Emily Bian - sept 28th

 The two texts assigned this week gave me a lot of insight on translating poetry. I originally assumed that translating poetry is one of the hardest thing for a translator to do. Both Pulvers and Beichman ran into very unique problems with each poem that they translated. This made me realize that when it comes to poetry, there is no set of rule that's one-size-fits-all. When Beichman was trying to decide if he wanted to follow the traditional tanka form when he translated a tanka, Beichman said "There was, that is, no need to make a choice; one could use the number of lines that worked best for each poem.". I agree with this thought. There are situations where following the number of syllables per line would make a translated poem with great flow, and there are situations where following the same rule would make the translation awkward and unreadable. 

Another interesting idea that I read from Beichman was when he was translainting Akiko's poems on the plane, and he had forgotten to bring the original Japanese text. I think that trying to reconstruct Japanese texts from your own translations is a great way of checking if your translation is lacking in certain areas. When I'm translating, found it easy to forget that my audience is not going to have both the translation and original side by side, reading both with the same fluidity. Therefore trying to reconstruct the original text from the translation is actually the perfect way to check if the translation is lacking because only then are you really inside your audience's mindset.