"When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence"
About this Quote
Translation, in Marilyn Hacker's telling, is less a courteous act of ferrying meaning across a river than a close reading conducted under pressure. Her phrase "obliged to look" makes it sound like duty, not hobby: the translator is accountable to structure, not just sense. And she picks her battlefield carefully. Poetry, "in particular", is where language stops being a transparent vehicle and starts behaving like engineered material - weight-bearing, resonant, sometimes deliberately unstable.
The keystone is her "triple tension": line of verse, syntax, sentence. Those are three different systems for organizing thought, and in good poetry they rarely align neatly. The line break can contradict the grammar; the syntax can delay what the sentence wants to resolve; the sentence can surge past the line as if it refuses to be contained. Hacker is pointing to the subtextual drama that readers feel even when they can't name it: pace, suspense, surprise, the tiny torque of ambiguity. A translation that preserves only dictionary meaning but flattens that tension is, in effect, an adaptation of content with the music stripped out.
Context matters here because Hacker is a formalist who also moves across languages and traditions; she knows that technique carries ideology. How a poet "puts together" language signals class, era, intimacy, defiance. Her insistence on attending to construction is a quiet rebuke to the idea that translation is primarily about equivalence. It's about recreating pressures: making the new language strain in comparable ways, so the reader encounters not just what was said, but how the saying thinks.
The keystone is her "triple tension": line of verse, syntax, sentence. Those are three different systems for organizing thought, and in good poetry they rarely align neatly. The line break can contradict the grammar; the syntax can delay what the sentence wants to resolve; the sentence can surge past the line as if it refuses to be contained. Hacker is pointing to the subtextual drama that readers feel even when they can't name it: pace, suspense, surprise, the tiny torque of ambiguity. A translation that preserves only dictionary meaning but flattens that tension is, in effect, an adaptation of content with the music stripped out.
Context matters here because Hacker is a formalist who also moves across languages and traditions; she knows that technique carries ideology. How a poet "puts together" language signals class, era, intimacy, defiance. Her insistence on attending to construction is a quiet rebuke to the idea that translation is primarily about equivalence. It's about recreating pressures: making the new language strain in comparable ways, so the reader encounters not just what was said, but how the saying thinks.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Marilyn
Add to List
