[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-140243-en":3,"doc-seo-140243-105":31,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":92},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":21,"is_downloadable":21,"audit_status":21,"page_count":22,"language":23,"language_code":24,"site_id":25,"html_lang":24,"table_of_contents":26,"faqs":27,"seo_title":28,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":29,"read_time":30},140243,962084931830,"Jacob","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_a8503ba1806abce46bf441b54a3ca4cd",2,"Literature","George Steiner - To Translate or Transfigure","George Steiner explores why poetry resists translation, arguing that a poem is language under maximal pressure of expressive integrity and cannot be equated by any other statement. The discussion extends beyond verse to cover linguistic exchange itself: languages actively shape world-images by selecting and structuring experience, so no two languages can align perfectly. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, metaphor, and even word-length and orthographic cues carry historically and culturally charged meanings, making equivalence impossible.","George Steiner  \nTO TRADUCE OR TRANSFIGURE  \nTHAT IT IS UNTRANSLATABLE is one of the definitions offered of poetry.  \nWhat remains after the attempt, intact and uncommunicated, is the original  \npoem. So affirmed du Bellay, the French poet and rhetorician of the early 16th century, so, more recently, Robert Frost. A poem is language in the most intense mode of expressive integrity, language under such close pressure of singular need, of particularised energy, that no other statement can be equivalent, that no other poem even if it differs only in one phrase, perhaps one word, can do the same job. The poem is because nothing exactly like it has been before, because its very composition is an act of unique designation, of naming some previously anonymous or inchoate experience as Adam named the creatures of life. A painting divides space between itself and the whole; so a poem divides experience between itself and “otherness.” How can identity be translated into anything but itself? This is the admonition of Borges’ acid fable of a man translating Don Quixote into identical Spanish, line by line and word for word.  \nAdd to this the nature of poetic language. The distinctive beat of any given tongue, that sustaining undercurrent of inflection, pitch relations, habits of stress, which give a particular motion to prose, is concentrated in poetry so that it acts asan overt, characteristic force. Poetry will not translate any more than music. Verse forms, the shape of the stanza, the conventional or innovating directives of rhyme, the historical, stylistic discriminations which a language makes between its prosaic and poetic idiom, the counterpoint it sets up between colloquial and formal, these also defy translation.  \nAs does the immediate visual code of long and short words, of capitalisation and accentual mark in German, say, or Spanish. And how can a translation carry over into a Roman alphabet the pictorial suggestions, the relations of space and graphic incitement which are a vital part of the total statement made by a Chinese or Persian lyric?  \nIn short: because a poem enlists the maximal range of linguistic means, because it articulates the code of any given language at its most incisive—all other poems in the language being a part of the informing context—poetry may be  \nparaphrased, imperfectly mimed but “indeed cannot be translated.” To which Dr. Johnson adds,“and therefore it is the poet that preserves language.”  \nBut let us observe the argument closely. It cuts much deeper than verse. It implicates even rudimentary acts of linguistic exchange, the attempt to translate any word or sentence from one language into another. A language is not a passive representation of reality, it does not restrict itself to being a mirror. It is an active world image, selecting certain possibilities of human analysis and behaviour, certain ways of initiating, structuring, and recording experience from a total potentiality of representation. Each language cuts out its segment of reality. We live our world as we speak it (to ourselves or to others), as it feeds back to us through the particular linguistic code most immediate to our culture and personal upbringing. We cast the net of our own language over the multiplicity of living forms. Loosely woven, it will draw in experience in gross, indiscriminate lumps; the landscape of being is made incoherent and monotonous by illiterate speech. Close knit, the language-net makes available to us the largest possible range—possible to our physiological and historical condition—of differentiated, mastered, potentially related elements.  \nA large vocabulary signifies a literal wealth and concreteness of felt life. A developed syntax engenders those perceptions of interrelation, those creative regroupings of thought and action called metaphor. Without metaphor a society remains static, repetitive, as is a child’s song. Our world, the way we move among its total possibilities, spring from grammar, from","cbCainI2XdI9hs9S","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCainI2XdI9hs9S","pdf",103508,5,1,13,"English","en",105,"# To Translate or Transfigure\n## Poetry as untranslatable language\n## Poetic form and linguistic code\n## Languages as active world-images\n## Vocabulary, syntax, metaphor, and cultural meaning","[{\"question\":\"Why does Steiner claim poetry cannot be translated?\",\"answer\":\"Because poetry uses the maximal range of linguistic means and articulates a language’s code at its most incisive, so no other wording can do the same job.\"},{\"question\":\"How does Steiner argue the issue goes beyond verse?\",\"answer\":\"He links untranslatability to the basic acts of linguistic exchange, claiming that each language actively selects and structures experience rather than merely reflecting reality.\"},{\"question\":\"What roles do vocabulary and grammar play in translation difficulties?\",\"answer\":\"He argues that vocabulary carries historical and social energy and that syntax enables perceptions of interrelation and metaphor, so different grammars yield different life-images.\"}]","George Steiner - 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