I've come back to this poem a few times since I first read it, and i find it very moving. It reminds me a bit of your poem for Helen of Troy - 'To Have Loved' - and the plight of women who are doomed to suffer when their men go fight their wars and lose (ie, they either become war-trophies or sex-slaves). What's intriguing about both poems is that we can hear the voices of women and see warfare from their perspective - away from the carnage or heroics of the battlefield. The women (both Helen and Andromache) are primarily concerned with love and the temporary nature of existence. I guess what I like most about 'Hector's Farewell' is that Schiller makes it Andromache's farewell also by giving them two stanzas each.
If men would listen to women more, I'm sure we'd have fewer wars. In the joint epigrams he wrote with Goethe, a number which I have translated, Schiller strikes me as an admirer of women for more than just their beauty and charm.
Love poems in war settings can be very moving, and this farewell fragment from the dialogue between Hector and Andromache, during the Tojan wars, feels so tragic and real because she forsees that he will die in Lethe. But, despite this - despite the fact that Achilles will slay him - what is stressed here is that their love won't perish. This is a really fine translation, David. You and Schiller are always a good match.
I agree with all here, Mr. Gosselin, that this translation has to be among the very best we've seen from you, perhaps the very best. Trying to analyze why this is so, I think there may be two reasons above all. The first is that, it seems to me the greatest service a translation can perform is to send us back to the original with fresh insight, as though it were something entirely new. This piece reminds us how novel, startling and strange Schiller can be. How eternally contemporary.
The second reason your translation appeals to me is the way it "works" as an act of English poetry, not despite its refusal to transpose the original's metric scheme but because of a certain spikiness. Its cadences derive from the dialog itself, the voices it contains, unconstrained by any superimposed metric grid. The result is a sense of immediacy that can get lost under the weight of metrical fidelity that only such an effete audience as ourselves may appreciate. You have allowed yourself to work your way into the heart of this piece, it seems to me, into its conceptual and emotional core.
The old adage traduttore / traditore, we must not forget, is a cautionary statement. Slavish adherence to formal features of an original lead us inevitably to betray its spirit. Pound's Cathay poems and Lowell's Phedre bequeathed us classics of English poetry through a devotion to their source materials whose essential qualities they sought to capture. They never fail to send us back to Li Po and Racine.
So at the risk of appearing contrarian, I encourage you to venture even further, more boldly, into territories opened up by this lovely, and most enjoyable, betrayal.
I actually have the whole of Schiller’s “Cassandra” translated. It will appear alongside an essay, “Why We Need Tragedy.” Aside from that I’m working on a collection of Schiller translations to be made into a book, part essay, part translation.
Despite all these no doubt well-earned encomiums I still wish you'd captured the trochaic metre of the original more accurately. (But then as you know I'm a stickler for good form.)
It's ok to be a stickler for good form, but there are some important details to consider for a proper assessment and objective evaluation of a good translation.
Translating from one language to another involves certain limitations that can't always be ironed out formulaically. The bad translators of poetry always just try to imitate the formal elements, but they often end up with stilted or unnatural verses, often glaringly so. These stilted phrasing and elements have the ability to ruin otherwise fine translations.
In my view, the limitations often have to be overcome creatively, or artistically, given we're dealing with different languages that are almost never perfectly commensurable. If they're not perfectly commensurable, it's going to be difficult to get exactly the same results. So, a good translator has to be judged by how creatively they overcome the particular difficulties, as opposed to just how perfectly they imitate certain formal characteristics. But that means that for a proper assessment, one also has to have some appreciation for the language being translated, otherwise they're not going to be have an objective assessment of whether the translator made a good or creative decision.
The ham-fisted response would be to say all these things don't really matter and that at the end of the day all the boxes have to be checked off no matter what. But that's not reality. The poetry world is populated by bad translations of the kind I'm describing. They have no magic, which leaves one with very little reason or desire to read them.
