Willis Barnstone > Quotes

“The Bible is a work of art. Were it not art, were it simply an instruction manual, it would not satisfy or convince, and very likely would not have survived. So, to be faithful to the original work, which in Greek is normally chanted in churches, as the Torah is chanted in the temple and the Qu’ran is melismatically chanted in the mosque… the Bible here must resonate.”
― Willis Barnstone, The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas

“Paul suggests that gentiles can practice a law written in their hearts, which will be seen as not only equal to but also above the written Torah…It should be remembered that in Paul’s day the only religious law for Paul was that of the Jewish Bible, in Hebrew… Though Torah and the New Testament, including Paul’s letters, will eventually shape church law, the New Testament’s books are not in themselves composed as law. They are not a self-consciously composed constitution. They contain no Ten Commandments in form or statement.”
― Willis Barnstone, The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas

“Many banal ideas are commonly held about the disadvantages of poetry in translation—this despite the modern additions to our language of verse translations by Lattimore, Fitts, Fitzgerald, Wilbur, Lowell, or Auden. Poems may be poorly translated, as they may have been poorly written originally, but they are not necessarily poorer or better than the original—though the translator must secretly and vainly aim for the later. The quality of the poem in translation will depend on the translator's skill in writing poetry in his own language in the act of translating. If he is T. S. Eliot translating Saint-Jean Perse or Mallarmé translating Poe or the scholars of the King James Version translating the psalms, the result may indeed be superior—or at the very least equal. Only one thing is certain: the poem in translation will be different. The translator's task, then, is to produce a faithful forgery. The quality and resemblance of the new product to the old lies somewhere between such fidelity and fraud.”
― Willis Barnstone, Ancient Greek Lyrics

“Her time-scissored work is not quite language poetry, but a more joyful cousin of the eternal scant-garde, which is always and never new. So Sappho is ancient and, for a hundred reasons, modern.”
― Willis Barnstone, The Complete Poems of Sappho

“Ideally, poetry in translation should one day lead a reader to a reading of the poem in the original tongue. The poem in its native phonemes, we often forget, was primarily a poem, and a good one, presumably, if chosen for translation. A poem in translation should be faithful, if to anything, to this primary quality of the original—that of its being an effective poem.”
― Willis Barnstone, Ancient Greek Lyrics

“Discussion of translations of poetry usually confuses kind with value. One type of translation is thought to be intrinsically superior to others, be it free translation, close translation, poetry after, imitation, metaphrase, paraphrase, etc. In the critic’s mind, the quality of a translation often depends on how closely it conforms to his own preferred method. This error of descriptive rather than evaluative criticism—where kind determines value—probably occurs more often in regard to poetry in translation than in any other form of literary criticism. But in the end, method is secondary, and determines neither the virtues nor sins of a poem. The translator need only clearly and honestly indicate his method—whatever it is—and then be judged, not on this choice, but on the quality of the new poem. If the new poem is good, the translator as artist will be performing his ancient function of retelling, in his own form, a given content he has overheard from the immediate or the distant past.”
― Willis Barnstone

“Somehow, even the slightest words and phrases of Sappho yield her voice.”
― Willis Barnstone

“But it is said that certain memorable lines or phrases cannot be expressed in any other language. Yet it should also be said that while at times we must lose, at others we gain, and the good translator will take advantage of the text, improving upon the weaker lines of the original, while doing his best with the best. More important, it is forgotten that translation provides an opportunity for languages to interact upon each other, for one tongue to alter and enrich the possibilities of expression in another. In the past some translated works have changed both literary language and tradition: notably the Petrarchan sonnet, Luther's Bible, Judith Gautier's haiku. Milton went as naturally to the King James Version for vocabulary as Shakespeare turned to Holinshed for plots; when Rimbaud's Illuminations were translated into English, the tradition of our literature was expanded to the extent that diction and subject never before found in English were presented to us.
In a word, the quality of a work in translation is dependent on the translator's skills. His forgery is not necessarily better or worse than the original or than other works in his own language; it is only necessarily different—and here the difference, if new and striking, may extend the verbal and thematic borders of his own literature. And as a corollary to his work the new poem may also be seen as an essay into literary criticism, a reading, a creative explication de texte.”
― Willis Barnstone, Ancient Greek Lyrics

“The snow crisscrosses down and flurries up all afternoon, unaware it is snow

or some of us are desperate.”
― Willis Barnstone, The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets

“But it is said that certain memorable lines or phrases cannot be expressed in any other language. Yet it should also be said that while at times we must lose, at others we gain, and the good translator will take advantage of the text, improving upon the weaker lines of the original, while doing his best with the best. More important, it is forgotten that translation provides an opportunity for languages to interact upon each other, for one tongue to alter and enrich the possibilities of expression in another. In the past some translated works have changed both literary language and tradition: notably the Petrarchan sonnet, Luther's Bible, Judith Gautier's haiku. Milton went as naturally to the King James Version for vocabulary as Shakespeare turned to Holinshed for plots; when Rimbaud's Illuminationswere translated into English, the tradition of our literature was expanded to the extent that diction and subject never before found in English were presented to us.
In a word, the quality of a work in translation is dependent on the translator's skills. His forgery is not necessarily better or worse than the original or than other works in his own language; it is only necessarily different—and here the difference, if new and striking, may extend the verbal and thematic borders of his own literature. And as a corollary to his work the new poem may also be seen as an essay into literary criticism, a reading, a creative explication de texte.”
― Willis Barnstone, Ancient Greek Lyrics