Читать книгу Rae Armantrout. Poemas (2004-2014) онлайн

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I am very grateful to Natalia Carbajosa for her excellent translations of my poems and for her extremely substantive and insightful introduction. Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” We all know what he means. (We’ve probably seen it happen). Poetry is more difficult to translate than prose for a number of reasons: its sound is an important part of its meaning; ambiguities and double meanings which may be important in the original text can be almost impossible to carry into another language; and cultural differences can easily obscure the connotations of a word choice or the tone of an expression. My poetry, which has in truth been called difficult by some American readers, may present particular challenges for a translator. For one thing, as Natalia notes (quoting me) in her intro, my poems are quite condensed and sometimes depend on the simultaneous activation of different possible interpretations. In addition, as she also suggests, I tend to use a variety, almost a cacophony, of imagined voices implicated in various tones and types of diction. Natalia has been able to overcome these challenges not only because she is fluent in English, but because she is a poet herself—and one who happens to share a number of my interests from cosmology and quantum physics to the representation of gender in popular culture. As she says, we engaged in an intense and productive email conversation about the poems and their possible translations. She flatters me when she asserts that I speak Spanish. I took Spanish classes in school and can read passably well with a dictionary in hand, but I am far from fluent. I have understood just enough to gain an enhanced appreciation of the interesting complexities translation projects involve.