R. Pulvers and J. Beichman Reading (Bruce)

    This calls back to a discussion we had earlier in class. I forget the context, but I remember bringing up Hyett and Thurlow, a translation duo who visited us as guest speakers last semester in LJ251. When discussing their process, they claimed that the purism that many critics feel, that desire to retain what makes a poem "Japanese," is fundamentally flawed. As such, their process is heavily reliant on feedback from English speakers. In response, someone in our class claimed, then, that translation is pointless, and readers should just read the original works and learn the actual language. Clearly, the difficulty in translating poetry is universal. However, the process described by Pulvers, that of "assimilation" and "re-creation" essentially echoes what Hyett and Thurlow feel. It is pointless to translate poetry literally, because then the poetry would be lost. It is then upon the translator to take on the burden of destroying and rebuilding certain elements to translate the feel and aesthetic, rather than the meaning of the poem.
    Another interesting point, this one being brought up by Beichman, is how much translation influences the main field of poetry itself. According to Beichman, the intense love and appreciation of western poetry drove many Japanese authors and critics to translation, which in turn shaped many aspects of modern Japanese poetry. As such, translation can never be pointless, if only as an exercise to extend the love of a certain media.