Found in Translation

A Piano Sonata Played on a Trombone
In many ways, translating poetry is like playing music. First, you must be able
to read the score to understand the original composition. But if the poet’s
instrument is language, then each poem is designed specifically for that
instrument. Thus converting a poem into another language is like trying to
play a piano sonata on a trombone. The melody of the poem may be
recognizable in any language, but its sound will be completely different once
it’s translated.
It takes a fine and discerning ear. Often it takes another poet. Fortunately for
us, these poet-translators are also able to clearly articulate both the importance
and the difficulty of the poetry translation task itself. Charles Simic, a Pulitzer
Prize winner for poetry and former U.S. poet laureate, immigrated to the
United States from Yugoslavia and did not begin to speak English until he was
fifteen years old. For more than fifty years, in addition to writing his own
poetry, he translated poems from various eastern European languages,
resulting in thirteen books of translated works.
In his final appearance as poet laureate, he gave a talk at the Library of

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Congress in which he emphasized the value of translation to society at large.
“Every culture in the world is enriched by another country’s literature,” Simic
said. “Translators were the first multiculturalists, looking at other languages
and other traditions and finding something that they wanted to translate and
share.”
Simic went on to explain that translating poetry is ultimately an “act of love,
an act of supreme empathy.” He pointed out that even when he taught literature,
he never read poems as closely and meticulously as he did when translating
them. He commented, “Translating is like being a medium, standing in the
shoes of the person you’re translating; one becomes another. It is the closest
possible reading of a literary text.”
Of course, because of its extreme difficulty, some go so far as to say that to
even attempt to translate poetry is not only futile, but impossible. Simic
disagrees: “Poetry itself is about the impossible. All arts are about doing the
impossible. That’s their attraction. How does a poet take an experience, big or
small, and convert it into fourteen lines? But it’s done.”
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