mean what an Italian means by pazienza, because of the great American smile, because of the conspiracy to be upbeat, to think upbeat, and to talk upbeat. The Italian expectation of life is much darker, and so the word pazienza does not have many ready equivalents in English. Things like ‘This too will pass’ approach part of the meaning of pazienza, but that’s not economical or as colloquial.” What is understood easily and deeply by a native reader is often meaningless to the reader of another language, who does not know the original language’s history and culture. Jonathan Galassi told me in reference to Eugenio Montale, “so much of his poetry is allusion to the history of Italian poetry. None of that can really come across. You can try to create a language in English that is rich with association, but you’re creating a kind of artifact that’s not the same thing.” Many people say that today it’s impossible to rhyme in translating poetry and still keep it contemporary. Tell that to Richard Wilbur or Willis Barnstone. Barnstone has written, “without the fine craft of using rhyme naturally and invisibly, a rhyming translation is impossible. Few contemporary poets have such craft, and this fact, rather than taste, is responsible for the scarcity of translations in rhyme.”* Taste does come into play, however, in making translation impossible. Some works can simply not be translated into certain languages at certain times. The example George Steiner has given is Aristophanes in Victorian English: Aristophanes’ sense of humor was considered too crude by Victorians. Today, few literary Americans would be able to translate a racist work into English, except as a document. One of the most difficult kinds of poetry to translate is, paradoxically, the simplest poetry. “[T]he more difficult the poem,” Michael Hamburger has written, “the more complex and idiosyncratic its structure, the more likely it is that a good deal of its quiddity can be satisfactorily conveyed in translation. It is the plainest, most limpid, poem that may defy translation, because it leaves the least latitude for paraphrase and interpretation, and the
plainness that may be a happy reduction in one language and
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