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Can a translation of a poem be as beautiful as the original?

Kavya Menon Contributor
· 3 replies
Meaning & language#poetry#translation
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I translate my own Malayalam poems into English and they always lose something. Sometimes they gain something, which is stranger.

Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) is a famous case: a very free version that many consider a great English poem in its own right, but which is hardly a translation of Khayyam.

So is a beautiful translation still a translation? Or does every great poetic translation become a new poem?

3 answers

  1. Claire Dubois

    Contributor

    As a translator, I'd say a good translation is a new poem that answers to the original. It has obligations the original didn't have, but it must still be a poem. A translation that's accurate but dead has failed at the most important thing.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Reza Tehrani

    Contributor

    Iranians have mixed feelings about FitzGerald. Some quatrains he attributes to Khayyam are not his, and FitzGerald made him more of a hedonist and pessimist than the Persian supports. But it introduced him to the world. A beautiful betrayal.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Layla Haddad

    Fellow

    In seventeenth-century France, elegant but loose translations of the classics were nicknamed les belles infidèles, the beautiful unfaithful ones. The phrase is sexist, but it captures a dilemma translators into Arabic had felt for centuries before that: accuracy and grace pulling in opposite directions.

    Helpful · 3

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