Rita Dove's poems Contents Introduction

Would you talk about the “sound cage” with reference to poetry?
Well, I’ll go about it first with the obvious ones, which are the sound cages of each language. Every language has a certain latticework of sounds and cadences that we work with or against as poets. In my case, the German influence has been profound—because it was through going to Germany and becoming fluent in German that I began to hear my own cadences within the framework of American English. Not just my midwestern patterns but my native tongue writ large, a mapping of our language’s vocal terrain. 
Here’s a great example: When our daughter was born, we wanted to raise her bilingually. My husband’s oldest friend is a native Greek whose parents immigrated to Germany when he was ten. At the time, he knew not a word of German. Of course, now, he’s bilingual. When our daughter was about six or seven months old, we asked his advice, and he said, “Just do whatever you do. She’ll figure it out. She’ll be able to hear the differences in the language. I’ll prove it to you.” So he went up to our daughter, Aviva, and began talking to her in German. She was babbling at that time; so she babbled back. She just babbled. And then he switched to Greek. She looked at him, cocked her head, and then she started babbling in Greek. There was a different cadence, a whole different sound system. Then he switched to English. And she babbled in English. I began to hear it: Separate from the sense of the words, there was a river, a cadence of sounds out of which one produces words. 
How does it work with translation?
Well, I think the reason why we have so many translations of Rilke, for instance, is because each translator is attempting to capture the colloquial aspect of Rilke’s work. In the time in which he wrote, his poems would have presented a level at which an ordinary reader would recognize quotidian speech and then be able to see how he’s taking that and making it strange, layering it. A direct translation has to reflect that, which means trying to find a level of everyday language against which to bounce your translation.
A really great writer is going to be using language in ways that are absolutely untranslatable. For instance, if I write “twitching stars,” they’re not twitching! [Laughing.] But there’s a difference between “winking stars” and “blinking stars” and “twitching stars.” It’s in the sound as well as the sense—but it’s mostly in the sound. Now, translate that to another language, whose word for “twitch” might not be as itchy. What are you going to do? You have to find a way to convey that itchiness and still make it the right amount of strange, different than winking or blinking or jostling or whatever else.
Rilke uses the very Germanness of his language to its utmost. He’s just brilliant at making up words, because German is great for putting together compound words. Or he’ll take a word apart, like erinnern, which is “remember.” But its German syllables boil down to “the process of making something very interior.” The prefix “er” works by supersizing the verb’s energy, so that “inner” becomes a focused action—the process of making something very interior. Rilke will apply both meanings of that word—the denotative “to remember” and the deconstructed “to internalize”—at the same time.
How in the world are you going to translate that? You could say “remember,” which has its own mixtures—take a member and then put it back together. But the act of putting something back together, re-membering it, is different than the action of super-interiorization. So you can’t use “remember.” 
Does that have anything to do with sound cage? At first blush, no—but it has to do with the way a language is constructed, how it deploys and stretches itself along that arc. And that’s part of translation, too.
Sound is one of the most persuasive elements in poetry. If a poet is musical—and most really great poets tend to be, because they understand that music will convince when all else fails—the translator has to find a tonal tapestry that doesn’t feel foreign in your own language but still conveys the sense of the original.