Although Hughes did everything possible to preserve the poet’s vision, he divorced this vision from its form and, therefore, did not truly know the vision. Feeling great affinity with what he did know, he ended up imposing his own vision on his translations, without realizing it. This might well happen even if Hughes did read Hungarian, if he had chosen fidelity to content over fidelity to form. But there are cases where prose translation completely undermines the meaning of verse. One such case is Molière’s verse plays. As his English-language translator Richard Wilbur wrote in the introduction to his translations of The Misanthrope and Tartuffe: “Molière’s logic loses all its baroque exuberance in prose; it sounds lawyerish; without rhyme and verse to phrase and emphasize the steps of its progression, the logic becomes obscure like Congreve’s, not crystalline and followable as it was meant to be.”* Although prose translations of poetry are no longer as fashionable as they were in the days when it was considered social activism to give the working classes access to the great things of our civilization, Goethe in many ways remains the spiritual father of fidelity. His choice of the content end of the fidelity continuum has remained the choice of most translators and editors, and prose translations have effectively been replaced by free verse translations and even formal translations that, like Peters’ Rilke, choose to be flatter and more prosaic than the original. But is a prose version of Homer really a translation? This question brings us to a practical, although not very popular, solution to the problem of fidelity: differentiating between rather than condemning different approaches. I think the best broad definition of literary translation (here in terms of poetry) is George Steiner’s: “the writing of a poem in which a poem in another language (or in an earlier form of one’s own language) is the vitalizing, shaping presence.”* This definition excludes all works that are vitalized by another work, but not shaped by it, for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses or Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. But I think those works that are both vitalized and shaped by the original should be more clearly differentiated, not in interest of categorizing as much as
in the interest of informing readers.
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