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Translating can be challenging – some words simply don’t have a direct equivalent in another language. Translating prose (a novel or short story) is even more challenging, as the translator needs to also convey affect – literature is more than a sum of its parts, remember. But learning how to translate poetry must be the ultimate challenge for a translator.

With poetry, it’s not just about translating the text in question, conveying the meaningIn the context of this post, meaning refers to the word-by-word meaning; what the narrative talks about.. It’s not even about merely conveying affect, as with prose. Instead, to translate poetry you need to worry about several things at once: meaning, affect, meter, and possibly rhyme.

If you put all these elements together, you might wonder how on earth can poetry be translated at all!

As someone who has translated poetry, I can tell you it’s possible. But yes, it’s super hard to do properly. In today’s post I’ll share with you some tips that will help you translate poetry effectively, intelligently, and – above all – respecting the original author.

To Translate Poetry, Let Go of… Logic

What this cryptic subheading means is to realize that when you translate poetry you don’t translate any text – not even prose, and definitely not some nonfiction document.

In other words, to learn how to translate poetry you must let go of the “If this then that” mentality. It’s not about translating words and sentences with their equivalent.

Let’s make use of my Shakespearean sonnet mixer and get two random lines from the Bard’s production.

And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend

Let’s make the point even stronger and also use my rhyming anapest generator.

Her untouched minaret near legumes has outstretched,
cool divisive degrees then some stratospheres fetched.

Why the point is even stronger? But because this latter example is entirely random. Unlike the former case, which simply shuffles Shakespeare’s actual lines, the example just above is random and hence removes meaning from the picture.

Which leaves us with affect (if any), meter and rhyme.

It’s a Balancing Act: Pick Your Trade-off

In a perfect world, when you translate poetry you:

• translate the poem’s lines, conveying their word-by-word meaning; what the poem talks about.
• convey the poem’s affect, attempting to interpret and replicate the poet’s intended emotional response.
• maintain the poem’s meter (if it is metered).
• maintain the poem’s rhyme (if it is rhymed).

Call me old-fashioned, but if a poem is neither metered nor rhymed, I’m finding it sloppy. Yes, I’m aware that what the canon considers literary giants have written such poetry, but they simply don’t inspire the same sublime awe that metered and rhymed poetry does.

Non-metered, non-rhymed poetry doesn’t have rhythm.

I talked about a perfect world, however, and in this not-quite-perfect world we live in, it’s near impossible to achieve all these elements perfectly.

You need to find the balance, prioritizing between what’s more important in your opinion.

How to Know What to Prioritize

There’s basically only one thing you need to keep in mind. Simple, huh? I wish!

You see, the only thing you need to keep in mind when you translate poems is that you prioritize what the poet prioritized, too.

To a great extent this is guesswork, but it’s educated guesswork. Which adds another dimension into the whole thing (lucky you): a knowledge of the poem’s context.

To put it simply, you can’t translate a poem without having at least some knowledge of when the poem was written, why (i.e. under what circumstances), and what the sociocultural framework was.

Armed with that information, you will need to first interpret the poem, coming as close as possible to what they author intended – which isn’t easy. Afterward, as I said, you will need to decide what the author prioritized.

For example, some (most?) poets consider meter and rhyme more important than being 100% grammatical. Poets will literally invent words, if they need to. Here’s an example from my Self Versus Self project:

And so, though terribly upset I feel
about the way this world is maldesigned,
these painful wounds of ours will quickly heal,
and friendship will soon leave these thoughts behind.

Here I needed a three-syllable word rhyming with “behind” and roughly meaning “flawed”. Well, such a word didn’t seem to exist, so I… invented it, coming up with “maldesigned”. There are some instances of this on the internet, but not in a standard English dictionary.

A Checklist for Translating Poetry

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, obviously enough. But generally speaking, this is my “priority checklist”:

1. Rhyme
2. Meter
3. Affect
4. Meaning

If there is clear, consistent rhyming in the poem, I first take care of that before anything else. That is, I find the words that will rhyme in the translated version. Of course, this always occurs with one eye in meaning, which might be the least of my concerns (in the sense that, like with all literary translations, I’m not preoccupied about 100% accuracy), but it still needs to follow as much as humanly possible the original.

My next concern is the poem’s meter. This can be very difficult, because languages might have unique patterns that aren’t easy to follow. Generally, however, English is pretty flexible. Still, remember that it’s all about balance: Perfection is good to aspire to, but it might be an idealistic goal.

