Translation of Poetry

Poetry, according to Alexander Pope, has been said to consist of “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” (1711). Thus, poetry seems to lie on a continuum with one end attached to human feelings and emotions, which can only be sensed, not given expression to; for how can we say how much we enjoyed a poem? The other side attached to his means of communication, i.e. language; hence the controversial relationship between language and mind.

The issue of the translatability of poetry has long been a heated debate among scholars. Some scholars believe that what is lost in translation is the poetry, while others state that all meanings are translatable and only the form of poetic discourse is lost in translation. There are still other scholars who believe that poetry translation is possible only if both the meaning and style of the source text are kept intact in the target language. Below is a sketch of the arguments of both groups:

According to Frost (1969), the main characteristic of poetic discourse that distinguishes it from common discourse is that in poetry form and content cannot be separated. Content is highly language-bound and this is what makes poetic translation of poetry more difficult than other types of translations. He believes poetry is what is lost in translation. Nabakof cited in Giblett (1987) compares poetry translation to beheading, insulting the dead and a parrot’s scream, and Roman Jacobson (1960) states that poetry is by definition untranslatable.

As to those who take an almost positive stance concerning the translation of poetry, Boase-Beir and De Beauground cited in Connally (1991) believe that translation of poetry can be successful only if both style and content are transferred. Holmes (1970) who has a descriptive view towards translation believes that there may be as many different translations of the same poem as the number of translators. He adds that while the translation of a poem is never equal to the original, any text including a poetic one has many interpretations and therefore many possible translations. Nair (1991) believes that poetry is an imaginative expression of a poet’s feelings and experiences and its translation must be a faithful transference of the poet’s ideas. A poetry translator should, therefore, strive for accuracy and this makes the translator’s fluency of expression indispensably difficult. Lefever (1992) who takes side with the issue introduces a number of methods for translation of poetry; namely, phonological translation, literal translation, rhythmic translation, translation into prose, translation into rhymed poetry, translation into poetry without rhyme (blank verse), and interpretive translation. He states that in the past most translators translated poetry into rhymed poetry but today they translate poetry into prose. He adds that some translators translate only the meaning at the price of the form but sometimes translators get help from the poet to create a new work.

A final word here is that the possibility of poetry translation does not mean that all aspects of a poem are translatable in practice, since each language has its own lexical and structural patterns which in some cases resist imitation in other languages. However, getting close to the original text as much as possible is not a far-fetched aspiration, as the past has witnessed great achievements in cross-cultural renderings of poetic masterpieces of a language to other languages. Nicholson’s (1962) translation of Rumi’s Mathnawi, Arberry’s (1947) Fifty Poems of Hafiz, and Rehatsek’s (1964) The Gulistan of Sádi are just a few to mention.


​(Excerpt from: Translation of Poetry: Towards a Practical Model for Translation Analysis and Assessment of Poetic Discourse Article,  in Journal of Universal Language · March 2008)