translators so concerned about the poet’s voice are among the few poetry translators who do not write poetry themselves, but are excellent writers of prose. Keeley told me that for him this is a conscious choice, not to create his own voice as a poet that would get in the way of his translations. Similarly, Richard Howard is a poet who translates almost exclusively prose, although he did get hooked on Baudelaire. But for most translators, the process is one of melding voices, using aspects of one’s own voice to bring a foreign voice into English.
The most direct response to those who quote Frost is George Steiner’s: “The defence of translation has the immense advantage of abundant, vulgar fact.”* And the most humorous is James Thurber’s. Once upon a time, Thurber met a French admirer of his. “I am fortunate,” said the admirer, “to speak English well enough to appreciate -- and to love -- your stories. But, I have also read them translated into French and, believe me, they are even better in French.” The modest Thurber nodded and said, “I know. I tend to lose something in the original.”*
The courageous translator does not want to merely respond to Frost’s dictum; he wants to show him. Probably the most courageous translator, besides those who translated the Bible when it meant being burned at the stake, was a contemporary of Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin. Hölderlin translated ancient Greek writers, particularly Pindar and Sophocles, and he got burned in the process. But it was he who did the burning, not an outside authority. Richard Sieburth, who has translated Hölderlin’s later poetry, wrote, “it is precisely the intensity of this conflagration that accounts for the dark, charred radiance of his versions. As he writes in one of his late fragments: ‘Verwegner! möchst von Angesicht zu Angesicht / Die Seele sehn / Du gehest in Flammen unter.’ Reckless! wanting to see the soul / Face to face / You go down in flames.”* What Hölderlin was seeking, according to Sieburth, was “the ultimate etymological root (or logos) that lay buried beneath all the divisions of language. Yet he also remained keenly conscious of the fundamental hubris of his enterprise: How, given the essential limitation and fragmentation of human speech, could the translator aspire to disclose the unity of the divine Word? The pressures this awareness exerted on Hölderlin’s language account for its
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