The Translation of Verse

The Song Of Roland translated by Fredrick Bliss Luquiens. Macmillan. $2.75
The Lusiads Of Camoens translated by Leonard Bacon. Hispanic Society of America. $4.50.
The Lusiads Of Camoens translated by William C. Atkinson. Penguin Classics. 2/6.
Poems Of St. John Of The Cross translated by Roy Campbell. Pantheon. $2.75

At the risk of repeating certain things that have already been said more than once, I should like to consider rather summarily what I take to be the aims and functions of translation in general—especially translation of poetry, and of poetry that has become in one sense or another “classic.” A translation is necessarily a compromise; it exists somewhere between extremes. On the one hand there is the kind of translation that attempts to carry over some particular quality or meaning of the original work at the expense, if need be, of everything else in the new language, and even of carrying over anything else from the original. A prose pony does this; it tries to bring the denotations of the original text consecutively into words in the new language whose denotations are as close to the original as possible. At the other extreme there is the sort of version, hardly any longer a translation, which uses the original merely as a sort of paradigm and order of suggestion for a work relatively independent of it: Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” for example. I imagine the ideal translation would attempt to discover and order not only the words but—more broadly—the terms in which the original work can be made to exist most fully and most exactly in the living language of the age into which it is translated. In the translation of a poetic classic this would mean an attempt to re-create the original by the use of what live poetic means the new language has to offer. The new language, and the poetry possible to it, if they are alive, will be in a process of change, and the terms in which the new work can exist will only be discovered by an attempt at a full and lively use of the living language and its living poetic means.