In the context of meter, this means that you might not be able to replicate the poem’s original meter, but you could introduce a different one – say, iambic instead of anapestic. Whether this is acceptable or not, depends a lot on the individual poem – for instance, I can’t imagine Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” having anything other than an anapestic meter.

The next step is affect. There isn’t much to say here; it all depends on your interpretation of the poem. The closer you are to the emotional response the poet intended, the better. To put it bluntly, if you think Samuel Coleridge’s Christabel is about a girls’ jolly slumber party, you have no business translating it!

We’re left with meaning; what the poem talks about. As I mentioned, it’s basically impossible to offer a word-by-word translation and respect the previous three items (rhyme, meter, affect). Still, the translator must make an effort to offer an as accurate translation as possible.

Below, I’ll give you an example case of a poem I’ve translated, so that you can better understand the dynamics involved.

How to Translate Poetry: an Example Case

The poem is “Federico Garcia Lorca”, by the Greek poet Nikos Kavvadias. Obviously, unless you’re a Greek speaker you can’t examine the original to assess my translation. But for our purposes, I’ll juxtapose my own translation to some literal translations found on the internet – the poem has been set to music, and as a result there have been several examples found on lyrics websites.

A quite literal translation of the first stanza (found here) begins like this:

For that one moment, you faunted your bolero
and that chemise of the most intense orange.
If I remember correctly it must have been in August
when the Crusader squadristi set off for war.

Textually speaking, this is a fine translation; that’s exactly what the poem talks about. The problem is, there is no rhyme, though the original Greek is rhymed.

Here’s my own attempt. I should note that I make no claim of authorship in any way. After all, it was only made for entirely educational purposes and was partially inspired by pre-existing attempts, such as this one.

For a moment you waved your bolero,
and your petticoat, the color of the loss.
Was it in August? I remember it so,
when they all set off, the bearers of the cross.

I have accepted a slight compromise in meaning, in that I replaced “orange” with “the color of the loss”. Perhaps we can have a debate on whether orange is “the color of the loss”, but there is something you need to know here – related to the concept of prioritizing we spoke of earlier.

The poem was published in 1945 and as such it’s historically set in a very intense period. Its themes revolve around fascism, the Spanish Civil War, Nazi atrocities in Greece, etc. Therefore, although it intermixes different spaces (and even times), it has a certain linearity to it, in terms of affect. It’s all about events caused by other events – in a sense, the inevitability of history. In my opinion, rhyming is crucial in assigning this quality to the verse.

Let’s see one more stanza, the second one. One fairly literal translation of it, from the same source, is this:

Gusts of wind whipped the banners
as the galleons sailed towards death.
The baby sucked anxiously his mama’s teat
and the weary elder let the sun warm his balls.

Well, once again the translation is quite literal. But, again, the lack of rhyming subtracts the crucial aspect mentioned above, that is, the sense of inevitability surrounding history.

Let’s see my own attempt:

In gusts of wind the ranks of flags just ripple,
toward death the galleons set their sails.
While babies cowered at the nipple,
the old man lazily was sunning his entrails.

Here I was even bolder in my word choice. Instead of the old man’s… balls, I opted for his entrails, for rhyming purposes. Clearly, this changes the meaning entirely – for “sunning his entrails” implies something far different than what (I assume) Kavvadias intended. But I was willing to accept this compromise, considering it consistent with the theme of brutality pervading the poem.

It’s All a Balance and a Compromise

As with virtually everything else in literature (if not in life), it’s all a matter of priorities and compromises. Learning how to translate poetry is a balancing act. It’s good to aim high but, realistically speaking, there will have to be trade-offs.

This complex scale revolves around four elements: rhyme, meter, affect, and meaning. It’s like those role-playing games, where you have a certain number of experience points to spend on improving your character: You can be a good warrior or a powerful wizard, but you can’t be both.

More often than not, it’s the same with translating poems.

Often you need to prioritize rhyme and meter, precisely because they’re so directly connected with affect – perhaps more than strict, literal meaning. Indeed, sometimes the absence of strict meaning allows for far more affective interpretations – take a look at my poem shuffler post to see what I mean.

Every now and then, of course, there are cases where priorities shift. And then you must adapt. It’s hard, yes. But here’s the good news (and I’ve said that before): It gets easier with experience.