What Is Lost, and Gained, in Translating a Poem

A translator of prose can usually aim at one target. A translator of poetry must aim at several that cannot all be hit at once: the sense of the words, the pattern of sound, the shape on the page, and whatever the poem's form meant to its first readers. Every choice sacrifices one of these to another, which is why the same short poem can be translated a hundred times without any version making the next unnecessary.

[A] Consider a sonnet whose fourteen lines carried, for a sixteenth-century reader, an immediate signal of a particular kind of argument. [B] A modern translation that preserves the fourteen lines preserves the shape but not the signal, because the modern reader does not hear the form as a convention. [C] A translation that abandons the form to reproduce the argument's movement may communicate more of what the original did, while looking nothing like it. Neither version is a failure; they answer different questions about what a poem is. [D] The consequence for a reader without the original language is uncomfortable but worth accepting: no single translation can be trusted to stand in for the poem, and the honest response is to read two.