Young Writers Society

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?

Translation is a hard work. A translated work is considered the best only if the translator has command over the original language and the language he is translating it to. Otherwise, as you said they all "frankly suck".

I have tried translating works from Tamil(spoken in South India-Tamil Nadu, and is an official language of Singapore and Srilanka) to English many times, and I've given up every time within a day of trying because, well, for one I was ignorant, I just found it impossible to fit a language that has 247 characters into a language that has only 26 characters. Also, there are certain words in Tamil that cannot be translated and if they are translated, they lose their authenticity and that's why I'm being hesitant, because I usually try to translate folk poems and folklore stories and they have words that are sometimes new to me, as these words only belong to certain community.

Nevertheless, I tried translating my own work;) for the Translature magazine (a new awesome thing in YWS) and it reads,

அலை
பருவம் உற்ற பெண்ணைப் போல,
தன் தலையை மெல்ல மேல்நோக்கி,
பார்த்தது அந்த அலை.

Wave
the wave,
like a newly bloomed girl
lifted her head above, slowly

It took me many hours, let's ignore the fact that I was working on it a day before the deadline, and an entire night to check if I had maintained the feel of the poem throughout, and that's when I thought I should probably stick to word to word translation because that made lot of sense then, but when I look back at this now, I can't help but think if I should've just kept the meaning/sense of the poem and not have worried too much about the words that I chose.

In my opinion, literary works are reflection of a particular community, their rituals, their practice, and I think it is important to translate them just so the people from other parts could understand whys and whats of the said community. And these are okay as far as for understanding the culture, but to bask in the glory of the language and meanings and the words, it's hard as the importance of the stories changes from one reader to another and if this opinionated reader becomes the translator, it sucks.