Thoughts on Bly and Nabokov

After reading Robert Bly’s The Eight Stages of Translation and trying to project his stages onto what I am beginning to understand about my own (fledgling) translation process, my prevailing thought surrounded his steps 5 and 6, application of tone and sound respectively. I realized that in all of my own translations attempts so far, I’ve been a) sort of combining steps 3 and 4 (perhaps because trots have been considerately provided to us, so the literal translation work of step 3 is done) and immediately trying to render the text into American English, or an English cadence which I think that the content would read well in for my hypothetical American audience. Furthermore, I am immediately meaning as hard as possible into sound/tone as I’m simultaneously working with the content. Obviously, there’s a natural degree of sound/tone that comes through just by rewriting the piece in English; not just my voice as a writer but certain innate translation choices that jump out to me immediately. I thought it very interesting that Bly wrote that to succeed in stage 5 “it is important that the translator should have written poetry himself [...] he or she needs the experience of writing from mood in order to judge accurately what the mood of a stranger's poem is” (78). Do I agree with this take? I’m not sure. It’s very reassuring to read as someone entering a translation space with a background in poetry. With the little to no authority I wield, I’d amend his statement to clarify that the translator needs at least the experience of reading poetry in order to translate it. Poetry is sort of like a regional accent that is not too hard to pick up but it’s clear when someone’s faking it. 

Also, on an unrelated note, I thought Nabokov’s statement that “the term ‘literal translation’ is tautological since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody” (119) was interesting because we have tossed the comparison/ contrast of words like translation and adaptation around in class. I don’t necessarily disagree with him, but his grouping adaptation with parody feels strange to me. Adaptation feels closer to translation than parody.

Samantha