National poetry day

[liv]

It's National Poetry Day, apparently. And this one is actually based in my own nation, rather than just one of those vague nation-of-internet special days.

As it happens, yesterday the internet was full of people being cross about a project to produce contemporary English translations of Shakespeare. Now my opinion is that contemporary English translations are just one part of the myriad ways that modern audiences respond to literary classics. Certainly it's possible for them to be awful, but the idea of reworking Shakespeare's words isn't inherently awful.

papersky wrote a sonnet expressing the general sentiment that changing Shakespeare is horrible. I commented that I really shouldn't try to write a response sonnet to express my alternative view, and certain people talked me into it instead of out of it. I'm rather charmed with the idea of an internet argument about Shakespeare in sonnet form, I must say.

So anyway, have a rather bad, dashed off hypertext sonnet about why I'm in favour of translating and reinterpreting Shakespeare:

True poetry is what survives translation,
An exiled Magyar poet told me once.
We're all time's exiles. Each one longs
To touch the past through each imagination,

But time excludes us from each treasured word –
No verse, no rhyme, no play remains pristine,
We'll never watch unchanged a perfect scene,
Nor ever hear what past play-goers heard.

Limelight's electric now and women act,
Some plays are filmed instead of staged,
The words, the sounds, the very rhymes have changed.
No fossil, this, to be preserved intact,

But living art in loving minds reborn,
Poetic truth translation can transform.

I do rather like writing poetry that responds to existing works. Pastiches and filks and metrical translations of poetry in other languages, too, but especially when someone writes a poem and I reply to it in similar style and metre.

Comments

[davidgillon]

Whoops, not sure I even noticed the link, certainly didn't follow it.

I agree with your take on Gömöri, the language contributes a huge amount, especially via contexts that may not translate at all. You can translate the words, but unless you can translate the langauge as well, you aren't going to get the same poem out at the other end.

I do think that the cultural canon is to be played with and reinterpreted in every possible way, not to be preserved "authentically".

Now I think about it, retellings of fairy tales are a recognised sub-genre of fantasy. They're not a particular favourite of mine, but they can be very well done.

[liv]

I agree with your take on Gömöri, the language contributes a huge amount
I think he was probably being provocative, but also his first language is Hungarian, and he's a professional translator; if he held with the common view that poetry can never be translated he'd be kind of stuck!

retellings of fairy tales are a recognised sub-genre of fantasy
Basically everybody agrees that some remixing and interpreting should happen, but people draw the line in different ways. Retelling fairy stories is one of the easier cases, they're generally seen as just part of common culture, even though actually quite a few were written by individuals like Hans Christian Andersen. And reinterpreting Shakespeare with things like modern settings is again, generally accepted, as is giving the director freedom to decide staging and so on. I don't think it's entirely rational to hold that the words are untouchable when everything else can change, so I wanted to unpick that a bit.