Translation Question Week One

The question posed in class today: "What do you mean that translation doesn't reflect but refract?"

I am extremely interested in this refraction idea because of the violence that we mentioned in class. Refraction connotes a sense of breaking apart, of separation and recreation into something else. Reflection connotes a sense of mirroring, of a legitimate duplicate of an original. Translation isn't a mirroring because there is no way for a translator to copy everything exactly the same from one work to another. We decided that a translation was bringing one culture over to another, and that requires some adaptation, because as we know from being in Italy, one culture is not the exact same as another. Everything bases itself upon perspective. Refraction creates the perspective of violence because in a sense, translators pillage the text for importance, for what to carry from the original into the new text. Translations, bringing across cultures, carry over some aspect(s) of the original culture into a new, adapted text, that allows this second culture the opportunity to experience the original culture in a way that is relevant to the second.
In a way, translation is about relevance, about accessibility. But for me, translation dissects one culture, pulls apart the original text and brings some aspect into a new text. We mentioned Dante multiple times because of the amount of translations available. Specifically, Mary Jo Bang's, which incorporates modern culture. Without having read much of it so far, I am really excited to see what she does with it: to see if she captures the politics of the original or if she forgoes that for the modernity factor. In discussing Dante, we focused on the idea of form: if the terza rima matters or if it is okay to move it into blank verse. I believe that this is the idea of refraction. Moving something from one culture to another causes something to change. Terza rima was the most important form of the time, blank verse is the most prominent form of our time, so when a translator decides to refract a text into blank verse, the translator decides to focus on the meaning of the text and the importance of what is actually in the text, therefore, refracting the original into a different form.
I find translation to be refraction, not reflection, because there can never be a mirroring of a text. It's relatively impossible to mirror an unrhymed dactyllic hexameter text or terza rima text in the English language because our words don't rhyme or have the same syllables as other languages. That's why it's refraction: something has to change, just like when light refracts or we go fracking for oil. Something changes from an original to a translation.