Goldilocks, that is, by someone who insists neither on absolutely faithful form nor on the popular form of the day, but rather on a competent, intuitive balancing of all elements with an eye out for what is most essential. Any inflexible approach hampers a translator: Bly’s choice of a free form is just as restrictive as Peters’ choice of the same form Rilke used. To put the use of unfaithful form (free verse, in this case) and faithful content into another perspective, let’s contemplate the other end of the continuum: faithful form and unfaithful content. What do you get when you do this? Either the piracy of a tune for a new song (for example, America’s stealing of the tune of “God Save the King” for “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”) or a burlesque that makes fun of the original’s form alone (although here there is usually at least an echo of the original’s content). Since foreign-language poetry and prose are unfamiliar to nearly all of us today, we are unlikely to burlesque foreign works outside a language class. An example (necessarily from song) would be the following burlesque of “Frère Jacques.” Faithless traitors, Faithless traitors, Boo to you, Boo to you, You write what you want to, You write what you want to, All day long, All day long.
No one would call this translation, yet almost everyone considers the other end of the continuum — all the content and none of the form —translation. This shows a serious taking of sides on the form-content controversy. Adamant moderate that I am, I opt for balance and appropriateness, but if I had to lean one way or the other, I’d lean toward form. The best way I’ve found to put my position, although it’s still far too simplistic, is to say that where the work is form-focused, then the translator should also be form-focused; and where the work is content-focused, then the translator should also be contentfocused. One problem with this approach is that it is up to the
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