If one gets stuck strictly on the formal aspects, it can often be misguiding and prevent one from achieving the best results. It's happened where I perfectly translated a piece, but the final result was much less compelling than when I gave myself the freedom to produce a slightly more flexible translation, which was much better suited to capture the nuances and recreate the magic of the original.
One has to make certain choices here. Sometimes the form will be perfectly imitated and the wording will be perfectly faithful to the original, and yet, there will be a magic in the original and dullness in the translation. This is where the real translator can distinguish himself. The question becomes: how can he reproduce the magic? He has to be a poet, meaning he has to get creative and original. No matter how good an imitator, if the magic isn't recreated, it's not a success, in my opinion.
A lot of these translation challenges are apt metaphors for life, if you ask me. It's like those who make the perfect the enemy of the good. People will often make the mistake of thinking life should be perfect, and find themselves disappointed with much of what they have. They'll go to great lengths to remedy those imperfections, only to bring upon themselves a different and more painful (or unnatural) kind. I think translation is often that way too. Alas, they have a perfectly metrical translation, but for some reason, the magic is gone.
In reality, when it comes to the translation of poetry there's rarely a perfect way preserve the form in every instance without introducing other imperfections. If one irons out one set of imperfections, they're usually introducing another. It becomes like the game Wack a Mole. Depending on the audience, some will be more sensitive or partial to one kind of imperfection over the other like, say, naturalness of the language over faithfulness to form.
Poetry's formal elements are important in translation, but they're not the most important, in my opinion. Full stop. For instance, Homer's blank verse is written in dactylic hexameter. The purpose of good English translations isn't just to reproduce English dactylic hexameter. You wouldn't have good translations of Homer if people thought that way. In the case of Homer, because it's so obvious that English can't possibly mimic the dactylic epic hexameter page after page, book after book, the best English versions, like Chapman's Homer, translate the verses into iambic hexameter, with rhymed endings, despite Homer's end-verses not rhyming. Chapmen reproduces the same thing consistently, page after page.
But this is just one particular case... There are many more cases where the same principle holds, but in much subtler ways...
In this spirit, one could have simply chosen to translate Schiller's poem into iambic pentameter (and arguably that's not a bad idea at all). Of course, then some translators would quibble that the lines should be trochaic. If one perfectly reproduced the formal elements, there would undoubtedly be some stilting of the English language itself to make it all work. At this point, it would depend on how much stilting the translator or reader is ready to tolerate.
However, I would consider the stilting of the language a qualitatively greater flaw than not perfectly preserving the formal elements, simply because if a reader reads the poem they're going to get a contrived feeling, which is the antithesis of art. The magic of any great work of art disappears at that point. There needs to be that feeling of freedom and naturalness for it to work at all. And that's actually the basis of all of Schiller's aesthetic and literary criticism. If the free play of the imagination is inhibited and it feels as though something artificial is being imposed, the artist has failed. The appearance of freedom in a work of art is paramount.
Schiller's theories get more complicated and detailed from there, but they're rooted in that essential idea. If one fails on that level, it doesn't really matter how well the other elements are imitated. For me as a translator, naturalness takes precedence over perfectly preserving the metrical characteristics. That might be somewhat unorthodox for the general poetry translation world, but then one can simply observe that there are a lot of not good translations of great poetry... Especially Schiller's.
Some are committed to the idea that it can all be done perfectly in every instance and there's never an excuse. But alas, one should be wary of making the perfect the enemy of the good, especially in translation.
So, I believe the good translator has to arrive at some notion of well-tempering. Because there are so many subjective decisions to be made in something like poetry translation, it's one of those cases where no two people will agree in most cases...
German by its nature has a trochaic rhythm, while English is essentially iambic and monosyllabic. They essentially flow in opposite directions. One can't glaze over that and say "hey, missed a spot" whenever there's some discrepancy between the original and the translation.
With that said, you can look up multiple translations of Hector's Farewell on the net.
