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Translating Poetry

The Double Labyrinth
Editor(s): 
Daniel Weissbort


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1989
262 pp
Cloth: 
$32.95
0-87745-225-3

"In 1975, in a study of the whole nature and problem of translation, I expressed the wish that some of our best translators should let us into their workshops, that they should keep and make available some record of their 'exact art,' failures and frustrations included. Daniel Weissbort's atelier-anthology is a generous, intensely stimulating response to this plea…This anthology is a primer of mutual respect, of reciprocal need, as much as it is a compelling introduction to the alchemies of translation."—George Steiner, Sunday Times

"…a fascinating attempt to revitalize and expand translation studies…an important and valuable addition to the study of literature and translation."—Rainer Schulte

Ezra Pound regarded translation as a superior type of literary criticism, representing a fusion of the creative and the critical. In Translating Poetry, Daniel Weissbort and his fellow contributors show just how this fusion occurs as they address the practical problems of transplanting a text from one culture to another with its resonance and nuances as intact as humanly possible.

With the help of his contributors, including Stanley Kunitz, W. S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, James S. Holmes, Michael Hamburger, Richard Wilbur, and many others, Weissbort expands our understanding of the translation process and provides students with an entrance into the thought processes that lead to the final draft. Contributors' worksheets, along with their narrations of the translation process, provide a unique illustration of the translator at work. Weissbort also includes correspondence between translators to demonstrate the translation process further, revealing how problems present themselves and how translators resolve them.

In this volume translators make explicit what is implicit in their work and offer critical insights that cannot always be accommodated in the translations themselves but are a significant bonus to the translation process. Translating Poetry brings a new dimension to an understanding not only of translation but linguistic traditions and the translator's role as mediator between cultures.