I Don’t Want This to End Yet,” which includes this second stanza: The Larkin-Manrique translation offers poems filled with longing and bawdiness and the earthiest of language (such as “the way you fuck me is no trick”).Ĭonsider “Don’t Go, My Darling. As Larkin and Manrique have rendered these poems into English, she is also shattering the expectations of religious chastity and reveling in the fever and lust of lesbian love. In 1997, poets Joan Larkin and Jaimie Manrique published a translation of 14 of her verse works Sor Juana’s Love Poems/Poemas de Amor.īorn illegitimate, Sor Juana was a woman of great intelligence and courage who broke boundaries throughout her life. Here, for instance, is the opening stanza of “Poem II for the Fest of the Presentation of Our Lady”:īut, in addition to her theology, philosophy and devotional writing, Sor Juana also wrote about love. Included in the book are several poems in praise of the Virgin Mary and the saints as well as devotionals. Internationally known during her lifetime, she was so important as a theologian that, in 2005, the Catholic publishing house Paulist Press included a selection of her writings, translated by Pamela Kirk Rappaport, in its series called The Classics of Western Spirituality. In this case, though, the poem has already been transformed by a go-between (the translator) so the reader is required to interpret an interpretation of the original work.Ĭase in point: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Sister Joan Agnes of the Cross), a Roman Catholic nun in the late 17th century in Mexico City who is hailed as a major figure at the beginning of Mexican literature. And it will yield a different experience, a different “meaning,” to each reader, depending on how much one puts into and takes out of the words and phrasing of the poem.Ī translated poem requires the same work by the reader. In essence, a poem in its original language, with its hints and gaps and odd juxtapositions, demands translation by the reader. What must Shakespeare’s plays read like in French? In Swahili? In Korean? Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding… I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-ĭom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Eliot into another language? Orthese lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins: It’s not a mathematical equation but an interpretation.Īnd, if one Russian word for a piece of furniture can result in such varied responses by translators, how much greater variance is implicit in the translation of poetry? For instance, how would one translate The Waste Land by T.S. Talk to translators, and they’ll tell you that it’s an art, not a science. Translation is always a dicey proposition. In the original Russian, it was the same word, but it was transformed into English in these four different ways. What I found was that other translators identified this piece of furniture differently - variously, as an open bureau, as an open wardrobe, and as an open chiffonier. That’s how one translation has it, but, while researching a story about translations for the Chicago Tribune, I had occasion to compare this scene in six English language versions of the masterpiece. On one of the first pages of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dolly Oblonsky is packing to leave her womanizing husband and is described as taking something out of an open chest of drawers.
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