Translating is a funny old business. It is poorly paid, scarcely recognised, agonisingly vulnerable to criticism and generally soon replaced and forgotten. Translating poetry is even worse since so many people subscribe to Robert Frost's foolish dictum that poetry is what is lost in translation (Frost never attempted translation and I suspect that his prosy poetry does quite well in other languages). And yet foolish people like myself continuing translating poetry: in my own case, I have been translating poetry for as many as thirty-five years.
Among all the problems confronting the translator of poetry of the past - poetry that employed prosody - that of what to do about metre and rhyme is perhaps the most acute. Take Pushkin out of his own metres and rhymes and one is often left with doggerel, which evidently he is not for readers of Russian. Similarly, much of Byron's doggerel translated into other languages became movingly romantic for countless non-English readers of his generation. Or consider the high esteem which Baudelaire and Mallarme had for the wretched poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.
And indeed the effects of metre and rhyme are extremely difficult to calculate. In English, for example, it is almost impossible to have any two readers scan a poem in exactly the same way; often the differences, even when the scansion is done by "experts", are very great. Little wonder, then, that Hopkins's metrical experiments are still the subject of debate and various interpretation.
The root of the problem, it seems to me, is that the metres of classical Greek and Latin, which European literary culture used as its models, are "out of sorts" with the European languages which tried to accommodate them (it is ironic that the Romans sometimes complained that Greek metres were an imposition for them and distorted Latin into syntactic patterns out of keeping with the genius of their language).
Hopkins, expert as he was in classical metres, felt deeply the lack of relevance of these metres (and their English accommodations) to the English language, and he devoted his energy and talent to attempting to supply a more natural or native metrics.
And now I come to the interminable debate between the literalists and the imitators or adaptors. In his Imitations, Robert Lowell formulated the main charge against the literalists and metricists. "Strict translators," Lowell wrote, "still exist. They seem to live in a pure world untouched by contemporary poetry. Their difficulties are bold and honest, but they are taxidermists, not poets, and their poems are likely to be stuffed birds. A better strategy would seem to be the now fashionable translations into free or irregular verse. Yet this method turns out a sprawl of language, neither faithful nor distinguished, now on stilts, now low, as Dryden would say. It seems self-evident that no professor or amateur poet, or even a good poet writing hastily, can by miracle transform himself into a fine metricist. I believe that poetic translation - I would call it an imitation - must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and rightness of hand as an original poem."
Lowell seems not to be aware that his term "imitation" was employed in this same sense some centuries ago by Pope and others. But leaving that aside, his facile dismissal of all metricist translators seems to me unjustified and covers up that problem which I identified at the outset. A more acute perception of this problem is expressed by the French poet, critic and translator of Shakespeare, Yves Bonnefoy, who, in a short article he wrote to preface his translation of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium", states: "To translate the poetry of the past according to rules [he means the rules of traditional prosody] that are now empty of substance would be . . . a betrayal, and one has to attempt it with the only line that is possible for us: one that is free, faithful to personal truth, submitting to laws like every life but not to conventions, and remaining content with evoking, potentially only, the initial regularity, through the occasional surfacing of the old metres which we can accept only when they are born as if from themselves."
Underlying Bonnefoy's view of the problem and his proposed solution is his understanding that the regular and formal prosody of tradition is authentic only when and insofar as it reflects the regularity of the accepted norms that inform the Weltanschauung of the society to which the metricist belongs. A translator of traditional poetry of the past who himself in his own personal and societal life does not (and perhaps cannot) subscribe to such norms, is playing false in mechanically copying the metrical regularity of his original.
According to Beonnefoy, "The translator cannot set himself the task of a regular verse line without failing in one of the dialectics that structure true poetic creation. When Yeats wrote `Sailing to Byzantium', the metric structure he chose was a forma formans, something generative, since it determined the as yet uncertain `content' of which it became, in return, an aspect. Form and content are thus a single act, wherein a freedom is inscribed. But when the significations are, in advance and entirely, defined as is the case when one translates, a form decided a priori can only be external to them, a form of adjustment demanding ingeniosity, removing from the translator's sphere of decision his obsessions and myths which I believe to be the only things capable, however, of rekindling the darkened glow of the work."
The translation of poetry is a booming business now, in Ireland as elsewhere, and it seems to me that these acute observations of Bonnefoy are of crucial importance to any translator whose concern is the poetry of the past.
Michael Smith is a poet, translator and publisher