There are a number of interesting collections of essays on translation–theoretical and practical.  In my course I use the two edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Theories of Translation and The Craft of Translation (both published by the University of Chicago Press).  I supplement these with some individual essays by Kwame Anthony Appiah, George Steiner, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Yves Bonnefoy (who is marvelous on the subject in his volume, translated from French, Shakespeare and the French Poet (also published by Chicago), and Dick Davis’s marvelous essay on the effect of translation on the whole history of English poetry, “All My Soul Is There: Verse Translatioin and the Rhetoric of English Poetry” (published in the Yale Review some years ago).  Essays in Theories of Translation that I find particularly engaging–as a poet who translates–include those by John Dryden, Roman Jakobson, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Octavio Paz, and inevitably, Walter Benjamin (although a German graduate student told me long ago that having read Benjamin’s famous essay in both English and German, she could not say that the German was any clearer).

More of my introductory groundwork for the translation seminar I am teaching:

The acts of writing and translating are textual and contextual (and also intertextual, in that a translation exists only because of the existence of a prior text elsewhere.) Different approaches to translation arise because of the gaps–linguistic, literary, cultural and historical–between poet and translator.

Linguistic—not only because languages differ in what they can say, can’t say, and may or may not say (we’ll read an essay by Roman Jakobson on this subject), but also because idioms and idiomatic syntax in two different languages can be so different. Imagine a Chicago social club that includes “artist members”; how is this phrase different from “member artists”? What if in a particular phrase one language must specify the gender of a pronoun, and another cannot or need not use pronouns at all? Some languages specify or imply dimensions of time, experience, and action and agency that others do not communicate.

Literary—because any given literary work is composed in a context of artistic assumptions, constraints, permissions, and expectations that has been created by earlier works over time—or by particular audiences or even by dominant critics. And while in its language of origin a work might be very fresh in manner or statement, that same manner or statement might already be familiar in the target language, which makes it difficult for the translator to convey the original freshness. There is an opposite problem, too: what if a particular manner, familiar and even clichéd in the source language, is unfamiliar or even unprecedented in the target language? Should the translator bring this element into the target language as something very fresh? Or rather find an analogous cliché in the target language? (Does everything depend on figuring out the intentions of the source writer—even though artistic intentions are often nearly impossible to judge?) Should a translator make the translation seem completely idiomatic in the target language, as it it had been composed in the target language originally? Or rather translate so that the unfamiliar aspects of the source language and text will sound unidiomatic? (This might enlarge the possibilities of poetry in the target language.) (We will read essays by Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Walter Benjamin that take up this question.)

Or what if an impressive quality of the source text (which could have to do with style, with sound, with the movement of thought, etc.) is already known in the target language but is considered inappropriate or uninteresting or puerile or antiquated in the literary culture of that language? What if an earlier literary strategy or stance—such as High Modernist poetic devices like those of T. S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Mina Loy–is considered antiquated, outmoded, in the source language, but would have the effect of a literary revolution in the target language in the present day?

I remember vividly arriving at a literary party in Mexico City and seeing Octavio Paz speaking with a small group of young men (literary culture is more patriarchal in Mexico than in the U. S.). I approached and Paz—whom I knew a little and regarded as a very great writer—welcomed me to his circle of admirers. “I was just telling them,” he explained to me (in Spanish, of course), “that three of the most influential American poets in all of Latin America were from Illinois. Isn’t this true?” I was taken aback by the idea that the influence in Latin America of three poets from Illinois could have rivaled Walt Whitman’s. “Sandburg,” I said. “Yes,” he answered, smiling and waiting. “Masters,” I said. And Paz turned to his group and said to them, “There are poets all over Latin America who are rewriting in their own locales the Spoon River Anthology without even knowing that that is what they are doing.” Then, to me: “And the third?” I made a gesture of not knowing—because I didn’t know, and because I wanted to see his enjoyment when he triumphantly announced the missing name. “Vachel Lindsay!” he said. So—three poets no longer at all in vogue in American literary culture can still be revelatory innovators to poets elsewhere. Another very well-known case is that of Edgar Allen Poe—whom Baudelaire, Mallarmé,Valéry, and other French poets considered one of the greatest of poets, and who, to their great annoyance, has never been regarded as such by poets and critics of America.

On the other hand—what if the target language and literature make possible certain effects that are partly limited by the source language itself and its literary traditions? Can translation liberate meanings as often as it loses them? Samuel Beckett, who late in his life wrote a few poems in French and also made English translations of them, allowed or spurred himself in effect to rewrite them in English; in English he did some things that French cannot do (for both linguistic and literary reasons). In English, Beckett sounds very English-language, not only because the two languages are different but also because modern literature in English has its own permissions and constraints. Almost any two languages offer the writer (and translator) different linguistic openings and opportunities, as well as different literary-historical contexts that sometimes can be liberating rather than constraining.

Cultural and historical—because literary culture is a part of a larger culture shaped and infused by historical events and epochs; attitudes toward those events and textures of those epochs may be understandable elsewhere, but probably can never be mapped clearly across cultures, and may even be scarcely apprehended in the target language and culture. In the target culture and language, other, quite different historical events and textures of historical experience may dominate, along with other associations, connotations, ideas, and what I suppose we could call feeling-sets of particular groups within cultures—missing in the source culture and language—may dominate. (For example, American narcissism; the cultural centralism of Mexico City; patriarchal attitudes of varying intensity in different cultures; Native American spiritualism of nature; “face” in East Asia; “la bella figura” in Italy; and so on.) Hence this kind of gap between source text and possible translation. In China, poets were persecuted, decades ago, for writing poems about flowers; their gesture was considered by those who ruled as a coded and criminal criticism of the communist regime, which insisted that all writers depict idealized lives of workers—which insisted, that is, that poems make certain political gestures and not others. Even a literarily excellent translation of such poems into English cannot bring with it their political gesture, which is entirely implicit. For many decades, similar constraints oppressed writers in the Soviet Union, who were all too often silenced or murdered. (To say nothing of Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and many other regimes on this planet.)

And of course there is highly effective “soft” political pressure, too, on art. In the U.S.A., one of the most volatile and contradictory subjects in literature (and even more so in the media) is the political dimension of social class. Two great American poets who can now be found in anthologies but who were long excluded, and who remain excluded from many classrooms, are Thomas McGrath and Muriel Rukeyser. They must present interesting problems of context to translators abroad. We may not be disturbed, but we are not surprised, that contemporary media, seems constantly to encompass more and more lurid and sensational material the political implications of which can be suppressed in favor of gossip; yet those political implications exist. Meanwhile, certain subjects are excluded from broadcasts—subjects that evidently not only to not interest the desired market segments but which also offend moralistic and demagogic groups aligned with corporate interests and existing social privilege based on religion, race, and so on. A prominent recent example is the exclusion of photos, video, or print reporting or commentary on brutal events involving the actions of American soldiers actively at war; in this case, the exclusion is from the media with largest audiences, but fortunately our culture permits such events to be described in print venues utilized by small audiences (above all, books). Books are not so dangerous in a social context of electronic media. What, amidst all this, might be the translator’s goal in translating a work of the ancient world, or a work from an oral culture?