Pulvers and Beichman Reading Response

     Translating poetry seems to be very difficult as the elements that compose poetry can be easily lost in translation. As Beichman states in his introduction, poetry is "dependent on sound and form for its effect," making poetry "difficult to produce in another language." In fact, both the authors of our reading this week, Pulvers and Beichman mention the difficulty level of translating poetry. However, both of them claim that poetry can be translated. Personally, I believe that to also be the case, but I also understand that when translating from languages like Japanese to English, some elements are indeed lost in translation. 

   In "On Translating Poetry", Pulver states that the voice is crucial to a poem. I agree with this statement. The voice or tone of the translation needs to be considered when translating a poem or any other medium. The original tone of the author and the writing is important as well, but a translation lives and dies by the "voice of the translator in the new language." Any translated work, especially poetry, has to be able to stand on its own. If it is not a "poem in its own right," then it has failed as a translation in my opinion. 

    One thing from Beichman's "Through a Glass Darkly" that caught my attention was the actual mentioning of seeing through a glass darkly. I interpreted this phrase to be about the process of translating itself. From just my own few personal experiences, translating anything seems to involve a whole bunch of reading. I read and reread the original works for our previous assignments over and over when working on my own translations. For each read through, I learned some new detail from the original that I could implement to improve my translation. This is what I think that Beichman meant by there being a "new light." 

-June