When ПушкинComes to Shove

[Valentino, Russell]

Inna and colleagues,

Glad you're willing to work through some of these issues more on list.

Judson wrote: "As Jakobson said, poetry is by definition untranslatable.  That is a sad fact, perhaps, but inescapable.  One can make versions of Pushkin like mine (I gave you an example) or even much better than mine, but they will still not be true translations."

This seems to me to assume a narrow conveyance model for translation. Jacobson's definition is only inescapable if one assumes that the aim of all translation is transfer of the whole, not, for instance, inspiration, or invention, or persuasion, or literary practice (i.e., the practice of literature), or therapy, or the development of language skills, reading skills, aesthetic range, or any of the many other things that translation actually does in practice. It assumes a very narrow speech situation, pretty much just one -- Modernist and, I think, rather elitist. We attempt to carry a cup filled to the absolute brim with tea, one pinky protruding, across a sea of obstacles, getting elbowed and jostled along the way. I'm sure others have encountered metaphors like this. Of course you can't do that without spilling anything: therefore impossible. According to this way of thinking, all the 3rd-graders translating poems in the Bay Area's Poetry Inside Out Program (for instance) !
 are failures; in fact, they've been set up to fail from the start by an assumption about what a full, true translation might be. But neither poetry nor translation is that one thing that J's axiom qua definition suggests. I would say the same about artistic prose.

I love the idea, suggested by Alex, that translation might trade in forensic sense, both for its connection to law (every translation is an argument for itself) and for its associations with investigation and what happens to bodies when they're dead (known in some circles as "rendering"). I'll be sure to credit you, Alex.

Russell

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