Sunday, August 13, 2017

Another Opinion on Ezra Pound's Translation

Just saw in a Reddit discussion an interesting comment related to my post "On Ezra Pound’s Translation of Ancient Chinese Poetry" (this is an example where the pronoun "he" is blatantly wrong in a comment, but the commentator still makes a good and on topic point 😊) .

Here is the gist of the comment (emphasis mine):

     This is an example where one of the poets is blatantly wrong in his translation, but he is still the best poet out of all of them. Even though the blogger tried to come up with his own style that is above the other two, he misses out on a lot of the subtle modernist poetic rhythms that Pound pulls in his. Pound, of course, misses out on the folk-song repetitive & rhymey quality of the original, but makes up for it in his skill.
      For example, in the first line of Pound’s poem, he builds up softer sound through “picking the first fern-shoots”, and uses more ‘o’s when the later part comes. The 3rd translation has the rhyme, but lacks this nuance. Pound’s version is lingering throughout because of his superb manipulation of sounds.

(Complete comment embedded below)

No comments: