Translations: Three Poems by Stephen Crane
Published:
Lately, I’ve been taking a self-directed refresher course in Latin, a language I studied for six years back in middle and high school (yes, I went to one of THOSE schools). A fun little exercise I’ll sometimes do to check my understanding of the grammar is translate a short English text into as idiomatic Latin as I can muster. One great corpus for this that I’ve recently been mining is the poetry of Stephen Crane, an American writer of the late nineteenth century. Crane’s poems—tiny free-verse parables set in a grim universe of foolish humans and angry gods—are highly unorthodox by the standards of his time. However, the direct, simple language of these “lines” (as Crane called them) makes them ideal for translation. Here are three examples I’ve recently worked on; the first two are from the collection The Black Riders, and the third is from War is Kind.