"Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English"
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Translation is usually sold as service work: faithful, invisible, dutiful. Marilyn Hacker treats it as an aesthetic dare. “Perhaps first and foremost” stakes out a priority that quietly demotes everything else we pretend is sacred in translation - literal accuracy, documentary zeal, even the translator’s moral posture. The task is to take “what I find as a reader” and rebuild it as a poem that can stand up in English, not as a report about a poem.
That phrase “what I find” is doing heavy lifting. It admits that reading is already interpretation: selective, biased, intimate. Hacker’s subtext is that a translator can’t smuggle meaning across languages without leaving fingerprints; the only honest move is to make those fingerprints legible as craft. The goal isn’t to preserve the original’s body so much as to re-create its pulse: cadence, pressure, wit, argument, heat.
“Plausible” is the killer word. Not perfect. Not “equivalent.” Plausible, as in: would an English-language poem naturally make these moves, take these turns, earn these rhymes? It’s a standard that’s both humbling and exacting, because English has its own music and its own cringe thresholds. Hacker, known for formal rigor and for translating French poets with an ear for meter and rhyme, is arguing against the kind of translation that reads like a dutiful worksheet. If the English poem doesn’t feel inevitable on the page, then fidelity becomes a hollow virtue: you’ve saved the facts and lost the poem.
That phrase “what I find” is doing heavy lifting. It admits that reading is already interpretation: selective, biased, intimate. Hacker’s subtext is that a translator can’t smuggle meaning across languages without leaving fingerprints; the only honest move is to make those fingerprints legible as craft. The goal isn’t to preserve the original’s body so much as to re-create its pulse: cadence, pressure, wit, argument, heat.
“Plausible” is the killer word. Not perfect. Not “equivalent.” Plausible, as in: would an English-language poem naturally make these moves, take these turns, earn these rhymes? It’s a standard that’s both humbling and exacting, because English has its own music and its own cringe thresholds. Hacker, known for formal rigor and for translating French poets with an ear for meter and rhyme, is arguing against the kind of translation that reads like a dutiful worksheet. If the English poem doesn’t feel inevitable on the page, then fidelity becomes a hollow virtue: you’ve saved the facts and lost the poem.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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