Learning my "Bly"ndspots

For fun (?), I lined up all of Bly’s translations from different stages and scrutinized their differences. The exercise taught me a surprising amount about my poetic sensibilities (and the lack thereof). I realized my inclination toward meaning-making (perhaps over all else) when I could see myself spending a ton of time in stage two. Along these lines, I actually liked the version produced in Stage 3, which reads most prose-like, starting with “Spring has returned once more.” Then, when I read the “American English” version in Stage 4, I saw that, if I reached that stage in my translation where it veered on spoken language, I would likely call it a “success,” drop the mic, and go for a leisurely walk. But this, at least according to Bly, would be a big mistake. First, “It’s spring!” while wonderfully colloquial and joyful, deviates from the source because it doesn’t speak to the cyclicality (although I wouldn’t have known this if I were just reading this as a layperson and would likely consider this natural sounding version to be a great translation, which is also worth thinking about). Second, then I would not have caught the tone and the mood, which is the most important! Bly made me feel both troubled and comforted when he said that only those who actually write poetry might be able to capture the tone or get to this next stage…

Having said that, while I did think the final version read well, I did come away liking different bits from the different versions. For instance, I didn’t really like the first line of the final version “Spring is here, has come!” because it doesn’t, in my view anyway, well capture the return or the cyclicality. And I liked “long entangled stalks” from Stage 6 more than “long, involved stalks” in the final version because the latter reads a bit awkward to me even if it might be a bit more rhythmic.

Bly says that the stages are not necessarily linear nor exactly in this way so I understand that this is not meant to be some how-to guide on translating poetry but nonetheless, I appreciated the effort to make concrete a process that can appear quite elusive.

-Lois