"Meaning & musicality: striking a balance in poetry translation" (original) (raw)
In adopting the genre of metred, rhyming poetry (as opposed to 'free verse'), the poet is making a conscious decision to let her expression, her choice of words, be governed not by semantic considerations alone but also by the sounds, syllables and stress-patterns they happen to contain. This might be termed the 'musical' (or 'artistic') dimension of the poem, which in this particular genre is as integral to the poem as its semantic meaning. In translating such poetry between languages there is an inevitable trade-off between the two criteria, and the balance in many cases seems to be weighted in favour of meaning and against musicality. But if the poetic translator is to be faithful to the whole range of dimensions of the original, he must apply the same principles governing word-selection to the translation as the poet applied to the original work and choose his words with as much respect to their sounds, syllabic content and relation to other words in the poem as to their semantic signification; otherwise his translation will be only partial and unfaithful to the original genre. For a display of the graphics (originally shown on overhead during the conference presentation), please go to: http://kanadacha.ca/academic/feb02.html
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.