复旦2021

Bonnefoy suggests that a work has to be compelling，or it is not translatable. Pound would certainly have agreed with this. For if translation is, as Lefevere and others claim, rewriting, then the relationship between writer and rewriter has to be established as productive. Translations of poems are part of a process of reading continuity. Writers create for readers, and the power of reader to remake the text is fundamental.
Different readers will produce different readings, different translators will always produce different translations. What matters in the translation of poetry is that the translator should be so drawn into the poem that he or she then seeks to transpose it creatively, through the pleasure generated by the reading. If we follow Bonnefoy’s view, he would point out that none of the translators of Dante appear to have relived the act that gave rise to it and remains enmeshed in it; rather, they appear to have taken the source as a monolithic whole and chipped away at it. Justifying his own approach to translation, Bonnefoy talks about releasing a creative energy that can then be utilised by the translator.
The positive imagery of translation as energy-releasing, as freeing the linguistic sign into circulation, as transplanting, as reflowering in an enabling language is a long way removed from the negativity of Frost and the pundits of untranslatability. A great deal of this imagery has been around a long time, but it is only recently, as post-modernists reject the idea of the monolithic text, that a discourse of translation as liberating has come to the fore.
The boundaries between source and target texts, never clearly determined in any genre, cannot be sustained if a poem is to have an existence as a poem in another language. Perhaps the most succinct comment on the symbiosis between writer and translator/rewriter of a poem are these lines by the Earl of Roscommon, Dillon of Wentworth, composed more than three hundred years ago:
Then seek a Poet who your way does bend,
And choose an Author as you choose a Friend:
United by this sympathetic Bond,
You grow familiar, intimate and fond;
Your Thoughts, your Words, your Styles, your Souls agree
No Longer his Interpreter, but he.
When the rewriter is perfectly fused with the source, a poem is translated. That this happens so frequently is a cause for celebration. Poetry is not what is lost in translation, it is rather what we gain through translation and translators.