2 - What Is Lost?

Summary

Robert Frost's is the most famous and widely diffused aphorism on translating, or not translating, poetry. He is reported to have said that ‘poetry is what gets left out in translation’ according to one authority, or what gets ‘lost’ in translation, more usually. The remark appears in variant forms on a number of Internet sites, though it appears not to have a source in Frost's published prose writings. The remark, quoted by Louis Untermeyer in 1964, is given as ‘Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation’ in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. Edmund Keeley, the translator of C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, and other Modern Greek poets, paraphrases such ‘dangerous generalizations’ as: ‘what constitutes poetry is exactly what is lost when poetry is translated into another language (ascribed to Robert Frost).’ There is, he notes, ‘a half truth’ in this, but then adds: ‘The other half truth’ is the ‘reverse image, equally valid, equally false.’ Thinking about it thus brushes off the problem, but only superficially, since a proposition can hardly be ‘valid’ and ‘false’ at the same time. In this chapter, I explore and illustrate the proposal that Frost's aphorism is, in its terms and implications, true and valid – and, what's more, that it memorably captures (hence its familiarity) one of the inescapable conditions for those involved in poetry and translation.