Bly’s 8 Stages of Translation: Stage 8, far more than the back of a rug

from Robert Bly’s Eight Stages of Translation       Our last stage is making the final draft. We read back over all our earlier drafts—perhaps a half line we said better in one of them. We have to make our final adjustments now. [...] During this stage we allow ourselves, at last, the pleasure of examining other [...]

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Bly’s 8 Stages of Translations: Stage 7, the very painful stage

from Robert Bly’s Eight Stages of Translation       We are nearly finished now. During what I will call the seventh stage we ask someone born into the language to go over our version. Perhaps we go back to the native speaker who helped us in the first draft; if we did not get such help then, [...]

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Bly’s 8 Stages of Translations: Stage 6, paying attention to sound

from Robert Bly’s Eight Stages of Translation       In the next stage, which I call here the sixth, we pay attention to sound. The question of tone has led to this. If we wonder whether the poem’s tone is enthusiastic or melancholic, there is only one thing to do: memorize the poem in its original [langauge] [...]

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Bly’s 8 Stages of Translation: Stage 5 the ear turned inward

from Robert Bly’s Eight Stages of Translation       In what I’ll call the fifth stage we need the ear again–not the ear turned outward toward human speech but the ear turned inward toward the complicated feelings the poem is carrying. Each poem has a mood. Harry Martinson remarked that to him a poem is a mood. [...]

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Bly’s 8 Stages of Translation: Stage 4 “we begin to need the ear”

from Robert Bly’s The Eight Stages of Translation 4. We translated the poem into English in the third stage. In the fourth stage we translate the poem into American…. that is, if we speak the American language. In England, we would translate it into spoken English. It’s the spoken quality that this stage aims at. [...]

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“I am not part of this crime”

from Neruda’s “Letter to Miguel Otero Silva,” translated by Robert Bly [...] I took life, and I faced her and kissed her, and then went through the tunnels of the mines to see how other men live. And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness, I held my hands up and [...]

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Robert Bly’s 8 Stages of Translation, part 1

Excerpted (muchly!) from Robert Bly’s The Eight Stages of Translation, Rowan Tree Press, 1983. It’s now out of print and difficult to locate. In the book he goes through the translation process with a sonnet from Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orphesus.” I won’t type out his various versions, but “seeing” how he makes choices and changes [...]

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