The fact that translation is even possible reminds us of just how much of poetry lies in the sense.  Poetry, like all literature, is a weird hybrid art.  In its purely sensual aspect, it is a lot like music.  Sound is a huge part of what marks literature qua literature, and sometimes that aspect of things even seems to dominate.  But on another level, literature is not a sensual art at all. Images, ideas, and stories as such are not tied to particular sounds or even sound as such. The words bread in English, pain in French, and lechem in Hebrew all sound very different and thus have very different effects on a purely sensual level, but the reality they bring to mind is much the same. The sound of a word and its relation to other words in a language can add a certain coloring to the thing towards which it points, but in the end bread (the thing) is bread and the word for it in any language will have very similar connotations. Thus, some poems—even lyric poems in very particular forms (such as sonnets)—have such strong content that they remain quite powerful even when translated into free verse or prose.

In my experience, there are even extended passages of poetry in translations where the experience of reading is nearly identical to the original. After all, both texts are pointing outward from themselves to things in the world. We might compare this to listening to a piano transcription of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, where large parts of the score suffer absolutely no diminishment and might as well have been composed precisely for that instrument. This is especially telling because an enormous part of Tchaikovsky’s appeal lies in his orchestral coloring, something which should suffer enormously in transcription.  However,  most of the work remains shockingly undiminished, even in a work like the Nutcracker. Much the same is true for translation, even when the original’s particular style is important. Reading a superb carrying-over like the King James Version beside the original Hebrew reveals that much of the English is every bit as good as the original.

On the other hand, there are other poems which completely evaporate in any sort of translation. A notorious example is “Chanson d’automne” by Paul Verlaine. While the poem obviously has a sense, the poetry of it is heavily dependent on the dense rhyming occasioned by the short lines. Any translation into another language is going to have to depart wildly from the sense of the original in order to keep anything like the same poetic effect, but this would then be an original poem only loosely inspired by the original. This is an extreme example, but it is true, to some degree, of all poems. Even the most “translatable” poems, especially the longer they go on, will inevitably have some moments in which they suffer diminishment in translation, or if not diminishment, then some important departure from the original. To return again to the Tchaikovsky piano transcription, while some parts really suffer almost no degradation, others, if not completely diminished, can sound somewhat “tinny.” 

There are certain kinds of content that work best within certain formal constraints, but translation again demonstrates that there can be fairly wide latitude in what those constraints might be. There must be repetition, but it does not have to be the exact same kind of repetition. Indeed, in translation from one language to another, with their different metrical systems suited to the particular characteristics of that one language, it is impossible to use exactly the same kind of repetition in a different language. But there are instances which go much further. Translations of rhymed verse into unrhymed (but still formal) verse, such as Richard Howard’s version of Baudelaire, are quite common, but there is also a long tradition of translating unrhymed Ancient Greek and Latin poetry into rhymed English, as well as a long tradition of turning the unrhymed Hebrew Psalms into meter and rhyme. Henry Weinfield’s translations of sonnets by Gerard de Nerval and Pierre de Ronsard, like their originals, still use rhyme and meter, but he frequently quite radically alters the rhyme scheme. There are many more such examples. Though the forms in these translations are often quite different from the original, the general consensus is that these are often successful, both in their own right and as representations of the originals. This holds not just for shorter lyric poems or didactic poems but also for narrative. There have been very artistically successful versions of the Iliad in blank verse, loose hexameter and rhymed fourteener couplets. In such cases, while the matter is better suited to verse than prose, exactly what kind of verse is not narrowly prescribed.

Burl Horniachek is the editor of To Heaven’s Rim, an anthology of Christian poetry.