Pulvers and Beichman response

I will be the first to say, I am not a big fan of poetry and I rarely read it. I think it is extremely difficult to write, understand, appreciate, and now translate! Both translators addressed the common idea that translating poetry is near impossible, and requires an entirely new set of skills in addition to those required to translate novels or other fiction. Aspects like word choice, punctuation, syntax, and grammar carry much more weight in poems which tend to be briefer and more concentrated, intense. And then there are even details that they mention that are unique to poetry such as flow and lineation. To answer some of the questions I posed to the class, I think all the characteristics of poetry that I've mentioned so far contribute to a poem's "voice." To me, the voice is almost like the personality of the work, and I would use adjectives I use to describe people to describe literary voice, such as awkward, friendly, funny, or dorky. What I noticed about both translators is that they acknowledged that translating poetry requires more of themselves to be inserted into the translation. It is less important to get a literal translation, and more important to have emotion in the poem, which can only be achieved through a more liberal hand with the translation. Beichman calls it editing, and both translators add and change the original content a lot more than the translators we've seen previously, to retain the feel. As a film major, I also really liked Carl Sesar's cinematic language that he used to describe the action in the poem that he was translating. This seems like a great technique that he uses to first visualize the story, to best translate its essence. 

Joanne