them. It’s not a question of whether they are better or worse, people have completely different views. That’s not really a theory, that’s just a fact of practice. I know that’s how I do it, and that’s the only way I could do it. structo: In terms of translations, there’s everything from the syllable by syllable translation – which sounds remarkable by the way – through to very loose translation. Do you aim for anywhere on that scale, or is it completely dependent on the text?
“÷e shock of reading a pœm which is really e◊eÀive is really the shock of something foreign” constantine: It depends solely on the text. When Hölderlin did Pindar like that he would have had in mind, almost certainly, an extraordinary version of the Bible in German. There was quite a bit of so-called interlinear translation of holy scripture, and there it was a religious matter since this was believed to be the word of God, then logically speaking the word of God is contained within every syllable of the Hebrew or in every syllable of the New Testament Greek. So you had to do it syllable by syllable and interlinear; as it were a translation of a physical thing, a handing over from one language to the other, with nothing flowing away through the holes. Since [Hölderlin] had an almost religious veneration for the poets of Greece then it’s similar in his case, except he also had, I think, what all poet translators have at the back of their mind, which is what’s in this for me? That way is extreme, and in both of these cases – Hölderlin’s Pindar and the interlinear versions of the Bible – without the original it makes no sense really. The German makes a bit more sense than if you’d done it in English, because German is more like Greek in the way that its syntax works and the way it makes up words, than English. What I wouldn’t ever want to do is produce something which carried nothing of the foreign with it. I’m not a deliberate foreigniser. The premise is that poetry itself is like a foreign language within the vernacular. The shock of reading a poem which is really effective is really the shock of something foreign. Translation is more than a bit like that in that it’s literally foreign, and if you want to get anywhere near even something analogous to the shock [of the original] it has to ring foreign in some way, but not so foreign that it just sounds as though you
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