Chapter 4 - What the Translation of Poetry Is

Summary

This chapter is a declaration of the author’s translational assumptions: rhythm is a force that resists the signified; translation promotes sense-making rather than the gathering of meaning, the relational and the associative rather than the intelligible; back-translation is indispensable to translational exchange and dialecticity; translation operates most fruitfully in the ST’s invisible; the text is not the ST but the totality of its possibilities. A translation of Rilke’s sonnet to Orpheus 1, 5 exemplifies this notion of totality. And the translational involvement of the performing body is illustrated in a translation of the first stanza of Verlaine’s ’En sourdine’. In conclusion, the chapter revisits distinctions between vocative and accusative perspectives, sense and meaning.