The more we read, the more I feel that translation is a bit of a wild practice. Some people see it as art, others as a science, and some even call it a little bit of a betrayal. After reading these papers from Suzanne Jill Levine, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Bly on the subject, I found myself bouncing between admiration, frustration, and a whole new appreciation for just how messy and fascinating translation really is.
Levine’s Translation as (Sub)Version makes it sound like an adventure. She doesn’t just translate Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres—she remixes it. The idea that translation is more about reimagining rather than just copying word for word totally stuck with me, and is something we've discussed in class in the past, looking at the distinction between "translation" and "adaptation". Levine’s love for puns, alliteration, and cultural shifts has continued to alter my perspective on what “faithful” translation really means. I was thinking back to the talk from Friday too, where the speaker claimed that there is really no translation that isn't faithful as long as it is faithful to the way the translator read the piece. Instead of obsessing over a perfect one-to-one match, Levine treats translation as a collaboration between writer and translator—something way more fluid and dynamic than I expected.
Then there’s Nabokov, who is basically on the opposite end of the spectrum. His Problems of Translation: Onegin in English reads almost like a manifesto. He seems to hate free translation. Anything that isn’t a strict, word-for-word transfer is, in his view, a total betrayal. I get where he’s coming from—precision matters—but his approach feels a little intense. It’s almost like he thinks translation should be surgery, carefully dissecting every word, rather than a creative process that breathes new life into a text. While I'm not sure it's fair to call this approach outright wrong, I'm not sure that it would work in every case.
Lastly, there’s Robert Bly’s The Eight Stages of Translation, which feels like a middle ground between the two. Bly treats translation like a journey, one that unfolds in stages. He starts with a rough draft and then keeps refining it step by step. What really stood out to me was his emphasis on the “ear” in translation—the way a poem sounds and feels, not just the literal meaning of the words. This is something that I've certainly struggled with incorporating in my translations, but I can see clearly the importance of from his writing.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this, it’s that translation is full of contradictions. While this isn't new, and we've addressed many of these ideas before in class, it was really interesting to see them laid out so clearly here. I think Levine and Nabokov both took quite severe opinions on translations, on opposite ends of the spectrum. My own feelings lie somewhere in the middle, but will probably continue to change with more experience. Bly reminds us that translation is a living, evolving process, and I think each translator's approach can evolve too. To me it seems that the beauty of translation isn’t about locking down the “right” version of a text, but about embracing all the different ways it can come to life.
Kamryn
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