Cambridge Conversations in Translation - 13 November 2017 - Translation and Poetry (Workshop)

Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação (CLAS, Cambridge)Jennifer Harris (Fac English, Cambridge) Moderator: Monica Boria Within the domain of literary translation, poetry has traditionally attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Holmes 1970, 1988; Lefevere 1975, 1992; Bassnett 1980; Hermans 1985; Eco 2003; Robinson 2010; Jones 2011; Reynolds 2011, Drury 2015). The constraints offered by rhyme and meter may sometimes appear to justify the statement (often attributed to Robert Frost) that ‘poetry is that which is lost in translation’. The notion of translatability frequently seems to defy the very essence of poetry since it is a literary medium in which meaning and structural form seem to be inextricably linked. Even proponents of strikingly different approaches to poetry translation usually agree that any expectation of absolute ‘fidelity’ (whatever that is) must necessarily be qualified or compromised in one way or another. But which aspects of a given poem can be safely jettis