Andrey Gritsman, born in Moscow and living in the US, works as a physician and writes poetry; he has an essay in EastWest Literary Forum called On Bilingual Poetry and Self-Translation that, while rambling and occasionally unclear, says some interesting things. A few excerpts:
At times, specific feelings and emotional situations are better expressed in a non-native language due to the development of a new sensibility, more natural for a newly acquired tongue. […]
I was asked several times in which language I dream. I was thinking about this and realized that in my dreams people talk, I talk to them, and there is some language. But then I realized that it is not English and it is not Russian, it is a language that I understand but it does not have words or familiar sounds of one of the recognizable languages. And then it occurred to me that this is similar to the famous Pentecostal event in Jerusalem when a crowd of people of different nations heard the same sermon spoken in a “language” understood by them, i.e., in their native tongue. So, I concluded that this probably could be qualified as the language of poetry or a language above other languages. Some see it as a metaphysical substance that a poet puts into a certain language but which existed before him and which is transferred into words, and subsequently, it lives in the poet’s soul and mind. A monologue of the soul, so to speak. […]
The language itself dictates the way a poem is to be created. This is why attempts, by a great poet such as Joseph Brodsky, to place a poem from the original language, a Russian syllabo-tonic poem, into a framework of a totally different language sometimes produce cumbersome results. The number of words in poems in two different languages varies, which is only natural considering the vast differences between Russian and English. Sometimes unexpected images or different idioms enter the plot of the poem, or the language itself pulls apart the plot or adds an additional layer to the poem. However, the most important criterion in translation is recognizing the sound, although a poet-translator should maintain fidelity to the meaning of words, as much as the other language allows.
Tess Gallagher once mentioned that, when reading a translation of a foreign poem, the English language reader would like to see a good poem written in English. This particular philosophy was shared by Boris Pasternak, a great Russian poet and a famous translator of Shakespeare into Russian. […]
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