I have a third one from an old book of English Schiller translations from 1905. They preserve meter almost perfectly, but the poems appears stilted in various places, and are very archaic. With archaisms, it becomes easier to maintain the meter, but something else is often lost. It often sounds little like Schiller. One who doesn't speak German and reads the translations would have little reason to suspect so much magic exists in the originals. Hence, one among several reason's for people's unfamiliarity with Schiller in the West...
The translator's responsibility it to bring the magic alive, in my view.
Can my translation be improved. I'm sure. I made some slight changes since publishing. But is this translation an overall improvement on what existed before. Hopefully!
The great Rabindranath Tagore said that he needed leeway when translating his own Bengali poems into English. What is missing from most "toe the line" translations is, as you observed, the "magic" or whatever it is that makes poetry different from prose. Meter can play an important role, but I have sensed magic in free verse translations, so for me meter is an option, not a requirement, and I prefer looser meter to regular meter for all but short, humorous poems. Of course a poem needs to read well, but there are free verse poems that read splendidly, so I always keep an open mind.
I see nothing wrong with this translation either. As you rightly say, Mike, it has a touch of magic about it. So there is no great need to do anything that might detract from that. What is being said, and how it's being said, (with the best words possible) is much more important than excessively rigid forms that can put a straightjacket on emotions - which are so vital in love poetry.
Only this morning, I was reading Prof. Mark Musa's fine translation of Dante's Vita Neuova, and in his introduction to it, he outlines many valid and compelling reasons for not always adhering to what he terms 'the tyranny of rhyme'. So a good translator (ideally a good poet) goes by what is best for the poem, and what it takes to preserve the original magic. David has succeeded admirably in doing this because he understands Schiller so well.
I have written rhyming poems where I abandoned the rhyme scheme at times for the sake of a better poem. Some of the best poets have employed irregular rhymes: T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Matthew Arnold in "Dover Beach" which is a masterpiece in my opinion, quite a few poems by Tennyson and Wordsworth. I think what matters most is that a poem reads well and that it has the spark of magic that makes poetry poetry. Being a slave to meter and rhyme makes no sense to me.
I certainly agree about translations of Latin and Greek metres which are quantitative rather than stress-related. In particular dactyllic and anapestic metres are notoriously crude and tedious in English if carried on for any length of time.
But we live in an age when little attention is paid to outward form in poetry and I cannot help but think this is a mistake. And especially so when it comes to translation. Regular verse does test one's skill to the limit. But that surely is precisely the point. So few poets these days have any skill at all. If they can turn out perfectly formed regular verse at the level of the highest skill and then choose to do otherwise then one can respect that decision. Whatever else it may be due to it certainly isn't ineptitude.
As they say necessity is the mother of invention. So the more constraints one places on one's practise the more inventive one's work will be. And surely the best constraints are those imposed by tradition. One cannot assume that those oldies simply didn't know what they were up to. The chances are that they knew better than we do.
In Adam's Curse Yeats says
'A single line may take us hours maybe
But if it doesn't seem a moment's thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.'
Every poet ought to have those three lines seered into his memory. That is where the real skill lies: obeying the formal constraints while making everything seem utterly spontaneous. Do you think great composers do otherwise with their music? Think of how formally perfect the music of the Beatles is. They may not have been able to read or write music but they knew better than most how to make it. And yet the spontaneous sincerity of their work is palpable. And much the same is true of Mozart or Bach.
What I say is particularly true of trochaic metre, which is relatively rare, but has a very pronounced table-thumping effect. You know when a poet uses that metre that he wants to get a point across.
The great free verse poets could all manage perfectly shaped formal verse as well. Somehow the formal skills still inform their less formal work.
