Recent Posts
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Critical Response Contest Deadline Extended to August 30
There is still plenty of time to submit your entries to the Packingtown Review Prize for Critical Response! We have extended the deadline until August 30, 2008, and the winners will be announced on September 30, 2008. For more information, and for Paul Hoover's “The Windows (Speech-lit Islands)” awaiting your critique, visit our contest page.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Featured Response by S.C. Garrett to "Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation?"
Dear Editors,
In answer to your web site’s challenge concerning the quote widely attributed to Frost, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation," I couldn’t help but send you an answer to this famous maxim I happened to write about two years ago:
Correction
Lost poetry
is what translation
gets in.
I, too, find the quote oddly fearful of a lack of artful commerce between languages (especially concerning the widely available range of excellent translations of poetry into and out of English) and wrote this as a rebuttal.
Sincerely,
S.C. Garrett
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Featured Response by Luba V. Zakharov to "Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation?"
Dear Editors,
In an article by Thom Satterlee titled: Thom Satterlee delves into Robert Frosts Views on Translation (Delos, 1996: p. 46-52), Mr. Satterlee discusses how his own search for this quote ("Poetry is what gets lost in translation") led him to:
1) Mark Richardson, ed., Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (1995) who assured him that this quote doesn't appear in any of Frost's formal prose.
2) Other writers: Kinnell, Leighton, Ramanujan, Nims
3) Translators who suggest that it may have been a remark made at a party or during a class at Bread Loaf.
4) Dartmouth Archives, where Phil Cronenwett, Curator of Manuscripts at Dartmouth suggested that the source could be a published lecture by Louis Untermeyer, one of Frost's longtime friends. In Untermeyer's book titled, Robert Frost: A Backward Look, Untermeyer and Frost are discussing a remark a critic made about Frost's, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Untermeyer then wrote that Frost's comment was:
"You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation."
Satterlee goes on to argue how this too, is problematic and cites a variety of sources, including a 1913 essay by Pound ("How I Began,") who says, "I would know what was accounted poetry everyday, what part of poetry was 'indestructible,' what part could not be lost in translation," suggesting that Frost might have borrowed this notion from Pound and he then traces this from Dryden to Dante (translated by R.A. Shoaf):
"And therefore everyone should know that nothing harmonized through a musical bond can be translated from one tongue into another without breaking and destroying all sweetness and harmony."
Thanks to Satterlee for spending over a year trying to get to the source for a conclusion that you can find at the end of his article.
For my part, I would say that perhaps viewing poetry through the lens of music and it's syncopated steps (or sentence sounds) is more accurate than trying to explain translation and all the problematic tendencies that people worry about when language moves against language. In this way, perhaps translation is the act of bringing a sweet sound into whatever different language the translator sends it to, creating a structure we cannot measure except by the 'ah ha' of recognition – the collision of our hearts and minds when 'knowing' transcends translation.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Contest Annoucement
Acclaimed poet and UIC alumnus Paul Hoover has donated his poem "The Windows (Speech-lit Islands)" to Packingtown Review’s critical response contest. Learn more…
Sunday, January 06, 2008
AWP 2008 (New York, NY)
Stop by the Packingtown Review table at the AWP Bookfair in NYC (January 30 – February 2). We are assigned table # 513 in “Americas Hall II” at the Hilton, which you can access from the third floor. Editors and staff will be there to answer questions and chat. Check out the conference here.
