Poetry: best English workout few know about

This is a guest post by Timur Khamzin, a programmer who writes and translates poetry in his free time. In this post, he talks about the whys and hows of his hobby. What Timur does is inspiring and mind-blowing. You can find his bilingual poetry and translations in his community on VK Переводы стихов | Poetry Translations.

Choosing poetic form

Don’t be hasty to reel back in horror when I tell you it is writing poetry that I refer to in the headline, not reading it (although that can also be a treat). Some of your apprehensions may turn out to be misconceptions, e.g. “only people with special aptitude can write poetry” or “I lack inspiration that is an indispensable ingredient of writing a good poem”. Writing poetry is a skill to be learnt, like driving a car or doing yoga. What makes it particularly enticing for language learners is that it has the fortunate and lasting side-effects of enriching vocabulary, enhancing precision and sense of style.

Now, there is writing poetry and there is translating poetry.

Translating song lyrics is the hardest - it keeps you bound on all sides by having to accommodate rhythm, meaning, rhyme and style all at once. Translating poetry (unlike lyrics) you can afford your rhythm to get looser. On to writing poetry from scratch, and you’ve got yourself a blank cheque with the meaning. There’s also blank verse and free verse poetry, which give you even more freedom. Start where you are most comfortable. If you haven’t ever written a line of poetry, you might even want to consider writing some poetry in your own language first, just to get the hang of it.

OK then, let’s suppose you’re interested and willing to give it a whirl. How do you go about it? It can be intimidating to see a blank page in front of you waiting to be written on, as if you’re about to cross an ocean on a boat with no bearings and zero nautical experience. I only know my own way of doing it, which I am going to explain to you presently.

Where to start

Let me reiterate, that translating a poem can be a taxing exercise. This particular poem took me about four hours of focused effort, with hundreds of words juggled around, considered and rejected, looked up in regular dictionaries, synonym and rhyming dictionaries, and language corpora. My most frequently used tools were Google (searching “define poetry” will give you the meaning of “poetry” along with its synonyms), http://www.rhymezone.com/, and https://context.reverso.net/.

So, how is it actually done? It was when I started translating one of my own poems into English that the idea of writing this article was born, so I decided to keep all the drafts to later use them in the article. I’ll first show you the original poem in Russian and the final translation, then walk you through the drafts.

От штиля в шторм (original poem)

Когда знакомою тропою
Иду, не ведая преград,
Когда изведанной судьбою
Я день за днем живу сто крат,

Когда все просто и привычно,
Работа, круг друзей, подруг,
И все прекрасно, как обычно,
Я к жизни вкус теряю вдруг.

Я воздух ртом ловить пытаюсь,
Лишенный запаха тревог,
Вокруг тоскливо озираюсь,
И устремляюсь на порог!

Мне вкус тревог покоя слаще,
Мне сердца стук милей тиши,
Душа моя теперь всё чаще,
Устав от штиля в шторм спешит.

Тимур Хамзин, 2008

From Calm to Storm (translation)

When all is wonted like a chore
And nothing blocks my striding step,
When no surprise is held in store
Of life mundane like flow and ebb,

When life is easy all about,
And nothing's new around the bend,
And all is great, day in, day out,
All of sudden, life turns bland.

And there's no air, as if I drowned,
And no concern, and therefore,
I'm stultified, I look around,
And head at once toward the door!

The anxious fragrance of adventures
To bored heart is welcome balm,
I'm bound oft for risky ventures,
A welcome change from dreary calm.

Тимур Хамзин, 2020

Now, let’s see how it was done. I split the whole translation process into three major stages, which I am going to explain using one of the stanzas.

First stage - rhythm and meaning

At the first stage, I aim to retain the meaning as much as possible, also trying to reproduce the rhythm of the original, i.e. the number of syllables in each line. Retaining the rhythm is not a must, though, if it’s not lyrics that you are translating. I don’t care about rhyme at this stage. Here’s the example of the first stage draft:

Когда знакомою тропою
Иду, не ведая преград,
Когда изведанной судьбою
Я день за днем живу сто крат,

When down the beaten path I walk
And nothing halts my striding step
When no surprise is held in store
Of life, predictable and dull

This example is not perfect, because some of the meaning was added: nothing was said about dullness in the original. This, as well as loss or change of meaning should be avoided at this step. These defects can be amended at later stages, but they tend to linger on and may creep into the final production.

Second stage - rhyme

At the second stage, you replace some of the lines so that they begin to rhyme. I’ve broken the lines from stage one with spaces and put the replacement lines just below them:

Когда знакомою тропою
Иду, не ведая преград,
Когда изведанной судьбою
Я день за днем живу сто крат,

When down the beaten path I walk
When all is wonted like a chore

And nothing halts my striding step

When no surprise is held in store

Of life, predictable and known
Of life mundane, like flow and ebb

Don’t be hasty to obliterate the discarded lines until you are sure that the new lines work.

Third stage - feedback

Now you’ve reached the third and final stage:

Когда знакомою тропою
Иду, не ведая преград,
Когда изведанной судьбою
Я день за днем живу сто крат,

When all is wonted like a chore
And nothing halts my striding step,
When no surprise is held in store
Of life mundane, like flow and ebb,

Read it carefully and compare to the original. Make sure the rhymes are there and the meaning is retained. If it’s a song, try to sing it to yourself to make sure the rhythm is not off. Heed the style, too (you might want to replace some words with their more poetic equivalents). Go back to stage two if you are not happy with the result. If it doesn’t help consider going back to stage one and restructure your sentences altogether, or just forget about the poem for a while. A fresh look may work wonders, everything might magically click into place.

Once you are happy with the result, it’s time to get feedback. Show your work to someone you trust, someone who is no less advanced than you in the language of your poem. They don’t have to be experienced poets themselves. Explicitly ask them to criticize the weak points, because people tend to spare your feelings and prefer giving positive feedback. Finding a person you trust can be tricky and I have no recipe ready for you on how to do it.

If you have trouble finding this kind of person, there is another way to receive “feedback” translating poems. When choosing a poem to translate, you can pick not an original poem, but a translation of a poem (written in your target language, e.g. English) into your first language (Russian in my case). This way you can afterwards compare your translation to the original poem (written in the same language as your translation) and see where you deviated too much or where there is room for improvement. There is one condition here: the poem of your choice has to be a close enough translation of the original one, otherwise you won’t know who to blame if your translation is not even in the ballpark. It’s easy to satisfy this condition: just look at some other translations by the same translator to make sure they are all good.

Let’s summarize

1. Writing/translating poetry/lyrics is a great language workout that will improve your language skills on many fronts at once: enrich and activate your vocabulary, increase precision, develop the sense of style.
2. Producing poetry is a skill to be learnt, not a divine gift or arcane knowledge.
3. Use all tools you can find: your favorite dictionaries, rhyming and synonym dictionaries, language corpora, etc.
4. The challenge is increased in this order: writing your own poetry, translating poetry, translating song lyrics. Start where you are most comfortable.
5. Split the process of producing poetry into stages: first - convey rhythm and meaning, second - introduce rhyme, third - receive feedback.
6. If you can’t find feedback, translate poems that are themselves high-quality translations, then compare your translation to the original poem.

As I’m writing this article, no feedback has yet been received on the example poem translation (find its full text at https://vk.com/wall-197109879_8). I welcome you to be the first person to give this feedback! Follow the link above and leave your comments. Positive feedback and constructive criticism are equally welcome!

Follow Переводы стихов | Poetry Translations to read more bilingual poetry, translations of poems and your favorite song lyrics (singers wanted to record!) or even post yours!

Image credit: Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash