Translation Workshop Update

My workshop is going incredibly well. The students are doing what I ask and the results justify my methods, and making me a smarter person too just by studying with me.

My newest idea is that you might want to hear the translation in your head as a melody before you write it. That will be the basis of assignment four, which is going to be a translation of the poem into something cantabile.


The next time is going to be more formal. I want to give it as an online class through the university, and there will be tuition money involved. Or maybe not. I think I could give it again just on the side, if I had more students. It is a lot of work, and each student adds work, but I also think if what I'm offered is valuable it should have a recompense.

Exercise

Here's an exercise. Take this poem by Frost:

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Now come up with a linguistically rigorous explanation, for each noun, crow, dust, snow, tree, change, mood, day... of why you have either: indefinite article, definite article, no article at all. You can skip my heart and some part. In absence of that, just explain in non-technical terms what is going on. For example, you can't say "the crow" at the beginning, because that assumes the interlocutor knows what you're talking about already, but you can say "the dust" because ... why? This is difficult... You have to say "The way" because that's always followed by some specification. I love you "just the way you look tonight." You can never say "I like a way that you say things..."

Now translate the poem into a language you know well enough that you have an intuitive or technically precise enough knowledge of its use of articles. Maybe it's Chinese and the poem would be crow, me, snow-dust, hemlock, heart... whatever, without any articles at all.

Now translate it back into English, but make it not a Frost-ish poem at all. Use the style of a different poet, one as unlike that one as you dare. It should be recognizable, but not parodic.

Now translate it into your own poetic style. This should be as different from Frost as Frost is from Pound.

I see translators all the time who don't understand that articles work differently in different languages. If you think this is easy then you aren't paying attention.

Update

The translation workshop is taking shape. I have a few students who have signed up and I have designed the first part of the course, with the first three assignments. I want people to work with me in very specific ways, taking particular steps in their work rather than randomly giving me translations to critique.

Spread the word! This is going to be awesome.

Translation Workshop

I will offer a virtual translation workshop, beginning on the first of April and ending on the final day of that month. (Virtual workshop, not virtual translation.) If you are interested, please send me a note by email. To qualify for this, you must know a language from which to translate into English, well enough in your own judgment, and have a project in mind. I will accept the first 10 people that write me.

I will accept, in payment, the amount you think this is worth to you. Maybe you think it's worth $20, or $200. I will work with you on a few poems and give you readings to read. I'll have a private blog set up for it.

We will cover some prosody, some translation theory, some poetics. If this works out it will be a regular thing.