The possibility of every poem being translatable without losing its value is greater than the possibility of any poem losing its value in translation

Versopolis, platform dedicated to European poetry, plays a crucial role in poetry translation, fostering the cross-cultural exchange of voices. It provides a space where poets from diverse linguistic backgrounds can share their work, and translations are not merely a bridge between languages but a way to preserve and amplify the layered meanings inherent in each poem. By promoting high-quality translations, Versopolis contributes significantly to the global visibility of poets, highlighting the fact that poetry remains a potent tool for both cultural expression and communication across borders in its original and translated forms. We, Versopolis poets and festival organisers, know it well. But we keep hearing, at least here in Turkey, that ‘poetry cannot be translated’ or that ‘poetry loses its value when translated’. If you are an emerging poet, a poetry translator, a festival organiser or someone who loves poetry and has suffered from bad translations, you’ve probably heard these sentences hundreds of times and even internalised them.

First, let me say this: these propositions aim to define poetry. Throughout history, poetry has shattered every restrictive definition imposed on it, embarrassing those who relied on those definitions. In fact, poetry perceives any definition that limits it as a challenge and hands its only weapon, the pen, to a trusted young poet. These statements, and similar ones, are nothing more than attempts to circumvent the futility of defining poetry. Their purpose is to elevate poetry while simultaneously confining it within the bounds of this elevation and a single language.

In Turkish poetry, the scarcity of poets who know foreign languages, the fact that Turkish is a lonely language among the Ural-Altaic language family, and the syntactic differences between the Indo-European languages which dominate Eurocentric perspectives due to the global hegemony of English lend some weak justification to the above propositions. On the other hand, readers often find themselves subjected to poor translations due to the limitations of translators, whether in the source or the target language. In addition to the limited translation education in Turkey, the insufficient and repressive nature of translation criticism is another issue.

Despite all these problems, the proposition that ‘poetry loses its value when translated’ is flawed. For it at least assumes that poetry has a measurable value that both the reader and even the poet can fully grasp. Even if the concept of value is narrowed to multiple meanings, wordplay, alliteration, rhymes and cultural references, it is incorrect to assume these cannot be translated.

Let me begin with an example from another field. Given a scene where an actor is required to laugh hysterically and cry uncontrollably simultaneously, one actor might say that the scene cannot be translated and that it is impossible to convey this scenario. Another actor, however, might not understand the need to both laugh and cry in the scene. Instead of laughing and crying, a third actor might find another way to meet the scene’s requirements and create the same effect on the audience. A fourth actor, however, will laugh and cry simultaneously. What I mean to say is that the success of a translation depends on the translator’s proficiency as both a reader and a writer, on the tools in their kit.

Moreover, the poet often doesn’t know the full value of his poem. The boundary between what is meaningful and meaningless in poetry is so fine that a slight tremor can cause meaning and nonsense to swap places. A poet who thinks they’ve written a highly ambiguous line is only aware of a few of the countless possible meanings of the words they’ve used. Every highly ambiguous sentence contains more meanings than the author might realise, and these meanings will continue to multiply. If a sentence has more than one meaning, it will, by nature, acquire new meanings. This is why it is challenging for the poet to enter their own poem, slithering through the narrow spaces between the meanings of ambiguous words and lines, hiding within them. A translator, however, loves to play hide-and-seek. Even if they cannot find the poet, they discover several of the multiple meanings the poet may or may not have intended and translate them into a line that leaves room for the production of countless others. It is uncertain whether the translator can convey all these meanings into the target language at once, or which meanings the reader in the target language will grasp.

A poem changes every time it is written and every time it is translated, and it can change every time it is read. Writing and reading are not superior to each other in terms of creativity. Translation, if we exaggerate, stands a little above both. For it must encompass both in equal measure.

Here I aim to disprove the idea that translating a poem from one language to another is impossible. But before considering the sceptics’ claim that ‘poetry loses its value when translated’, there’s a question we’ve overlooked. There are currently over seven thousand languages spoken in the world. Does the above proposition claim that a poem cannot be translated into any of these seven thousand languages without losing its value? I believe everyone would agree that there have to be several languages in which any poem can be translated without losing any of its value.

Now, let us turn to intra-language translations. I do not suppose anyone reading this would doubt that language is a living entity. In countries like my own, where a language revolution has taken place, alphabets have changed, empires have fallen and people have abandoned the language of the state that once dominated them to return to their mother tongue, intra-language translation must have been an important tool for navigating life. However, language, like a virus, mutates in the body of every individual who speaks it. The meanings of words, or at least their weight, idiomatic expressions, adjectives, profanity and so on, change from person to person, from day to day, varying across on generations, social status and climate. In this case, even speaking itself becomes a translation problem. Of course, you might ask: if the meanings of words change from person to person, how can a translator produce a translation? Translators find the meaning of a word not in what it has signified historically but in the space between what the word has signified and the things it is intended to define.

We started this essay with the proposition that the possibility of every poem being translatable without losing its value is greater than the possibility of any poem losing its value in translation. Let us conclude with another:

Every sentence is constantly being re-translated.

(And at least one of these translations will be one that does not lose any of the possible total value of the sentence.)