Erin Moure posted a link to Translation Telephone where the online app takes your text and runs it thru 20 randomly chosen languages of google translate and see, like the telephone game, what comes out the other end.
Even when the word you have are not your own, more than usual, that is, when translating, there is this pivot of choice as you curate ideas to move them forward, and are mute about other ideas.
Accuracy is the bogeyman of translation; for what can be accurately paraphrased is not the “poetic” content of the work. Almost a decade ago, Charles Bernstein said in a duration press chapbook on translation,
Translation can be a goad to invent new forms, structures, expressions, textures, and sounds in the (new) poem being written. This is to acknowledge, but also go beyond, Walter Benjamin’s famous comment that mark of the translator should not be made invisible, or inaudible, in the translation. A certain strangeness from the original must necessarily be embodied in the new poem.
for morning exercises I’ve been playing with translating John Donne to modern English, keeping the form but culturally translating it to my point of view, it’s amusing, absorbing. It’s a dialogue. You acknowledge what you heard but say your say.