Until this week, I thought I had gradually arrived at my own definition of faithfulness: preserving the author's intended experience rather than the author's exact words. But these two readings made me realize that even this definition may be too simple. What exactly are we allowed to change in order to preserve an experience?
Pulvers's translation confused me at first because “Strong in the rain” is clearly not what ame ni mo makezu literally says. Yet the more I thought about it, the more his paradox made sense: sometimes we have to move away from the syntax of the original in order to move closer to the poem.
But Beichman's example of Kafū made me less comfortable. Changing syntax is one thing; changing who says “my beloved” seems much more radical. If the trees can become the speaker because this strengthens the harmony between human beings and nature (spirit of the poem preserved), where exactly does translation end and rewriting begin?
Maybe there is no fixed line. Translation is not choosing between “faithful” and “unfaithful,” but constantly deciding what kind of loss matters most. If keeping the syntax destroys the rhythm, perhaps syntax should be sacrificed. If preserving every word makes the voice unnatural, perhaps a word can disappear. But every freedom creates a responsibility: the translator has to know what they are sacrificing, and why.
This is why Beichman's description of translation as an “imperfect art” stayed with me. I used to think imperfection was something a translator should try to reduce. Now I am beginning to think that imperfection is not necessarily a defect of translation, but its condition. A translated poem cannot become the original. Perhaps the more interesting question is whether it can become, as Beichman says, the poem's “second self”—different enough to live in another language, but still recognizable as coming from the same life. And this “same life,” to me, is emotion: the shared humanity that travels across time and distance, allowing people centuries apart to still feel with one another. Perhaps this is what makes poetry immortal—not that its words remain unchanged, but that its emotions can continue to be felt, again and again, in different languages, times, and lives.
Mingzi
No comments:
Post a Comment