literary convention can sound like an intolerable banality in another.”*
Humor is up there with simplicity. Eugene Nida, best known for his books on the theory of Bible translation, has written, “Saying something in a novel manner is bound to have impact. This is precisely what makes Ogden Nash’s epigrams so tantalizing and at the same time almost impossible to translate. Note, for example, ‘He who is ridden by a conscience / Worries about a lot of nonscience.’”* Wordplay generally has to be totally recreated, which requires a very special sort of translator, one who is a humorist himself.
But probably the most difficult translations are of song lyrics. Ronnie Apter, who translates opera lyrics with her husband, Mark Herman, has written that the translator of poetry “may choose to be tied to a syllable-for-syllable translation, or a stress-for-stress translation, or he may choose to be free of both. The translator of lyrics [meant to be sung] has no such freedom. He must translate syllable-for-syllable, stress-for-stress (although the stress may be ordained by the music, rather than by the original words). He must crest meaning where the melodic line crests. Also, he must [ask] can this syllable be held for two beats without sounding silly? Can the tenor get off this syllable in the space of an eight note and take a catch breath?”* Nothing is more impossible than meeting all the demands of singing opera, and yet no translators I’ve spoken with love their work more than Apter and Herman.
According to Edmund M. Keeley, a translator of modern Greek poetry, W. H. Auden had an excellent response to Frost’s dictum: “some would say . . . that what constitutes poetry, at least in the individual case, is exactly what survives in translation: that which is so essentially poetic in a given poet’s voice that it can be heard in any translation, for example, what Auden calls Cavafy’s ‘unique tone of voice,’ unmistakable in English, he believes, whoever the translator may be.”* This is definitely the case when a poet’s voice rather than his language is the most prominent aspect of his work. Eliot Weinberger echoes Auden, but in a much more general sense: “Poetry,” he wrote, “is that which is worth translating. The poem dies when it has no place to go.”* It’s interesting that both of these
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