What you say sounds fair enough, but the question is: how close can the translator get to this ideal in reality, without subjecting the original poem to the other errors and problems I outlined. The ones I described are much more difficult to articulate or define with any kind of hard-fast rule, while it's easy to say the meter is off by a syllable of so. One is 100% objectively measurable, while the other is more subjective, and yet, the latter arguably holds more weight when it comes to poetic effect. It's less objectively measurable, yet more immediately perceivable.
But that's poetry for you!
Translation is its own special case of composition. The history of translation attests to this, hence the famous saying, "tradutorre, traditore."
That being said, you're welcome to make suggestions on the current translation. I'm not suggesting it's impossible to improve.
Different translators do different things. Great poets made Sappho sound like a Victorian. When I translate Sappho, I imagine her as a woman 2,500 years ahead of her time, speaking in modern English. I never think consciously about meter, nor do I in my original poems. I think some of my Sappho translations (not all) are better than those of the great poets. I think it all boils down to poets and translators finding "what works" and there are no formulas necessary if one writes "organically." I am at the opposite end of the spectrum from John. Nothing he says ever enters my mind when I write poems and translate. As for your translation, I think it's fine as it is. If you can "fine tune" the meter and keep both the sense and suggestion (magic), wonderful, but I wouldn't ruin a good translation by trying to force it into a corset (or straitjacket).
With most of the things I've done in my life I've felt like a fake. As if I were acting a part. (Which is as much as to say acting apart.) Only when I'm writing and when I'm arguing do I feel like myself, do I feel engaged, and at home, and like the person I really am. But even then, in writing, I will pretend to be other people, and, in arguing, I will argue simply for the sake of arguing, just to liven things up. And more than anything to restore a balance. So in a world where everybody is writing formal verse I'd probably be arguing in favour of free verse. This is not pure mischievousness on my part. Though it sometimes gets close to it. I just think balance is all-important.
Dave, I think "Hector's Farewell" is one of your best translations. I would be glad to publish it, if you email it to me. Bravo!
You're welcome to publish it on THT!
I've come back to this poem a few times since I first read it, and i find it very moving. It reminds me a bit of your poem for Helen of Troy - 'To Have Loved' - and the plight of women who are doomed to suffer when their men go fight their wars and lose (ie, they either become war-trophies or sex-slaves). What's intriguing about both poems is that we can hear the voices of women and see warfare from their perspective - away from the carnage or heroics of the battlefield. The women (both Helen and Andromache) are primarily concerned with love and the temporary nature of existence. I guess what I like most about 'Hector's Farewell' is that Schiller makes it Andromache's farewell also by giving them two stanzas each.
If men would listen to women more, I'm sure we'd have fewer wars. In the joint epigrams he wrote with Goethe, a number which I have translated, Schiller strikes me as an admirer of women for more than just their beauty and charm.
Yes, I agree. This is a really fine piece of work.
Love poems in war settings can be very moving, and this farewell fragment from the dialogue between Hector and Andromache, during the Tojan wars, feels so tragic and real because she forsees that he will die in Lethe. But, despite this - despite the fact that Achilles will slay him - what is stressed here is that their love won't perish. This is a really fine translation, David. You and Schiller are always a good match.
I agree with all here, Mr. Gosselin, that this translation has to be among the very best we've seen from you, perhaps the very best. Trying to analyze why this is so, I think there may be two reasons above all. The first is that, it seems to me the greatest service a translation can perform is to send us back to the original with fresh insight, as though it were something entirely new. This piece reminds us how novel, startling and strange Schiller can be. How eternally contemporary.
The second reason your translation appeals to me is the way it "works" as an act of English poetry, not despite its refusal to transpose the original's metric scheme but because of a certain spikiness. Its cadences derive from the dialog itself, the voices it contains, unconstrained by any superimposed metric grid. The result is a sense of immediacy that can get lost under the weight of metrical fidelity that only such an effete audience as ourselves may appreciate. You have allowed yourself to work your way into the heart of this piece, it seems to me, into its conceptual and emotional core.
