The Eight Stages of Coming Up With an Eight Stage Process with Eight Stages

 In his article “The Eight Stages of Translation,” Robert Bly has all sorts of useful and interesting points about different considerations in the process of a poetry (or any) translation. He mentions the sound, the balance of literary and spoken language, formal considerations, and the meanings of the lines themselves, among other things. The major issue with his article is that he presents a more or less ordered progression from one version to another across a prescriptive series of steps; it is as if Bly, having already considered the tone of the poem in stage 5, can now make whatever changes in service of the sound in stage 6. However, something might well sound better that does not adhere to the previously determined tone, and the tone of the translation is by no means resolved until it crystallizes in the final version. He mentions that sometimes a line or series of lines might pass through multiple stage, even all stages, very quickly, but that does not solve the issue. I think that Bly’s list of considerations is helpful, but he does not do credit to the dynamism in the interplay of these considerations, which involves compromise, gains and losses, and relative prioritization. His final version of the Rilke sonnet starts with the line “Spring is here, has come! The earth” which fails to sound like spoken English, one of his professed objectives; it also doesn’t sound particularly like literary English; it also fails to capture the cyclical renewal of spring: is here, has come does not imply with its repetition again. What has really happened, I think, is that he has noodled around with the sound and gotten stuck on the fact that the first phrase is so much heftier in plain German than in plain English with its two-syllable spring and its compound, past-tense verb, wiedergekommen for come again. He has prioritized his own sound invention which approximates that added weight at the expensive of the tone and of the sense. Moreover, according to his formula the sound should always take precedence over the sense and the tone because it comes later in his list. Obviously, this is not the always the best approach, and not even Bly’s approach in the translation that he settles on with it’s almost anti-musical “strenuous, earns it . . . the prize comes to her” for the gorgeous “langen Lernens bekommt sie den Preis”.

-Elijah