Poetry and its Fatal Shortcoming

Poetry, as beautiful and human a thing as any, is a wonderful celebration of the elegance and grandeur of human language. Possible in any tongue and as mutable as the languages themselves which employ its use, it comes in many shapes and sizes. Yet for all the praise I can muster of poetry’s splendor and for all the beauty to be found in the sonnets of Shakespeare or the prose of Whitman, there is one characteristic that fails to be recognized by many analysts and lovers of poetry, and that is that of its utter and complete untranslatability.

Yes, I am proposing (perhaps a bit controversially for lovers of poets of other lands) that poetry seen through the lens of any language other than that of its original is fraudulent and counterfeit.

Devoid of the idiom, semantic subtleties, syntactical patterns, rhyme, meter, and general flow of the author’s tongue, what good is expected to become of its translation? Poetry is only possible through the malleable nature of language; poets are unique due to their ability to manipulate and mold language in their own distinctive way. They are however limited in the sense that the only medium by which they have to convey their ideas is the words of the language in which they are writing. If you strip these words away and replace them with ones that not even the author himself is familiar with how can you not expect errors in translation to occur?

Every poet has a vast array of tools at their disposal with which to construct poems, yet while all poets possess tools, the tools sets vary in numerous and complicated ways. Each language is limited in the number of tools it can offer its speakers and it is from these differences that such variance in the world of poetry is possible. This is also however precisely where the imperfection of translatability rears its head. Imagine for example two home repair contractors set out to complete the exact same project yet while one has a hammer, nails, and pliers, the other is given a chainsaw, a wrench and a caulking gun. How can any reasonable person expect the two projects to turn out even remotely comparable, let alone the same?

Although I will not argue with the notion that beautiful translations are possible as well (I have for example read some English translations of the gifted Chilean poet Pablo Neruda which indeed constitute elegant poetry in their own right), they are at the end of the day just that: translations. Inefficient and underequipped vestiges of their original, they are as imperfect as they are artificial.

Many poets have understood this and as a result expressed great fear for the later generations that will hear their poetry in a form unlike the one they have written it in. Not the least of these poets was Geoffrey Chaucer. The following is a quote by Dr. Seth Lerer taken from a lecture of his entitled “Medieval Attitudes Toward Language”:

Chaucer feared for the miswriting and misreading of his own poetry by scribes and readers who did not speak his dialect. Now you’ll remember how in old English people were translating Northumbrian into West Saxon, Chaucer was afraid of what would happen if a scribe from another dialect region got a hold of his poem, and here’s what he says at the close of Troilus and Criseyde. He’s addressing his book; he’s addressing it as “thee” (”you”) and he says,

And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.

(Modern English Rendering):
And since there is such great diversity
In English and in writing of our tongue,
So I pray to God that no one miswrite you,
Nor mismeter you for default of tongue.

I find this little quote-within-a-quote to be interesting because the issue at hand for Chaucer is not translation into a different tongue, but merely into a different dialect of English. Poetry’s sensitivity is such that even the idea of molding a poem into another form of its same original language is enough to cause Chaucer to lament and plead with God that his poetry not be trifled with. If one of the greatest poets in English language history feels this way about the loss of information in dialect-to-dialect translation, how much more information stands to be lost when translation takes place between mutually unintelligible languages?

We modern English speakers have already long since been distanced from full natural intelligibility of Chaucer’s poetry. Even as direct linguistic descendants of Chaucer, the only forms of his stories we can appreciate are those translated into modern English. Take for example the four lines written above in middle English; as familiar as the majority of words are in their written forms, it doesn’t take a graduate degree in the history of English to tell that this is clearly something far removed from our version of English. If you could hear this language spoken its unintelligibility would increase several times over; as this was written before the Great Vowel Shift, its spoken form would differ from the way we read it in much more striking ways than the written form. This not only throws off rhyme and the like (indeed some of Shakespeare’s rhyming patterns are skewed as well and he came more than a couple hundred years after Chaucer and is technically considered a speaker of “modern English”), but the grammatical and syntactical patterns at work here also distort flow and meter, as addressed directly by Chaucer above.

Poetry is the art of language, and like any great piece of artwork a poem can only be truly appreciated if it is seen in the exact manner the artist created it in. One would not take The Starry Night by Van Gogh and repaint in a surrealistic way à la Dalí or in a 17^th century Dutch style such as that of Rembrandt. The Starry Night is best seen in its original Post-Impressionist representation with its inimitable sense of nocturnal beauty and its swirling rivers of blues and yellows. Just as repainting a painting seems almost heretical, to take a piece of poetry and render it into another tongue is to entirely miss the piece of art the poet had intended their audience to experience.

To be clear, I do not say all this to say that the translation of poetry is utterly without worth; the reality of things is that it is either a flawed translation or no rendering of the poem at all. Given the choices, I would rather read a translation that gets at the meaning of the author than remain entirely in the dark. However it is vital when we analyze poetry to consider the prospect that poetry that has been tweaked, however so slightly, from the original words of the author is at best an unfaithful replica of the original and should not be treated as an equivalent version. Again, poetry is the art of language and art is best viewed in the light shed on it by the artist, not that of those who come after.