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

George Steiner was a French and American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator whose work explored the relationship between language, literature, and society, with a particular focus on the moral and cultural consequences of the Holocaust. Multilingual from an early age, Steiner grew up speaking German, English, and French, and studied the classics under his father, while overcoming a physical handicap with his mother’s encouragement. His family relocated to the United States during World War II, an experience that shaped his lifelong reflections on survival, morality, and human cruelty. He studied literature, mathematics, and physics at the University of Chicago, earned an MA at Harvard, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Steiner held academic posts across Europe and the United States, including Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature at Oxford, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, teaching in multiple languages. A prolific writer, he produced influential works in criticism, translation studies, and fiction, including Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, and The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., blending historical insight with philosophical reflection. His essays and books explored the power and ambivalence of human language, the ethical responsibilities of literature, and the persistence of anti-Semitism, while his fiction offered imaginative examinations of moral and historical dilemmas. Steiner was celebrated for his intellectual breadth and lecturing style, described as prophetic, charismatic, and sometimes doom-laden, and he contributed extensively to journals such as The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. He was married to Zara Steiner, with whom he had two children, David and Deborah, both of whom pursued academic and public service careers. Steiner’s work remains widely respected for its integration of rigorous scholarship, ethical inquiry, and literary sensitivity, marking him as one of the foremost thinkers in twentieth-century literature and comparative studies.

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.