Never will a writer be read more closely than by his or her translator. The best translators seem to have an extra ear – indeed have to have an extra ear – for the literary dimensions and possibilities of their own language. Translation can draw the poet out of someone who may not have realised the poet in themselves. The response to poetry is in us all but it takes an extra talent to turn response to invention, to hear and speak echo in a fresh voice.
There will always remain the question of the faithful translation. The difficulty is deciding what it is one should be faithful to. A poem is a complex whole made up of many elements, not one of which has an exact equivalent in another language. Yet we hope for recognition, for some ideal combination of surface and depth fidelities. The ideal doesn’t exist. But living translations do: echo on echo on echo.
As a first-time judge of this competition I was immediately struck by the sheer sophistication and skill of some of the youngest entries though there were many variations on a theme among them. Grasshoppers hopped and ants crawled everywhere in regulation La Fontainean fashion. Some of the translations had real wit and sharpness, the winner of the class, Johanna Reimann-Dubbers, above all. And there was much beside La Fontaine from Latin and Spanish and Russian. The best had an ambitious period-feel verging on pastiche and almost carried it off, form and all.
The middle-category of 14–18 was a little disappointing as the judges’ discussion showed. Promise everywhere but rather less fulfilment, rather less sheer élan. Rather less bite. One could be charmed, however, by versions of Ovid (who, like La Fontaine gets in everywhere) and I personally was taken by versions of Neruda (by Saskia Volhard Dearman), George Heym (by Jennifer Cearns) and the classical Chinese poet, Lu Yu, whose ‘Phoenix Hairpin’ was translated gracefully but not over-prettily by Clara Yick Kay Fung. The winner thundered up on the inside, a splendidly ambitious Homer from The Iliad, the very end of the book, by Naomi Ackermann.
The greatest range was, as might be expected, in the Open category where the shortlist tended to be dominated by French and German poets, though the winner turned out to be Paul Batchelor’s marvellous new take – not terza rima – on Dante, via George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’. Novelty isn’t the point. New life is: the way a text swings into the ear with all the sense of discovery. This worked. Some good, welcome Dutch too, and a robust, brilliantly larky Béroul. Rilke, as ever, fascinates and shines through. As did, for me, another original take, this time on Baudelaire’s prose poem, ‘The Double Room’, slapped and tickled into broad Scots Burns measure by A. C. Clarke, an act of such verve and imagination that it delighted and moved me. Not orthodox translation, of course, and maybe a little far out at the edge of the field, but I’d walk there any time.
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