The old adage traduttore / traditore, we must not forget, is a cautionary statement. Slavish adherence to formal features of an original lead us inevitably to betray its spirit. Pound's Cathay poems and Lowell's Phedre bequeathed us classics of English poetry through a devotion to their source materials whose essential qualities they sought to capture. They never fail to send us back to Li Po and Racine.
So at the risk of appearing contrarian, I encourage you to venture even further, more boldly, into territories opened up by this lovely, and most enjoyable, betrayal.
Thanks!
I actually have the whole of Schiller’s “Cassandra” translated. It will appear alongside an essay, “Why We Need Tragedy.” Aside from that I’m working on a collection of Schiller translations to be made into a book, part essay, part translation.
Stay tuned!
Despite all these no doubt well-earned encomiums I still wish you'd captured the trochaic metre of the original more accurately. (But then as you know I'm a stickler for good form.)
It's ok to be a stickler for good form, but there are some important details to consider for a proper assessment and objective evaluation of a good translation.
Translating from one language to another involves certain limitations that can't always be ironed out formulaically. The bad translators of poetry always just try to imitate the formal elements, but they often end up with stilted or unnatural verses, often glaringly so. These stilted phrasing and elements have the ability to ruin otherwise fine translations.
In my view, the limitations often have to be overcome creatively, or artistically, given we're dealing with different languages that are almost never perfectly commensurable. If they're not perfectly commensurable, it's going to be difficult to get exactly the same results. So, a good translator has to be judged by how creatively they overcome the particular difficulties, as opposed to just how perfectly they imitate certain formal characteristics. But that means that for a proper assessment, one also has to have some appreciation for the language being translated, otherwise they're not going to be have an objective assessment of whether the translator made a good or creative decision.
The ham-fisted response would be to say all these things don't really matter and that at the end of the day all the boxes have to be checked off no matter what. But that's not reality. The poetry world is populated by bad translations of the kind I'm describing. They have no magic, which leaves one with very little reason or desire to read them.
If one gets stuck strictly on the formal aspects, it can often be misguiding and prevent one from achieving the best results. It's happened where I perfectly translated a piece, but the final result was much less compelling than when I gave myself the freedom to produce a slightly more flexible translation, which was much better suited to capture the nuances and recreate the magic of the original.
One has to make certain choices here. Sometimes the form will be perfectly imitated and the wording will be perfectly faithful to the original, and yet, there will be a magic in the original and dullness in the translation. This is where the real translator can distinguish himself. The question becomes: how can he reproduce the magic? He has to be a poet, meaning he has to get creative and original. No matter how good an imitator, if the magic isn't recreated, it's not a success, in my opinion.
A lot of these translation challenges are apt metaphors for life, if you ask me. It's like those who make the perfect the enemy of the good. People will often make the mistake of thinking life should be perfect, and find themselves disappointed with much of what they have. They'll go to great lengths to remedy those imperfections, only to bring upon themselves a different and more painful (or unnatural) kind. I think translation is often that way too. Alas, they have a perfectly metrical translation, but for some reason, the magic is gone.
In reality, when it comes to the translation of poetry there's rarely a perfect way preserve the form in every instance without introducing other imperfections. If one irons out one set of imperfections, they're usually introducing another. It becomes like the game Wack a Mole. Depending on the audience, some will be more sensitive or partial to one kind of imperfection over the other like, say, naturalness of the language over faithfulness to form.
Poetry's formal elements are important in translation, but they're not the most important, in my opinion. Full stop. For instance, Homer's blank verse is written in dactylic hexameter. The purpose of good English translations isn't just to reproduce English dactylic hexameter. You wouldn't have good translations of Homer if people thought that way. In the case of Homer, because it's so obvious that English can't possibly mimic the dactylic epic hexameter page after page, book after book, the best English versions, like Chapman's Homer, translate the verses into iambic hexameter, with rhymed endings, despite Homer's end-verses not rhyming. Chapmen reproduces the same thing consistently, page after page.
