The most notorious and thoughtlessly repeated remark in English about translation is the chestnut attributed to Robert Frost: “Poetry is what is lost in translation.” Though Frost’s authority on the subject is dubious, his remark—like the Italian phrase traduttore traditore (“translator betrayer”)—lends epigrammatic zing to the old notion that the translation of poetry is an impossible task. Arthur Schopenhauer, ever the pessimist, declared that “Poetry cannot be translated.” The great Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo said simply that “everyone knows that poetry is untranslatable.” And Roman Jakobson, the Russian linguist, argued that “poetry is by definition untranslatable.”
Such claims—many other philosophers, poets, and linguists have made similar ones—are so prevalent in part because they contain a kernel of truth. To the degree that the essence of poetry is embodied in its actual words and their particular sounds, poetry certainly does get lost in translation: all the original words and their sounds disappear. As the noted linguist Steve Martin remarked after a visit to Paris: “
Chapeau means hat. Oeuf means egg. It’s like those French have a different word for everything.” Martin’s joke gets at the serious difference between originals and translations that Vallejo, for example, had in mind: poetry is untranslatable, he explained, because “translated into other synonymous but never identical words, it’s no longer the same.”
I agree with Frost - although some translations are
better than the original.
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