On Beichman and Pulvers

 The idea of "tone" in the context of translation is one that I have always felt to be off-putting. Tone is a word that is so intrinsically fused with a personal interpterion of a text, that so often it does nothing more then stifle people and translators who have yet to form their own personal interpretation of a text. To clarify, I do yet still believe that the "tone" of a text or the voice of an author is a thing, but I instead believe it to rely much more heavily on the context in which the reader finds themselves. Someone might argue that Murakami's voice is cold, while someone would argue that it's warm, and while to some extent all readers may find themselves with a semblance of a universal agreement on which tone a piece might have, I believe that the tone that each person perceives is more complex then can be done justice by merely words, it is maybe myriad shades of a multitude of colors, or perhaps a sensation on the skin, or a nostalgic memory. Regardless though, I would qualify tone as being the effect that the author's choice of word and prose have on the individual, through its deviation from the standard, most basic sentence structure. Though strictly a translation without the tone of the original is still a translation nonetheless, tone is, in my mind, the second most important thing. 

In regards to the question posed on Beichman however, I have far more tempered thoughts. Particularly, that it has never mattered to me whether or not the translation of poetry has a point to it. Unlike prose, which oftentimes is striking in it's subject matter or the way the subject matter is delivered, poetry is more visceral, and if I had to describe why, I would have to say that in prose you experience the meaning of the words, in poetry you experience the words themselves. The structure of the poem itself so often deviates so greatly from the norm that you are, from the first word, forced to experience something different, something so very unlike any other text in that language. It has ever been the pervasive thought that poetry is untranslatable, which to some extent, I do agree with. I believe it impossible for a reader in another language to have the same experience from a translation that a native reader would have of the original text. And although the results may be awful, or amazing, like they were in the case of La Luna Blanche, I feel the attempt would never be in vain.

PS. Sorry I forgot about this again