Abstract:
There is a whole industry in translation and it seems to me that even very famous poets when they’re going through a rough patch in their own creativity resort to translation. It is almost like they’re claiming or assimilating other people’s work into their own particular voice. The word translation has a kind of authority which in some way undermines part of the separateness of the original; a word like forgery, or copy, suggests a distance between them and gives back to the original the authority which only it can really have. Also a forgery suggests that you are working at two removes from the original inspiration or impulse into poetry. That’s certainly what I have found. The impulse into language is very different from the impulse to take what is one language to another. They are two very different processes and I think the word translation doesn’t really suggest that any longer. It may have, initially.
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