Lost and Found
The most oft-repeated English-language words about translation are those of Robert Frost: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” This topsy-turvy definition of translation is from one of the few great poets never to have translated. But famous it is, and no one can enter the topic of translation without walking under a gate bearing its words.
Frost appears to me not to have been talking about translation as much as he was using (or abusing) translation to define poetry. But his words have been taken up by those who don’t believe in translation. Here’s how the sentence looks turned around so that, for the purpose of talking about translation, it’s facing front: “Translating poetry loses what poetry is.” Or: “In translating a poem, the essence of that poem is lost;” what is preserved are the inessential elements — the images, the basic ideas, many of the words — but not the sounds or the multiple meanings or resonances of the words, the exact way in which the ideas and images are ordered and embodied. In other words, poetry is something that works only in the language it was originally written in and for. Bringing it over into another language is impossible, not really worth doing.
There is a long history to the idea that literary translation is impossible. Frost simply happened to say it in a clever way, a way that would be difficult to translate, just as it is difficult to translate the other most famous expression about translation, the Italian Tradduttore, traditore, which literally means “to translate is to betray.” This expression is difficult to translate because it is a pun; for a contest I once translated it as “to seed a lay is to lead astray.”
Dante wrote, “Nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muses can be changed from its own to another language without having all its sweetness destroyed.”* In the medieval and
