시와 번역

Poetry and Translation: the Significance of Creative Translation

P. B. Shelley mentioned the difficulty of translating poetry, saying that translation is “the burthen of the curse of Babel.” Robert Frost also stated the impossibility: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Is it really impossible to translate poetry? This article refutes the nagative statement of the untranslatability of poetry, by showing that poetry is not lost but gained in translation. It seeks to address the issues of translating poetry and the relationship between poetry and translation, and then discuss the significance of ‘creative translation’, which does not exist as a copy of the original but as a creative writing as new and poetic as the original. Importantly, this essay has a close look at Pi Chyun-Deuk’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 into Korean as an example of the creative translation, where the sonnet is reborn as a new Korean poem. In this creative process, the distinction between writing and translating becomes blurred.