Theory of Translation 1 Introduction

2.8.1 Translating Poetry 
Although both are forms of literature, poetry differs from prose in many ways. Poetry 
is more indirect, oblique, suggestive and ambiguous. Rhythm, metre and sound 
structures mark the difference between the language of poetry and that of prose. 
Distortion of the ordinary language and deviation from the grammatical rules is a 
unique feature of poetic language.
Every poem uses the resources of language in its own way. Thus, it can be said that 
each poem has a grammar of its own. The devices like distortion, deviation and 
foregrounding are used by poets to suggest something emotional or sensitive or to 
achieve some poetic effects through the creative use of language. The following lines 
from Cumming’s poem, ‘Any One Lived in a Pretty Hometown’ show the deviation 
from grammatical rules:
 

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He sang his 
didn’t,
he danced his did 
They sowed their 
isn’t,
they reaped their same (qtd. in Mohanty, 86) 
In the above lines, the grammatical pattern of English is distorted by the poet. Also, 
the poet uses contraction of negated verbs like ‘didn’t’ as nouns. This deviation is also 
suggestive, e.g. the word ‘did’ consists of the verbal root ‘do’ in past tense used here 
as an object, that is, noun. The verb ‘did’ indicates past activity, whereas, its negation, 
‘didn’t’ denotes absence of such activity. This exemplifies that words with certain 
inherited meanings assume some other meaning in poetry. Bohuslav Ilek comments: 
The language of poetry is a highly complicated sign structure, and the complex 
structure of a poem enables it to communicate more information than a non-
poetic text can provide … this surplus information we owe to the symbolic 
character of poetic language (135). 
In poetry, the ordinary language is distorted to create a particular aesthetic effect. 
Rhythm, music and tones are the characteristic features of poetic language. Poetry 
tries to communicate through the use of figures of speech and prosody which cannot 
be communicated through common language. Poetry abounds in phonological 
patterns like rhyme, rhythm and tone and syntactic, semantic and stylistic patterns like 
versification and morphological parallelism. In addition, the translator has to be very 
cautious about the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between the words and 
their ordering. 
Translation of poetry is regarded as the most difficult mode of translation and some of 
the scholars have declared it to be an impossible task. Some of the romanticists 
commented that poetry is impossible to translate. S. T. Coleridge describes translation 
to be “painful copying that would produce masks only, and not forms breathing life” 
(qtd. in Bassnett, Studies, 64). Discussing the problems of translating poetry, Jayant 
Mahapatra cites four lines from a poem of an Oriya poet Radhanath Ray and 
comments: “To me, a good translation into English seems almost impossible to make 
… To render gems like these into English would be futile exercise” (qtd. in Das 
Bijaykumar, 46). 
The problems of translator get multiplied in the translation of poetry, as a poet uses 
various poetic devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm, metre 

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and rhyme to create musical incantory effects. Jean Paul Sartre, a French 
existentialist, comments that a poet does not use words as symbols but as things 
which are to be contemplated for their own sake (qtd. in Patankar, 65). For example, 
Tennyson’s famous poem ‘The Lotos-eaters’, brilliantly expresses languor through 
the sounds which is very difficult to render in any other language.
In translation of poetry, many times, the form and the content are linked. A. C. 
Bradley states: “And this identity of content and form … is no accident, it is the 
essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry …” (qtd. in Patankar, 65). The content and 
form of a text are mutually dependent on each other. In this regard, Nida asserts: 
“Content can never be abstracted from form and the form is nothing apart from 
content” (Science, 146). Thus, the organic view of work of art, the internal 
relationship of the parts of the text makes the act of translation of poetry more 
difficult.