Episode III : The Backstroke of the West

[[wcip]Angel]

Hi,
That's especially true for poetry, and yet people try just this again and again.

I know poetry is difficult to translate into another language, but not impossible.

The husband of my teacher is a norwegian poet. He's working with an English linguist (not his wife) to translate his poetry into English. They work closely together. He explains exactly what the poem is saying in every possible way and also every linguistic attribute of each word, and the linguist tries to find the most suitable English phrases for their Norwegian counterparts. It's really quite astonishing. I've heard some of the poems in both languages, and they're actually quite 'translatable' :)

Of course, this differs from poet to poet, and also how much of a collaborative effort is made with the person trying to translate the poems :)