Monday, December 19, 2011

A poet's hubris?

One volume of the Ben Belitt translations of Pablo Neruda includes not a single translation by another poet or by another poetry translator.

One of the translations is obviously flawed: a Chilean poem becomes a poem for all mechanized and schooled mankind. What is worse, the poet may have encouraged his translator in this cosmopolitan reading — but it is lacking in the original as given on the facing page, verso.

A better title: The Collected Translations of Neruda by poet Ben Belitt, 1970.

A book for me: a single volume with the best translations of Neruda from any European language (look how well Italian appears to translate to Danish - the concision - and Spanish?) with originals in Spanish RECTO and the selected translations VERSO (an e-book?) - not the usual arrangement (but consider how French bilingual dictionaries begin with the French lexicon, but those by the English or Germans begin with the target language - so the privilege would go to the poems, not the polyglot translations.)

A UN poetry week project: Tagore?

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