Book contents
- Poetry and Language
- Poetry and Language
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Introduction
- Chapter Two Meter and the Syllable
- Chapter Three Rhyme
- Chapter Four Onomatopoeia and Sound Symbolism
- Chapter Five Unusual Word Order and Other Syntactic Quirks in Poetry
- Chapter Six The Meaning of a Poem
- Chapter Seven Metaphor
- Chapter Eight Translating Poetry
- Appendix Quantity and Pitch in Greek Verse
- Works Cited
- Index
Chapter Eight - Translating Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2019
- Poetry and Language
- Poetry and Language
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Introduction
- Chapter Two Meter and the Syllable
- Chapter Three Rhyme
- Chapter Four Onomatopoeia and Sound Symbolism
- Chapter Five Unusual Word Order and Other Syntactic Quirks in Poetry
- Chapter Six The Meaning of a Poem
- Chapter Seven Metaphor
- Chapter Eight Translating Poetry
- Appendix Quantity and Pitch in Greek Verse
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The Latin word for “metaphor” is translatio, which is also the source of our word “translation.” A metaphor might be seen, then, as a kind of translation from one semantic domain to another, but within the same language. We mainly use “translation,” of course, to refer to the carrying over of a work or text from one language to another, what Jakobson calls “interlingual translation,”1 and metaphors within such a text are often quite readily translatable: Akhilleus leōn esti is the same metaphor as “Achilles is a lion.” Whether it makes sense to say, for example, that an English version of a French sonnet is a metaphor for the original sonnet would be an interesting topic to pursue, but our focus in this chapter will be on the challenges of making such versions in the first place, and to what extent linguistics can shed light on them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Poetry and LanguageThe Linguistics of Verse, pp. 238 - 259Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019