poetry & translation & history
Dante, Joachim du Bellay, Alexander Pope, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Jacques Roubaud, Robert Lowell, C.K. Williams — think of a great poet, and you’ve almost certainly thought of a translator, too. In the Western tradition there is no cutoff point between writing poems and writing translations or writing poems in translation. Poetic forms — the sonnet, the ballad, the rondeau, the pantoum, the ghazal — have migrated among languages as diverse as French, Italian, Russian, Persian, English, and Malay over the last eight hundred years. Poetic styles — Romantic, Symbolist, Futurist, Acmeist, Surrealist — are common European properties, as typical of German as of Polish poetry. Every so-called poetic tradition is made of other traditions. Against the dubious adage that poetry is what is lost in translation we have to set the more easily demonstrable fact that, from many points of view, the history of Western poetry is the history of poetry in translation. - David Bellos, Is that a Fish in Your Ear? (emphasis added by me)
