Posted on: Sunday, December 02, 2007
Who said poetry is what gets lost in translation? No, really, who said it?
Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the exact source of the Robert Frost quote-turned-cliché "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." My Google search yielded 666 different pages containing the quote. My JSTOR search yielded only 11 references of the entire quote, but it's significant that not only the resulting Google sites, but also the scholarly articles in JSTOR, never say when and where Frost was first heard saying those words. Is it an apocryphal quote? It's interesting that precisely the scholarly articles often omit the author of the above cliché – as if when the writers couldn't find the source, they decided to mention the quote as if it was a proverb. In any case, deep cultural anxiety about foreignness (shall I say xenophobia) lurks behind Frost's maxim and its wide-spreadedness. (For the record, Packingtown Review is anti-cliché, anti-anxiety, and pro-translation.) If anyone comes up with a clever counter-maxim to the Frostian cliché, send it to us and we'll feature it on our web site.
