#now i'd really like a version of this poem with danish on one side and the translation on the other | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

coquelicoq · 2 years ago

Photo

[Image description: The first image is a screenshot of the first five sections of Inger Christensen's poem "Alphabet," translated from Danish into English by Susanna Nied. The second image is a screenshot of the first seven sections of the original poem, "Alfabet." /end ID]

and see an interesting interview with the translator here and here. you can read an excerpt from the original and the translation of that excerpt (via the link at the top of that page) here.

#continuing to have many thoughts about poetry in translation #because like i loved the excerpt in english when i saw this post on my dash. then i went into the notes for an ID #and instead found this reblog which reveals this is a translation of a poem written in danish #and the things i loved about the english poem are different in the original. they are in a sense different poems #poetry #translation #sorry for the incomplete description but i figured it is better than nothing #also! excerpts of poems are not the same as poems in their entirety!#reading an excerpt of a poem is no less a poetic experience than reading the whole poem #but you are reading what is essentially a different work. it's certainly a related work but it is not the same #a poem is a cohesive whole...removing part of it will always lose or change some of its essence #did you know this poem is structured on the fibonacci sequence and speaks to the threat of nuclear war?#i mean i certainly didn't pick up on either of those things just by reading the first five sections #though now that i know that i understand what hydrogen is doing in the b section (it's not just because hydrogen in danish starts with b)#now i'd really like a version of this poem with danish on one side and the translation on the other #i feel like i know just enough about danish that i could possibly get something out of that #especially with a poem with so much syntactic repetition

10K notes · View notes