Dernièrement, nous sommes tombés par hasard sur un site Internet intitulé Poetry in Translation qui donne gratuitement accès à des œuvres poétiques traduites en anglais à partir d'une douzaine de langues dont le français. Le site héberge un énorme choix d'œuvres en anglais, avec par exemple une anthologie de 1.400 citations de Shakespeare, classées par thèmes. La section française propose des traductions anglaises des œuvres de Guillaume Apollinaire, de Charles Baudelaire, de François de Chateaubriand, de Pierre Corneille et de bien d'autres.
Voici la suite de cette explication, rédigée par M. Anthony Kline, mathématicien, poète et traducteur, qui anime ce site, riche en contenu littéraire :
The ‘Poetry In Translation’ Website –
Background
and Intentions
The website, created in 2000, was designed with the intention of making as many key texts of Western poetry as possible freely available, both online and offline, to the world-wide audience. In order that replication of the material could be rendered free for non-commercial use in modern language, the authors set out to re-translate selected key authors, either through whole works or at least in sufficiently large selections to allow an in-depth appreciation of those authors rather than through the limited snapshots achieved by multi-author anthologies.
The website creators regard translation as a hugely important task that each generation must undertake to ensure that the richness of past culture flows into the present, inspiring and energising future literary activity. True, as Frost identifies, there are elements of felicitous usage, of music, in the texts of a given language that can rarely be replicated in another tongue. But translation communicates something other than the original music. It is a re-interpretation and in the same breath a re-transmission of the meaning and intent of the original. A translation that fails to communicate meaning and intent, feeling and response, as well as a new music, derived from the original, will fail of its aim. Translation that succeeds brings new perspectives and new ideas to another and current mode of language. Frost, like many another poet, found his own work enriched by his appreciation of foreign and even alien streams of poetry. Translation is an essential task, which also conveys a meeting of cultures in the predilections of the translators.
It is not enough, the website authors believe, to preserve and defend a language and a culture. It is necessary to develop and broaden it, extending its scope and widening its embrace. It is not a given that the rich Western culture of the past, including its poetry, will survive as a living force. It is not even a given that its existing languages will survive and without massive alteration. English as a language has benefited inestimably from inflows of words, ideas and modes of feeling deriving from the mainstream European culture and from elsewhere, take the Elizabethan imports as an example, or Ezra Pound’s ‘discovery’ for major poetry of Occitan, Chinese and Middle English sources. Latin and Classical Greek are dead languages, which have been and still are vitally incorporated within modern Western culture. Translation is T. S. Eliot’s ‘compound ghost’. It is Petrarch’s ‘other voice sounding’. It is the blending of dead mastery and living skill in the creation of a new spirit and another manner of speaking.
It could be argued that most of the works translated already exist elsewhere in previous translations. Often this is indeed true, but the works are rarely available, especially to students, in a free and fully modern translation, and where the material can be swiftly replicated in all major digital formats, and extracts merged with the reader’s own work, without concerns over copyright restrictions. Freeing the word is a key intent of the website creators, and in keeping with that aim the website is free of all marketing and advertising material, and sets out to raise no revenue, other than that realised by donations from its readership. It indirectly set out to show that self-publishing is a reality, that editors and publishers, other than the authors themselves, are not required to achieve its aims, that the means of production are in the hands of the creator, and that the costs of displaying and distributing literature, at all hours of day and night, to the world, are now negligible, through the all-embracing medium of the worldwide web. In the thirteen years since its creation the website has grown steadily in breath of offering, visitor numbers, and is now a key web resource for many students in particular.
Poetry In Translation is not aimed at the erudite reader. It is not aimed at any specific ‘market’, since the concept of a market is alien to that of a freely available literature. It is there for any purpose and for any readership. It aims, in Emerson’s words, to be ‘a better mousetrap’ and for its presence to be signalled by unpaid search engine and word of mouth alone. Clearly it has only succeeded by offering a worthwhile experience. I have concentrated on providing a wealth of translations from Latin, the modern Western languages, and Chinese. George Theodoridis has concentrated on the Greek Classical playwrights. A few works have been created with other collaborators.
The main authors and translators are not primarily linguists. Their qualifications are the ability to write well in English, combined with an excellent grasp of written literature in the source languages and the associated cultural context. That doesn’t guarantee either of the site creators could ask their way to the nearest rail station in any specific town, and almost certainly not in Latin or Classical Greek! The test of translation is always the end result. If a translation lives on the page, it has achieved its primary aim. If not it fails regardless of its purity, accuracy or erudition. As any reader of academic translations knows, a higher degree is not a guarantee of the ability to write well and attractively in the native language. Poets often prove the best translators of poetry, due to their instinct and ability for fresh creation and interpretation. Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe. Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell are prime examples in English of that claim.
