Research into poetry translation dominates translation studies (Jones, 2011:181), due to the genre’s high status (Bassnett, 2002:114) and the “rich variety of problems” (Jones, 2011:182) it poses translators. This essay will discuss the challenges faced by poetry translators - both those which all literary translators encounter and those specifically relevant to poetry. I will illustrate my points by referring to Roy Campbell’s translation (Fleurs du mal, 2014) of Baudelaire’s 1861 poem L’Albatros and James Kirkup’s translation (University of Pennsylvania, 2014) of Apollinaire’s 1912 poem Le pont Mirabeau (see Appendix). Due to space constraints, I will focus solely on issues associated with the translation process itself, rather than those relating to the wider concern of earning a living from translating poetry (e.g. securing funding and dealing with publishers).
According to Holmes (1988:9), poetry is the “most complex of all linguistic structures, [in which] a whole range of significations, and not simply the signification most obvious or most logical, fuse to create the total ‘meaning’ and the total effect.” The use of ambiguity and polysemy (which according to Landers (2001:97) is “one of the hallmarks of literature”) is less of a concern for translators working with prose texts (Holmes, 1988:9), as context usually clarifies which specific signification is intended. However, if the source text (whether poetry or prose) is ambiguous or polysemous, this should be replicated in the target text so that it too is open to a variety of interpretations (Boase-Beier, 2009:195) and does not “reduce the dynamic role of the reader” (Hatim and Mason, 1990:11).
One of the most important issues for any literary translator, not only p...
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