Air”
"...no poem can truly be translated, but...a new poetics can flow from the originals...The music of the original is almost always lost when the meaning of the poem is transported into another language. On the other side, the inherent strangeness of the true poem, its use of images and details to convey ideas, can certainly be carried across into a different tongue. After all, followers of numerous world religions read their sacred texts in third- or fourth-hand translation. The magic of image, litany, rhythm, and incantation does survive linguistic boundaries. We enter the company of great poets not by ruthlessly rewriting their work, shoving it into our language, but instead by honoring them in the medium we possess, giving them a second voice."
- Ilya Kaminsky, “Correspondences in the Air”
- Ilya Kaminsky, “Correspondences in the Air”
"English literature lives on translations, it is fed by translations, every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translations, every allegedly great age is an age of translations, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer."
- Ezra Pound
- Ezra Pound
"I may hope that my own translations are less colonial raids into other languages than subversions of English, injections of new poetic forms, ideas, images and rhythms into the muscular arm of the language of power."
- Forrest Gander, A Faithful Existence
- Forrest Gander, A Faithful Existence