ENTRIES ARE NOW BEING accepted for the 2007 TimesStephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation. It is heartening to note that there are two junior categories, as well as the “open” one. But why translate poetry at all?

The short answer is that translation is as important to the health and strength of a literature as new blood is to a gene-pool. Resistance to outside influence is a sure sign of stasis: obsessing over the purity of his issue didn’t work out too well for Philip IV of Spain, and a literature similarly preoccupied would turn fatally weak and inbred. Writers themselves, however, have always provided the safeguard: from Chaucer to Ted Hughes, poets have looked outside the English canon to revitalise their imaginations.

The problem is that translating poetry is impossible. To paraphrase W. H. Auden, poetry tries to find a proper name for a thing that didn’t have one. Once found, it fits so well that it can only be transcribed, not translated.

The first and greatest barrier to translation is that poetry treats sound and sense as two sides of the same coin. Poets operate on the principle that if they get the sound right, the sense will follow. And that’s just what happens: words have a secret consanguinity with other words which share the same sounds; these sounds often reflect shared aspects, not of their precise dictionary sense, but their broad “feel”. Poets labour quietly to pattern their lines with similar sounds, and the result is a unique intensity and unity of meaning.

This means that you soon end up with a statement so locked in to its local music that it’s going absolutely nowhere. You can translate the words all right, but if the poem is going to be a poem, a music has to be reinstated; and as soon as you attempt that, the word-sense has to shift to accommodate it.

Knowing this, some folk go for a straight prose version to stay “faith-ful” to the original, but they are being faithful only to half of the poem. This lies at the heart of the “controversy” of poetic translation.

Additionally, poems tends to draw heavily on idiom both for timesaving and extra resonance. The dangers of literalising idiom are well-known: in the dubbed German Casablanca, Bogey’s “Here’s looking at you, kid” emerged as “ Ich schau dir in die Augen, Kleines” (“I’m looking into your eyes, little one”). My favourite is a French translation of Philip Larkin’s Mr Bleaney, where “He kept on plugging at the four aways” (that is, kept on filling in his pools coupon) was brilliantly rendered as “He took four holidays a year”.

I too have suffered, and have been variously accused of ritually burning a three-cornered hat, kissing yoghurt (your guess is as good as mine), and owning many Shetland ponies. Then again, one nameless diarist once claimed that a sonnet I had written for one of my sons was a “gay love poem from one man to another”. Maybe the most worrying translation issues are between those allegedly sharing a language.

Ignorance of the idiom-minefield can also mean that translating into your second language is often plain fatal. Even a first-rate English speaker and a wonderful poet such as Joseph Brodsky could murder his own lines: “Twice [I] have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.” Indeed. Or as a Swedish vacuum manufacturer said with such charming naivety in their first US campaign: “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”

For my money, there are two distinct approaches: you can either gloss the original — but not replace it — with a “translation” broadly faithful to the original words; or write a “version” that stands alone as a new poem — faithful, in its own indefensibly subjective way, to the original spirit. Both approaches are vital, and necessary, and can have beautiful results.

But whatever the approach, whatever the pitfalls, we have to translate: other traditions and their authors permit us a bravery and risk with our own language that we are simply unable to grant ourselves. Without translation, we would be without thousands of poems that have shaped and continue to shape the Anglo-phone imagination, from Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch up to Derek Mahon’s versions of Philippe Jaccot-tet. Translation is the most important of language games, which is why the Times Stephen Spender prize is to be applauded.

How to enter

- Entrants must submit a previously unpublished translation of a poem from any language, modern or classical, into English, with a commentary of no more than 300 words discussing their reason for choosing the poem and the difficulties that they encountered in translating it.

-There will be three prizes in the Open and 18-and-under categories and one in the 14-and-under category, ranging from £100 to £750. A charge of £3 will be made for each entry (under 18s exempted). The closing date for entries is May 25, 2007.

- Results will be published by October 26. Further details and an entry form are available at www.stephen-spender.org, or by post from 3 Old Wish Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 4JX.

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