Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Be bilingual, of course, but also bicultural, steeped in both histories, both nightmares. Always bear in mind that the same words may have
different cultural contexts in different languages. The soil must suit the
root. Synonyms may not be synonymous. Given its history, “Volk”
means more than ”folk”, being more sentimental and more sinister. Not dictionary but context is all. The four seasons have different connotations in different languages and geographies (ancient Greek having basically only three) and translate differently. German seasons are more directly symbolic of man’s life than in English. Transplant simultaneously for ear, for eye, for cultural memory. Boycott any prose trot. No matter how accurate, a trot sacrifices connotation to denotation. Be faithful to the original’s form and metrics, whether feminine rhyme, masculine rhyme, or free verse. But English (more monosyllables, few declensions) is shorter than German. So occasionally a German five-beat line requires an English four-beat line. Thou shalt not pad a line with deadwood filler to achieve five beats.
Don’t choose between a word’s sound and a word’s meaning; render both. Example: the first word in Heym’s line “Aber die Tiere”. Literal translation of “Aber” is “But”. “But” loses the sonorus vowel sound of the “A” in “Aber”. My suggestion: “Ah but the creatures.” This is what I mean by distinguishing between transplanting and literal translating. The aim: colloquial English poems in their own right, not pedantic translationese. Having shed declension endings because of 1066, English has fewer feminine rhymes than other languages. So keep inventing new feminine rhymes, even if slightly off. To work out the right mix of sound and meaning has often taken me (as with “Aber”) three years. This is not at all long, considering that my book [PV’s Complete Translations,
as yet unpublished] took me over 65 years, ever since in 1934 I first read its poets: Hölderlin, Goethe, Hofmannsthal, George, Heym. Often the meaning is better clarified, less distorted when you substitute an equivalent for an equal. Example: to translate from Latin the phrase “in the Greek kalends” (meaning “never”), I simply invented “on February 30”.