Traduttore traditore, Part 1

Is a translatior a traitor, as the title of this post suggests in Italian? This post has some information pertinent to my ideas, which I want to briefly explain here.

This post was inspired by my poem Complaints.

Source

Is translating yourself (i.e. your own work) an act of self-treason?

I honestly don’t know. The fact that you are both the author and the translator of your work does pose a few difficult questions.

Is there an advantage to it? Well, there is, in my opinion, but not a big one. You can definitely infer the meaning that the words in the text carry much better than what another translator would consider them to be.

Of course, another translator will likely have a different perspective (if not a fresher one) if he/she is to translate your texts. Still, that is probably for another post.

On the other hand, the word choice that you’d use to translate the ideas and concepts would be much easier to think of and utilize properly.

You probably notice I didn’t say words or sentences, yet ‘ideas’ and ‘concepts’ simply because translating any kind of text, especially poetry, does not depend on single words, but on how they relate together.

What about the time differential between the production of the original post and the later date of translation?

This one may be a bit more complex, but in a nutshell, I believe that once you write a text, it can and should live independently of the author.

The author him-/herself will undoubtedly change over the years (through life experiences, etc.), and will view past work as less organized, less developed, less mature (as I do from this perspective for my poems from the early 2000s).
This look back makes me feel detached from my teenaged self’s experiences and world views, as well as the level of (im)maturity present in those poems.

This in itself makes it easier to translate the poem in a more objective way, filtering its meaning through the newly-accumulated life experiences so as to make it more relevant to the present moment.

If you are bilingual, or are fluent in another language, and also happen to write poetry, do comment below and tell me if you’ve ever translated your own poetry into another language, and what your experiences with that were like.

Thanks for reading, and wait for Part 2 of this!

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