But this is just one particular case... There are many more cases where the same principle holds, but in much subtler ways...
In this spirit, one could have simply chosen to translate Schiller's poem into iambic pentameter (and arguably that's not a bad idea at all). Of course, then some translators would quibble that the lines should be trochaic. If one perfectly reproduced the formal elements, there would undoubtedly be some stilting of the English language itself to make it all work. At this point, it would depend on how much stilting the translator or reader is ready to tolerate.
However, I would consider the stilting of the language a qualitatively greater flaw than not perfectly preserving the formal elements, simply because if a reader reads the poem they're going to get a contrived feeling, which is the antithesis of art. The magic of any great work of art disappears at that point. There needs to be that feeling of freedom and naturalness for it to work at all. And that's actually the basis of all of Schiller's aesthetic and literary criticism. If the free play of the imagination is inhibited and it feels as though something artificial is being imposed, the artist has failed. The appearance of freedom in a work of art is paramount.
Schiller's theories get more complicated and detailed from there, but they're rooted in that essential idea. If one fails on that level, it doesn't really matter how well the other elements are imitated. For me as a translator, naturalness takes precedence over perfectly preserving the metrical characteristics. That might be somewhat unorthodox for the general poetry translation world, but then one can simply observe that there are a lot of not good translations of great poetry... Especially Schiller's.
Some are committed to the idea that it can all be done perfectly in every instance and there's never an excuse. But alas, one should be wary of making the perfect the enemy of the good, especially in translation.
So, I believe the good translator has to arrive at some notion of well-tempering. Because there are so many subjective decisions to be made in something like poetry translation, it's one of those cases where no two people will agree in most cases...
German by its nature has a trochaic rhythm, while English is essentially iambic and monosyllabic. They essentially flow in opposite directions. One can't glaze over that and say "hey, missed a spot" whenever there's some discrepancy between the original and the translation.
With that said, you can look up multiple translations of Hector's Farewell on the net.
Two examples:
https://classicalpoets.org/2020/03/21/a-translation-of-hector-and-andromache-by-friedrich-schiller-1759-1805/
https://www.schubertsong.uk/text/hektors-abschied/
See which you prefer of the three.
I have a third one from an old book of English Schiller translations from 1905. They preserve meter almost perfectly, but the poems appears stilted in various places, and are very archaic. With archaisms, it becomes easier to maintain the meter, but something else is often lost. It often sounds little like Schiller. One who doesn't speak German and reads the translations would have little reason to suspect so much magic exists in the originals. Hence, one among several reason's for people's unfamiliarity with Schiller in the West...
The translator's responsibility it to bring the magic alive, in my view.
Can my translation be improved. I'm sure. I made some slight changes since publishing. But is this translation an overall improvement on what existed before. Hopefully!
With that said, suggestions are always welcome.
The great Rabindranath Tagore said that he needed leeway when translating his own Bengali poems into English. What is missing from most "toe the line" translations is, as you observed, the "magic" or whatever it is that makes poetry different from prose. Meter can play an important role, but I have sensed magic in free verse translations, so for me meter is an option, not a requirement, and I prefer looser meter to regular meter for all but short, humorous poems. Of course a poem needs to read well, but there are free verse poems that read splendidly, so I always keep an open mind.
I see nothing wrong with this translation either. As you rightly say, Mike, it has a touch of magic about it. So there is no great need to do anything that might detract from that. What is being said, and how it's being said, (with the best words possible) is much more important than excessively rigid forms that can put a straightjacket on emotions - which are so vital in love poetry.
Only this morning, I was reading Prof. Mark Musa's fine translation of Dante's Vita Neuova, and in his introduction to it, he outlines many valid and compelling reasons for not always adhering to what he terms 'the tyranny of rhyme'. So a good translator (ideally a good poet) goes by what is best for the poem, and what it takes to preserve the original magic. David has succeeded admirably in doing this because he understands Schiller so well.
