Hello Everyone,
I just wanted to talk to you about the translations I’ve done or am doing or will usually due on this blog. Basically I feel in terms of translations there are two approaches, on is that of the grammarian and that of the poet. One focuses on the denotation, translating word for word relying on the words themselves to convey all levels of subtle nuance. The other way is to focus on the connotation and translate or create the same feeling as a poet would, or from the point of view of a poet.
This is very similar to what Robert Graves has done in his central book, well central for me The White Goddess. 
Here is an excerpt from WIKIpedia, the source of all things true
Graves described The White Goddess as “a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth.”[.........]… Relying on arguments from etymology and the use of forensic techniques to uncover what he calls ‘iconotropic’ redaction of original myths, Graves argues not only for the worship of a single goddess under many names, but also that the names of the Ogham letters in the alphabet used in parts of Gaelic Ireland and Britain contained a calendar that contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of a sacred king (see “Celtic Astrology“); and, further, that these letter names concealed lines of Ancient Greek hexameter describing the goddess. In response to critics, Graves has accused literary scholars of being psychologically incapable of interpreting myth [1] or too concerned with maintaining their perquisites to go against the majority view.
Graves admitted he was not a medieval historian, but a poet, and thus based his work on the premise that the
language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry…
For me I feel that a lot of Robert Grave works reached the pinnacle of thought through Joseph Campbell. Take a look if you are interest and the books Occidental Mythology and Creative Mythology.
The translation I have done or usually will do unless someone asks me to specifically are denotation based. I am just translating directly with little care at the moment for the poetic spirit, I am usually at work on a break when I blog. I have spent years studying the poetic voices and means of expressions especially through the vehicle of the French language. I’m everywhere!!! The poetry of the Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Valery, Rilke (he had great french poems) Baudelaire Mallarme Verlaine Rimbaud, Desnos, Victor Hugo, who isnt gripped by that poem Demain Des L’aube and the prose of, François Villon the hidden mystic, St Exupery, Raymond Queneau the French comedian (who doesn’t Like Zazie and the Exercises of Style) have a unique place in my heart and my mind.
What my approach to translating? Read the work, get a feel for it and then abandon everything I thought I knew about it and just go only by my ‘hearts’ perception of it.
Here is something from Wikipedia on translation:
Newcomers to translation sometimes proceed as if translation were an exact science — as if consistent, one-to-one correlations existed between the words and phrases of different languages, rendering translations fixed and identically reproducible, much as in cryptography. Such novices may assume that all that is needed to translate a text is to “encode” and “decode” equivalents between the two languages, using a translation dictionary as the “codebook.”[4]
On the contrary, such a fixed relationship would only exist were a new language synthesized and simultaneously matched to a pre-existing language’s scopes of meaning, etymologies, and lexical ecological niches. [5] If the new language were subsequently to take on a life apart from such cryptographic use, each word would spontaneously begin to assume new shades of meaning and cast off previous associations, thereby vitiating any such artificial synchronization. Henceforth translation would require the disciplines described in this article.
Another common misconception is that anyone who can speak a second language will make a good translator. In the translation community, it is generally accepted that the best translations are produced by persons who are translating into their own native languages,[6] as it is rare for someone who has learned a second language to have total fluency in that language. A good translator understands the source language well, has specific experience in the subject matter of the text, and is a good writer in the target language. Moreover, he is not only bilingual but bicultural.
The best of translation comes from Jorge Luis Borges, masterful is the only word to describe it. If you have this book or want to get it take a look at the chapter: World Music and Translation. Man its awesome.
-Dave to be continued
