Email me at jmayhew at ku dot edu
"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
--Kenneth Koch
“El subtítulo ‘Modelo para armar’ podría llevar a creer que las
diferentes partes del relato, separadas por blancos, se proponen como piezas permutables.”
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20 ene 2006
It's important, when you translate, that you suppress the rhetorical structure of the original. Make sure that, if there is syntactic parallelism in the original, that this is nowhere visible in your version. Make sure the form into which you translate has no relation to the original form. If all the lines in the original are end stopped, for example, make sure the translation contains many violent enjambments. If a particular word has specific connotations through its etymology, make sure that you choose a word devoid of such connotations. Translate "quimera" not as "chimera," but as "illusion." You wouldn't want the reader to think of the mythological beast. Your task is to translate some essential meaning in the poem entirely detachable from its language, not to bother yourself with the actual poetic devices that the poet used.
Jonathan, this is superb. I added a little something here.
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