I have written rhyming poems where I abandoned the rhyme scheme at times for the sake of a better poem. Some of the best poets have employed irregular rhymes: T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Matthew Arnold in "Dover Beach" which is a masterpiece in my opinion, quite a few poems by Tennyson and Wordsworth. I think what matters most is that a poem reads well and that it has the spark of magic that makes poetry poetry. Being a slave to meter and rhyme makes no sense to me.
I certainly agree about translations of Latin and Greek metres which are quantitative rather than stress-related. In particular dactyllic and anapestic metres are notoriously crude and tedious in English if carried on for any length of time.
But we live in an age when little attention is paid to outward form in poetry and I cannot help but think this is a mistake. And especially so when it comes to translation. Regular verse does test one's skill to the limit. But that surely is precisely the point. So few poets these days have any skill at all. If they can turn out perfectly formed regular verse at the level of the highest skill and then choose to do otherwise then one can respect that decision. Whatever else it may be due to it certainly isn't ineptitude.
As they say necessity is the mother of invention. So the more constraints one places on one's practise the more inventive one's work will be. And surely the best constraints are those imposed by tradition. One cannot assume that those oldies simply didn't know what they were up to. The chances are that they knew better than we do.
In Adam's Curse Yeats says
'A single line may take us hours maybe
But if it doesn't seem a moment's thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.'
Every poet ought to have those three lines seered into his memory. That is where the real skill lies: obeying the formal constraints while making everything seem utterly spontaneous. Do you think great composers do otherwise with their music? Think of how formally perfect the music of the Beatles is. They may not have been able to read or write music but they knew better than most how to make it. And yet the spontaneous sincerity of their work is palpable. And much the same is true of Mozart or Bach.
What I say is particularly true of trochaic metre, which is relatively rare, but has a very pronounced table-thumping effect. You know when a poet uses that metre that he wants to get a point across.
The great free verse poets could all manage perfectly shaped formal verse as well. Somehow the formal skills still inform their less formal work.
What you say sounds fair enough, but the question is: how close can the translator get to this ideal in reality, without subjecting the original poem to the other errors and problems I outlined. The ones I described are much more difficult to articulate or define with any kind of hard-fast rule, while it's easy to say the meter is off by a syllable of so. One is 100% objectively measurable, while the other is more subjective, and yet, the latter arguably holds more weight when it comes to poetic effect. It's less objectively measurable, yet more immediately perceivable.
But that's poetry for you!
Translation is its own special case of composition. The history of translation attests to this, hence the famous saying, "tradutorre, traditore."
That being said, you're welcome to make suggestions on the current translation. I'm not suggesting it's impossible to improve.
Different translators do different things. Great poets made Sappho sound like a Victorian. When I translate Sappho, I imagine her as a woman 2,500 years ahead of her time, speaking in modern English. I never think consciously about meter, nor do I in my original poems. I think some of my Sappho translations (not all) are better than those of the great poets. I think it all boils down to poets and translators finding "what works" and there are no formulas necessary if one writes "organically." I am at the opposite end of the spectrum from John. Nothing he says ever enters my mind when I write poems and translate. As for your translation, I think it's fine as it is. If you can "fine tune" the meter and keep both the sense and suggestion (magic), wonderful, but I wouldn't ruin a good translation by trying to force it into a corset (or straitjacket).
With most of the things I've done in my life I've felt like a fake. As if I were acting a part. (Which is as much as to say acting apart.) Only when I'm writing and when I'm arguing do I feel like myself, do I feel engaged, and at home, and like the person I really am. But even then, in writing, I will pretend to be other people, and, in arguing, I will argue simply for the sake of arguing, just to liven things up. And more than anything to restore a balance. So in a world where everybody is writing formal verse I'd probably be arguing in favour of free verse. This is not pure mischievousness on my part. Though it sometimes gets close to it. I just think balance is all-important.