In surveying European literature in particular the creators have tried to focus on those writers who were highly innovative, highly influential and highly distinctive voices. Inevitably they cannot produce a totally representative view of thousands of years of culture, and that is not their aim. Too much representation and they would be converging on being a Wikipedia of literature and diluting the impact. Nevertheless they have sought to represent the poetic tradition such that if the present day culture vanished, key elements of the previous culture would be retrievable. So, for example, the website without the French Symbolist poets or the Russian Silver Age would be unthinkable, without the modern Spanish poets impoverished, without Goethe and Rilke marginalised, and without Dante and Petrarch devoid of the two supporting arches of the Medieval Renaissance and European cultural development. The presence of the major Latin authors and the Greek Classical playwrights, the foundations of complex Western literature, are taken as given.
The website also contains original poetry and critical essays, and has not hesitated to stray outside of the poetic canon in focussing on very great but neglected authors, such as Chateaubriand, and outside of the strict definition of English translation by, for example, modernising Chaucer, compiling quotations from Shakespeare, and rendering John Donne in prose to aid understanding. Nor have the authors constrained themselves to translating rhyming or metric verse by corresponding forms. Prose versions and free-verse are preferred where they communicate meaning more clearly, for example prose in the case of the Divine Comedy and its complex sentences, a mixture of rhyming and unrhymed verse in the case of the Russians.
If the website possesses an over- riding purpose it is in the transmission of meaning. We value the great poets not merely because they created beauty through language, but because they captured something essential in the development of the culture and their times, its and our meaning. Reading great poetry should lead the reader not only to link elements of the culture together and see the pattern in the round and in depth, but also tempt the reader to explore the sources, understand the original authors’ context and environment, wander history, expand horizons, and comprehend that ignorance of one’s past fosters ignorance of one’s present and future. The website creators are not specifically Europeans, they consider themselves citizens of the modern world, but their primary language, English, and their cultural determinants arose in Europe and through Europe, and they place great value on the tradition established in Greece and Rome, and subsequently transmitted throughout the continent and eventually the world, which led to sophisticated democracy, a developed moral and legal structure, and the realisation of the free citizen within the bounds of a fundamentally decent state.
Though never wholly realised that is the ideal which the site creators believe is most conducive to the survival of a free and unfettered literature, expressing the whole range of views and emotions at play within society. It may be argued that Ovid, Dante, Goethe, Pushkin to name but a few, lived in societies far different from that ideal. That is true, but all those writers, even if not subscribing to that exact ideal or rather differing in their interpretation of its implementation, expressed a broad humanism and empathy, and expressed enduring truths which transcend the place and time, and point to the development of Western art towards that ideal. They were individuals, and expressed Individualism in one of its highest forms, poetry. The website creators wish to see that tradition alive and vigorous in the societies of the future, and in a small way are seeking to keep alive the flame and further the realm of literature.
The website will have achieved its deepest impact if its worldwide reach (it is regularly accessed in more than one hundred and fifty countries, and occasionally in many more) allows, say, the African or Asian child with developing English language skills and limited facilities but with some kind of access to the web, increasingly through mobile phone, or tablet, to read the greatest Western literature in a clear and straightforward manner without being expert or qualified or erudite. ‘Anyone can play’: that is the message of the internet, and the website. And anyone can contact the authors politely, who will always try to respond simply and helpfully to any interest shown in poetry and literature, without regard to age, race, gender, beliefs, or country, since we are all one species, and all need each other to survive the challenges of the future.
These comments have strayed well beyond the seemingly modest achievement of the website itself, in order to re-iterate the website creators’ primary vision, that only by developing and extending the scope and reach of a language and a culture, in their case English, and the culture founded primarily in Europe, can that language and its culture hope to provide the flexibility of meaning and application that will support future linguistic needs and guarantee its survival in a world where little is guaranteed.
The website will remain free to all, and any reader uncertain of whether its material can be used for a given purpose, need only contact the authors. Our mutual literary heritage is too valuable to be left in the hands of those who view it primarily as a commodity and only secondarily as the touchstone of our essential humanity.
A.S. Kline 18th May 2013
Anthony, thank you so much for such a beautiful text and your extraordinary work. I'm extremely impressed by the noble endeavor you've undertaken and I'm delighted to see the art of translation treated so beautifully (and not as a cheap commodity).
Jonathan and Jean, thank you so much for guiding us in discovering always more exceptional people.
Rédigé par : Anne | 03/06/2013 à 16:40