Polish Poetry: Should one only translate into one's own native tongue?

This is verging on nonsense. Jorge Luis Borges said rightly that "all reading is an act of translation" and this includes reading in one's own native tongue.

True enough, Les Essientes. However, as a translator as well as a lifelong student of translation, that is to say, of language itself, translating a work is essentially the ever so skillful act of recreating that work in another language. It surely never remains the same. I'm confident your Mr. Borges would agree-:)

Incidentally, Messrs. Weaver, Howard, Brodsky, Bly and of course, Gregory Rabassa, have written both cogently and brilliantly on the topic of poetry translation. They are, after all, poets in their own right!

Then there's the question of machine translation; can a machine ever successfully reproduce the unique of subtelty of utterance singular to both each language and each speaker/user of said language? Most, including yours truly, would ardently agree that it can't. Yet others maintain in fact that it can. Who's right? Guess we'll never know for certainLOL

Indeed, I know a woman who was raised in Macedonia, having both Albanian and Turkish parents. She was schooled in all three from a young age, as well as learning them in the home.

Likewise, I have Polish friends who are teaching their children, from the cradle, Polish and English. One friend has a 5 year old daughter who speaks better English than some Brit kids I know.


I'd say it depends how much it is necessary to convey the meaning. I had a macedonia colleague who translated Seumas Heaney (Irish poet) into Macedonian. Anyone familiar with heaney's work will know it is often multi-layered and full of colloquialisms (or even invented "colloquialisms" and phrases). I asked how he managed to convey all these meanings when the macedonian words often lacked the (same) mutliple meanings as the English words.

He said, "You sometimes just have to choose one of the meanings and go with that one," Likewise, he was translating a poem about a woman ironing. I realised the rythym of the poem was the same as the rythym of ironing... how to do that when a language has a fixed stress pattern? Maybe you can't.

Apropos of the Heaney example, it is often said that humor is what usually gets 'lost in the translation'-:)

The link bellow points to some department of Gonville & Caius, a college of the University of Cambridge. The content of the subdirectory .../Chinese/ suggests close interaction with some academic and cultural institutions in China.

Tips on translating poems (into or out of English)
babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/study/english/chinese/trans-po.pdf

This short tutorial touches some of the points raised in this thread, and provides many tips. My first impression was that of Master Po advising the little Grasshopper, but I have to admit - it has its charm.

It's a shame that I don't have enough background in mathematics to follow through all the equations so I probably missed half of the fun, but even reading the "softer" parts was tremendously inspiring. Great imagination and even greater sense of humour of the author :)

Norwid :
More and more times, all around, from you,
As from a torch, sparks flowing out.
Blazing, you don’t know if you’ll be free,
Or what is yours it will be lost?

If only confusion and ash would remain,
Which lie in the chasm of a storm?-or left is
At the bottom of ashes true bright diamond,
Eternal victory’s beginning.
Jacek & Adriene
* * * * * *
Co raz to z ciebie, jako z drzazgi smolnej,
Wokoło lecą szmaty zapalone;
Gorejąc, nie wiesz, czy stawasz się wolny,
Czy to, co twoje, ma być zatracone?

Czy popiół tylko zostanie i zamęt,
Co idzie w przepaść z burzą? — czy zostanie
Na dnie popiołu gwiaździsty dyjament,
Wiekuistego zwycięstwa zaranie!..

The answer to the original question of the present thread?? Unquestionably, YES!!!

This was translated by us as a team, so the truth is as usually somewhere in the middle.