Craft & Criticism
There is an old Italian saying, traduttore, traditore—translator, traitor. It is clever, and like most clever sayings, it is only half true. Every poem that crosses from one language to another loses something. The question is not whether loss occurs but what survives, and whether what survives is worth the price of admission. I have come to believe it almost always is, and that the reader of a translated poem is doing something the reader of a monolingual poem never has to: holding two poems in mind at once, the one that was written and the one that was made.
Consider the Chinese poets of the Tang dynasty, whose work has been carried into English by dozens of translators, each producing a different poem from the same source. Read three versions of Wang Wei's "Deer Park" side by side and you will find three different silences. The original is spare, almost a sketch. English translators must decide whether to fill it in or leave it bare—and that decision is an interpretation, an argument about what the poem is for.
This is why I think of the translator as a co-author, not a courier. A good translation is not a window onto the original; it is a new poem that has agreed to keep faith with an old one. When Robert Lowell wrote his "imitations" of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, he was roundly criticized for taking liberties. But those liberties are what made the poems live in English. A translation that is too faithful can be a corpse preserved in amber—accurate, inert, and impossible to love.
The same is true of prose, though it is less obvious. When a novel is translated, the translator must decide how the characters speak, how the sentences breathe, whether the humor lands. These are not technical problems. They are artistic ones, and they require the translator to have opinions. The best translations read as if they had been written in the target language, which is the highest compliment and the hardest thing to achieve.
My advice is to read translations generously and comparatively. If a poem moves you, seek out another version of it. Notice what each translator chose to keep and what they let go. You will learn more about the original from this exercise than from any single rendering, because you will be triangulating—using multiple angles to locate something that no one angle can fully show.
And do not be afraid of the loss. Loss is the condition of all reading, even in our own language. We never enter another mind whole. The translated poem simply makes that condition visible, and in making it visible, it gives us something rare: a chance to feel the seams of language itself, and to be grateful that anyone bothered to carry a poem across the water to us.
