Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/79

 that “if you want to influence the masses, a simple translation is always best.”* And there are, after all, prose adaptations of Shakespeare in English, the most famous of which is Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807), written to introduce Shakespeare to children and read by generations of adults as well. (The most recent of these books — from a division of the largest American book publisher — is a series called, chillingly, Shorter Shakespeare.) While some people want the entire experience of the original, others are happier with the story being told in the form of a good read. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov, whose most famous translation is an English prose translation of the long Russian poem Eugene Onegin, employed the image of one of his most favorite activities—collecting butterflies—to describe the advantages of prose translation of poetry: “shorn of its primary verbal existence, the original text will not be able to soar and to sing; but it can be very nicely dissected and mounted, and scientifically studied in all its organic details.”* But then Nabokov is an extreme believer in fidelity to meaning: “It is when the translator sets out to render the ‘spirit’—not the textual sense—that he begins to traduce his author. The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.”* Which leads one to ask why a translated poem should be useful. That’s what trots are for. The British poet Ted Hughes approached his translation of the Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky’s poetry in a similar way. Not knowing any Hungarian, he worked from line-by-line cribs. He wrote about his experiences, “my first principle of translating Pilinszky as literally as possible won out against my meddling self. ... [L]iteral renderings, very often, are all one could desire in a final version. When I go back through the whole poem in [the crib] version I see once more that the most effective lines in my final version have come through unaltered, or very little altered.”* Yet, as the crib maker, Janos Csokits, wrote, “these poems have lost the most distinctive feature of their appearance ... Without the softening effect of the original metre and rhyme scheme the impact of some of these poems can be very painful; they sound harsher and Pilinszky’s view of the world appears grimmer than in Hungarian.”* The result is a relatively bare, prosaic, contemporary English-language poem. 79 79