Poem into Poem: World Poetry in Modern Verse Translation

by George Steiner (Editor)

Poem into Poem is the first book of its kind. In an anthology of verse translations from twenty-two languages (ranging from ancient Hebrew and Greek to modern Chinese), each one has been made by an English or American poet who not only renders the original but also creates what is a living poem in its own right.

We find extraordinary encounters - Hardy and Sappho, Hopkins and Horace, Yeats and Ronsard, Scott Fitzgerald and Rimbaud, James Joyce and Gottfried Keller, Ezra Pound and Sophocles. The light of another poem is caught in a live mirror.

George Steiner believes that translation is central to the nature of modern poetry; that ours is the most brilliant period of poetic translation and recapture since the Elizabethans. This anthology contains his evidence.

Genres: Poetry

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

See also: George A. Steiner, author on Management and Planning.

Dr. Francis George Steiner was an essayist, novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and educator. He wrote for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews. Among his many awards, he received The Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award from Stanford University 1998. He lived in Cambridge, England, with his wife, historian Zara Shakow Steiner.

In 1950 he earned an M.A. from Harvard University, where he won the Bell Prize in American Literature, and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University (Balliol College) on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1955. He was then a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for two years. He became a founding fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in 1961, and has been an Extraordinary Fellow there since 1969. Additionally, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974, which he held for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He became Professor Emeritus at Geneva University on his retirement in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College at Oxford University in 1995. He later held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow of St. Anne's College at Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stupendous collection of translation of poetry from around the world and every era. The translators are all eminent poets themselves, and every one is matched to a sympathetic original.

First off, there is a pounding, wild, genius translation of Ferenc Juhasz’s The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets. This is the second time I’ve come across the poem, and it is one of my favorites now. It is a long poem, a dialogue between an aged mother calling to her son and the son answering that he can’t come because he has been changed into a dangerous stag, but the leaping, somersaulting, crazy-perfect images go way beyond this simple description. But then it evolves into his transformation to a seething, booming, evolving urban conglomerate. If you can’t find this out-of-print book, find a translation of this poem somewhere soon. This translation is by Kenneth McRobbie, with Ilona Duczynska, close to the end of the volume.

Then there a dozens of approaches to translating the classics, with many original authors repeated so you can compare how different modern poets render Villon, Horace, Homer, Dante, Sophocles, Pushkin, etc. I also found some classical poets and works I hadn’t paid attention to before, like Tibullus’s fifth elegy. There are excellent translations from the French standards: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Valery, Verlaine. And the volume is a wonderful way to discover less-well-known poets from Gerrmany, Russia and eastern Europe of the 20th century, like Juhasz and Gottfried Benn, as well as favorites such as Zbigniew Herbert.

The translators' approaches range from close-hewn traditional poems to the looser versions of Christopher Logue and Robert Lowell.

Out of print and hard to find, but make the effort!!

[Philip Coulter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modern translation of verse, rather than translation of modern verse.
There's a lot here. A lot of classical Greek and Latin. Some eastern European, some Japanese or Korean. For every selection that wasn't my taste, there was something that was.

As another review said Ferenc Juhasz’s The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets was particularly cool.