Translate, recreate
Below is the first stanza of Pablo Neruda’s poem Cuerpo de mujer from the collection Veinte poemas de amor: 1
Cuerpo de mujer, blanca colinas, muslos blancos,
te pareces al mundo en tu actitud de entrega.
Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje re socava
y hace saltar el hijo del fondo de la tierra.
One of Neruda’s best known translators into English, Mark Eisner, translated the stanza as follows:
*Body of a woman
Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like the world in your attitude of giving.
My savage peasant body plows through you
and makes the son surge from the depths of the earth.*
Another translation
I translated the same poem in English and Afrikaans (a Germanic language spoken in South Africa, derived mainly from 17th century Dutch). The Afrikaans version is below.
Lyf van ‘n vrou, wit heuwels, wit dye,
jy lyk soos die aarde in jou oorgawe.
My wilde boerelyf ploeg deur jou
en laat 'n seun opspring uit die aarde se diepte.
My translation into English of the first line of the poem is identical to that of Eisner. But the second line differs.
you are like the earth in your attitude of surrender
The word “el mundo” means “world” as in the ME translation. Likewise, one of the synonyms of “entrega” is “to give, again as in the ME translation.
Differences
The DWV translation differs in three aspects from the ME translation:
are like/look like
the earth/the world
surrender/giving
"Parecer” could mean “look like” but also “be like”. The DWV translation renders the phrase simply as “are like”. The body of the woman does not merely “look” like the earth, it “is” the earth which the speaker in the poem ploughs and sows his seed.
The DWV translation uses “earth” instead of “world. "Earth seems closer to the intention of the poet. It is not the world that is ploughed, but the soil, the earth.
And finally, the DWV translation offers "surrender” as a more accurate rendering of the poet’s intention. The tone of the poem is of wild (savaje) passion which forces the body of the woman to surrender and not merely to give.
The phrase “attitude of surrender” is well established in many European languages, as in the Spanish sentences below:
Pero es una actitud de entrega interior. Es una actitud de Presente.
vedantaadvaita.com
But it is an attitude of inner **surrender, It is an attitude in the present.
vedantaadvaita.com
In Afrikaans, however this phrase is not commonly used and the Afrikaans translation omits the word “attitude” and simply renders: “surrender” (oorgawe). Note the Dutch translation.
In other languages
A French translation:
“l'attitude du don te rend pareil au monde”
A direct translation: “The attitude of giving makes you alike to the world”
An Italian translation:
“assomigli al mondo nel tuo gesto di abbandono”.
A direct translation:
“Looking like the world in your gesture of abandonment”
A Dutch translation:
“In jouw overgave lijk je op de wereld”
A direct translation:
“In your surrender you look like the world”
Peter Landelius, born 2 April 1943 , is a Swedish translator , writer , cultural journalist , lawyer and former ambassador . Since 2004 he lives in Chile .
He has translated mainly from Spanish , but also from French and English . He has translated several works by Nobel laureates Mario Vargas Llosa , Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda and other Spanish and Latin American writers , among them Julio Cortázar and César Vallejo.
Landelius comments:
“What is it like to be a translator?”
You are alone with a text that you read more carefully than others. You can not ask the author for an explanation because he cannot speak your language. You have to trust your instincts. No one knows where the problem lies. The structure and the value of the poems in the two languages do not match, but you must know the tone that corresponds to the original. The translation is an attempt to recreate the text. It is an internal process, something you do in solitude. “
Recreate?
It seems that translators tend to "recreate” poetry when they translate. They possibly do that because: “The structure and the value of the poems in the two languages do not match, but you must know the tone that corresponds to the original.”
In the translations above, the Italian translator found it necessary to veer away from the literal meaning of “entrega” and rendered it as “abandonment”. In English it became “giving”. In French is also rendered as “giving” or an “offering”.
The Dutch and Afrikaans translations match almost perfectly - “overgawe” and “oorgawe”, both meaning “surrender.
Conclusion
There is no such thing as a perfect translation of a poem from one language into another. Speech rhythms, colloquial expressions, connotations of words, grammatical structures etc differ widely from language to language.
A translator can only hope to "recreate” the poem in his chosen language, to make it a living entity, a valid work of art, without departing too far from the nature of the original.