Listening With the Eyes

Robert Frost thought that “poetry is what is lost in translation.” This seems harsh. Pope’s Homer, Fitzgerald’s “Rubáiyát,” Arthur Waley’s or Ezra Pound’s versions from Chinese and Japanese — and many other examples — prove Frost wrong. Yet I know what he meant. All I have to do is flip through “Feuilles d’herbe,” the French translation of “Leaves of Grass,” to recognize that something essential has been lost. The French title feels wrong. Our grassblades are robust, tough, and scrubby and have nothing in common with the vaguely perfumed aura of “feuilles d’herbe.” According to the Italian proverb, the translator is a traducer, but could it be that languages betray one another? Frost claimed that poetry, to be appreciated, requires “the imagining ear.” He meant that we apprehend “the sound of sense,” always close to actual speech, as it blends, or contends, with the metered patterns of poetic form; a delicate whipsaw effect, discernible only to the native ear. And this, of course, must be lost in another language.