There are a lot of poems in German that I love, and I always get sad when people who only speak English can't understand some of my favorite poems, and even sadder when the only translations I can find frankly suck. One of my favorite poems is Selige Sehnsucht, and it tends to be translated really poorly. Here are some translations of Selige Sehnsucht:
http://www.shinzen.org/Poetry/poemHolyLonging.htm
https://room4truth.com/2010/08/25/the-holy-longing/
http://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=6619
https://jclab.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/ ... n-blessed/
As you can see, there's very little consistency between them. People are focused on making the translation sound pretty more than preserving the meaning. But no random person trying to make a translation sound pretty is going to match the beauty Goethe could attain when he was writing it from scratch, since he could pick the message and the words to go together, and he is statistically likely to be a far better poet than people translating him (although I've read a couple of translations of Goethe by great poets). I tried to make my own translation based solely on meaning, and it doesn't sound pretty at all:
Tell it to no one, only the wise
Because the masses will mock it right away
I want to praise the living,
What longs for death by flames
In the coolness of love's nights
Which begat you, where you begat
You are overcome by an alien feeling
As the still candle glows
You no longer stay surrounded
In the shadows of darkness
And new desire pulls you
To higher lovemaking
No distance gives you trouble
You come flying, spellbound
And, at last, eager for the light,
You are a moth, burnt
And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth
It obviously has issues too (I mean, "become!" in English is the biggest one), but not nearly as many as any translation I've found on the Internet (really, "you are a butterfly, then gone" for the basically the climax of the poem? "Schmetterling" means both butterfly and moth, but is clearly moth here from the context, and "verbrannt" is always burnt, never gone). I translate the title as "Blessed Longing" rather than "Holy Longing" since holy is "helig" and Goethe used "selig", but really even the title of this poem is untranslatable since "selig" means something like "partaking in the delight of Heaven" and "Sehnsucht" is quite stronger than any similar word in English, actually being a combination of "to long" and "addiction".
Also, I'm depressed at the cheating-essays people wrote on this poem. It's very clear what it means, and it's not actually about moths.
Has anyone else tried to translate poems before? If you have, what are your thoughts?
Gender:
Points: 17
Reviews: 63