Poet as Translator: Correspondences and Renewal

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or some two thousand years translation has been the F object of solicitous interest from writers, scholars and philosophers. The art and craft of translation was of particular interest to writers such as Cicero, Horace, John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Matthew Arnold. At the beginning of the twentieth century Ezra Pound revitalized the interest in transplanting texts from various cultures, past and present, into English. On the whole, however, translation of foreign literatures into English has always taken a second place in the field of American letters. Even today the statistics are slightly disturbing when compared with some other countries in the Western world. Germany publishes between seven and eight thousand books in translation from other literatures each year. France can show a similar statistical record. The United States hardly reaches fifteen hundred book translations per year.’ The figures indicate an alarming discrepancy, especially if one considers the geographical and demographic differences between the United States and countries such as Germany or France. It would be difficult to point to a very simple reason for the translation imbalance that exists between the United States and most European countries. We just don’t know enough about the mechanisms of cross-cultural communication, especially in the field of literature. Many translation projects happen by chance. Richard Wilbur began translating because Andre du Bouchet, the French poet, happened to be a fellow graduate student at Harvard. Ben Belitt, who through Wallace Fowlie was introduced to the early modern French poets-in particular Rimbaud-perceived translation as a challenge to please his language informant. Many of the other American poet-translators have similar stories to tell.* Another look at translation statistics reveals a disquieting fact: the lag time between the publication of a book in the original language and its appearance in English translation is between seven and ten years. Whether this situation will undergo a rapid change in the near future is doubtful, although activities in the art and craft of translation have seen a tremendous upswing in the last ten years in this country through the founding of the American Literary Translators Association in 1978 and the publication of Translation Review, a journal that is dedicated to all aspects of literary translation.3 Even though Ezra Pound revived interest in the art of translation in the first decades of this century, it was not