Posted on: Saturday, March 08, 2008
Featured Response by Luba V. Zakharov to "Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation?"
Dear Editors,
In an article by Thom Satterlee titled: Thom Satterlee delves into Robert Frosts Views on Translation (Delos, 1996: p. 46-52), Mr. Satterlee discusses how his own search for this quote ("Poetry is what gets lost in translation") led him to:
1) Mark Richardson, ed., Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (1995) who assured him that this quote doesn't appear in any of Frost's formal prose.
2) Other writers: Kinnell, Leighton, Ramanujan, Nims
3) Translators who suggest that it may have been a remark made at a party or during a class at Bread Loaf.
4) Dartmouth Archives, where Phil Cronenwett, Curator of Manuscripts at Dartmouth suggested that the source could be a published lecture by Louis Untermeyer, one of Frost's longtime friends. In Untermeyer's book titled, Robert Frost: A Backward Look, Untermeyer and Frost are discussing a remark a critic made about Frost's, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Untermeyer then wrote that Frost's comment was:
"You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation."
Satterlee goes on to argue how this too, is problematic and cites a variety of sources, including a 1913 essay by Pound ("How I Began,") who says, "I would know what was accounted poetry everyday, what part of poetry was 'indestructible,' what part could not be lost in translation," suggesting that Frost might have borrowed this notion from Pound and he then traces this from Dryden to Dante (translated by R.A. Shoaf):
"And therefore everyone should know that nothing harmonized through a musical bond can be translated from one tongue into another without breaking and destroying all sweetness and harmony."
Thanks to Satterlee for spending over a year trying to get to the source for a conclusion that you can find at the end of his article.
For my part, I would say that perhaps viewing poetry through the lens of music and it's syncopated steps (or sentence sounds) is more accurate than trying to explain translation and all the problematic tendencies that people worry about when language moves against language. In this way, perhaps translation is the act of bringing a sweet sound into whatever different language the translator sends it to, creating a structure we cannot measure except by the 'ah ha' of recognition – the collision of our hearts and minds when 'knowing' transcends translation.
