Your translators and interpreters
Verse translation is both an art and a craft. How do you manage to transfer a poem from one language into another? How to preserve every image, but also meter, mood, and rhyme? Alexandra Berlina has tried her hand at the verses of a Nobel Prize winner, but she’s also very happy to translate song lyrics and wedding poems.
Alexandra started translating poetry even before translating prose. While writing her PhD thesis on poetry translation, she tried translating poems into English herself. Her poetry translations received the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, a travel grant from the American Literary Translation Association, the Brodsky/Spender Prize (3rd place) and the Compass Award (2nd place).
Alexandra’s dissertation, Brodsky Translating Brodsky, considered how the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky translated his poetry into American English. For Brodsky, translating his own poems was a polishing process; everything that is typical of his poetry – enjambments and compound rhymes, erotic images combined with philosophical themes – is intensified in the translation. The book received the Anna Balakian Prize from the International Comparative Literature Association. A review in Translation and Literature reads: “Alexandra Berlina’s fascinating and intriguing book presents a selection of poems which Brodsky translated on his own, along with the original Russian and a line-for-line literal. What she then offers is a close reading of the end-product in both languages, showing a fine sensitivity not just to semantic correspondences (or failures of correspondence), but also to phonetic patterning and nuances. … All in all, the book presents a persuasive case for translation, as well as the reading of a translation, as a way to get to closer grips with a poetic text.” The fascination with these themes is what informs Alexandra’s translation practice.
In 2022, Alexandra taught literary translation at the University of Bielefeld. She began by taking apart the famous line “Poetry is what is lost in translation.” This is perhaps the most well-known quote on translating poetry, but Robert Frost had actually said it somewhat differently: “I like to say, guardedly, that I could define poetry this way: it is that which gets lost out of both prose and verse in translation.” And this makes sense, in a way: much of what makes a poem a poem would indeed disappear from an automatic translation that only considers content. But, of course, human translators – especially good translators – are something else. They can hear the music of, say, a poem in German or Russian, and they recreate it in English. Frost also writes that translating prose is not only about transferring the content, but also the form and emotional effect, style and beauty, sometimes even rhyme and rhythm… Somehow, this impossible work does happen. Poems get translated, and translating them is the most wonderful work in the world.
Sometimes Alexandra translates poetry just for hew own pleasure – but lately she has been getting more and more requests to translate verse for specific purposes. Sometimes publishers need a few poems translated, usually for a poetry collection like the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry – but more often Alexandra is contacted by authors who are looking for a wider audience and want their poems translated into British or American English. There’s been a lot of love poetry, some philosophical prose poems, sonnets and spoken word poetry, and even an epic; only a novel in verse is unfortunately still missing.
Occasionally, the verses are not intended for publication: jocular rhyming sayings for weddings and other big celebrations or a love poem for a person who does not speak the language of the lover… A customer once said that his sonnet in Alexandra’s translation had won the heart of his beloved: the best compliment she could possibly get! Alexandra also translates songs, taking care for the lyrics to remain singable. She is often asked for samples of her work. Here is a stanza from a poem by Joseph Brodsky in her English translation:
To A Certain Poetess
(Joseph Brodsky)
I am infected with the usual classics.
You’re suffering from being too sarcastic.
It’s easy to become too sly and caustic,
my friend, if excise taxes are your trade.
We talked, though talking didn’t cut the mustard.
Besides, you said this age was made of plastic.
I couldn’t guess that I, with my unflustered
love for the classics, walked the razor blade.
Alexandra mostly translates poems into English, but occasionally also into German and Russian. If you read German, you can check out her guest post on poetry translation in a fellow translator’s blog. Among the Google reviews of Alexandra’s work, many refer to poetry translation – like these:
