Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation (review)

Dryden famously distinguishes three modes of translation: ‘metaphrase, or turning an author word by word, and line by line’, ‘paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator . . . but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense’, and ‘imitation, where the translator . . . assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but . . . taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases’. The trajectory of poetic translation in the West has seen examples, variants, and hybrids of all three of these methodologies over the centuries, with the presumption that imitation remains a category apart from translation proper, and needs to be acknowledged as such. James Holmes, in his 1970 ‘Forms of Verse Translation and the Translation of Verse Form’, relegates imitation to the bottom of his list of approaches to ‘metapoetic’ translation. Translators may choose a ‘mimetic’ strategy, Holmes writes, ‘retaining the form of the original’, or an ‘analogical’ one, in which ‘a form that filled a parallel function in the poetic tradition of the target language’ is used. But they may also adopt an ‘organic’ approach, in which the translated text is allowed ‘to take on its own unique poetic shape as the translation develops’, or again, they may even adopt a ‘deviant’ or ‘extraneous’ approach, in which the form adopted ‘is in no way implicit in either the form or content of the original’. Regarding the latter, Holmes adds: ‘extraneous form has had a tenacious life as a kind of underground, minority form alongside the other possibilities ever since the seventeenth century. Rather than a period form, it has been a constant across the years, resorted to particularly by metapoets who lean in the direction of imitation.’

Perhaps it should not be at all surprising, then, despite a traditional consensus that imitation is not really a variety of translation, to find Barbara Folkart still championing the method in Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation. In this study she unapologetically makes the case for precisely this sort of rendering of poetic texts, texts which she fears will otherwise never come alive in a new language. Folkart has some basis for this argument in the plethora of donnish, fustian, unmelodious (she writes ‘bovine’) poetic translations perpetrated over the last 300 years or so. Trotting out example after example of these artistic offenders, she notes that little if any recent work in the field of Translation Studies is ‘adequate to the dynamics of producing poetically viable translations’. She invokes Barthes to complain of poetic translation’s historically ‘readerly’ bias with its ‘static, retrospective, replicative focus on the original’, a ‘trite-and-true’ undertaking that leads inevitably to productions which deal only with ‘the flat of the text’, the mere epidermis of the original, resulting in ‘retrospective, after-the-fact constructs’. Instead of revelling in new language, as all successful (Folkart writes ‘real’) poetry does, this type of translation has ‘regressed to the idiom’, mountains of academic analysis giving birth to ‘a mouse of a poem’.

In opposition to this traditional method, Folkart proposes a ‘poetics of appropriation’. ‘Texts’, she argues, ‘whether scientific or poetic, have to be made in the target language, written and re-enacted, rather than replicated, or repeated.’ She writes of translation as creation, of effecting jouissance (Barthes again), and of the translated poem as a ‘unit of invention’, which would be all well and good as part of a manifesto for imitation. Folkart, however, pushes the envelope regarding poetic translation, setting forth a highly personalized methodology that is almost militantly individualistic. ‘When it comes to poeming’, she writes in a passage that might well have served as the volume’s epigraph, ‘the end justifies just about every conceivable means.’ Abandoning translation’s age-old continuum of literal/free by jettisoning the very pragmatic concerns of compensation in mimesis or ‘matching’, Folkart asserts that ‘the translator’s strategy can be to trade all...