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I chose to study Goethe's "Prometheus" on a professor's recommendation.  When I read the poem, I became enamored of both the text and the fact that it represented such a tempestuous moment in literature and philosophy.  An aesthetic fixation with the figure of Prometheus ran vehemently through the Romantic Period, and this was no different for one of Romanticism's fathers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  Goethe had written the poem earlier in his career--he was just 23 years old--just one year before becoming famous for Sorrows of Young Werther.  I found it interesting that his associate Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi later published the poem without Goethe's permission, and it made me wonder if the version Jacobi published differed from the original manuscript (Satyros and Prometheus, xlvii).  This eventually to thoughts about translation, and how the process of translating a work is much like Jacobi's handling of Goethe's manuscript--a scholarly translator (or, on today's online scene, almost anyone who speaks both languages) picks up an edition, maybe changes the meaning a bit without the consent of the author, and publishes it for all to read and analyze as if it were the author's work.  From here I decided to analyze the meaning of translation today:  translation in print v. translation on the web, translations' production and who produces them, translations' selection for analysis, and how translations change over time, with multiplying editions of the original-language work on the market becoming eligible for yet even more translation.



To add dimension to my initial research, I decided to include another poem.  Neruda's "Puedo escribir" came to mind, primarily because I was able to read the language in which it was first published, and second because Neruda was so popular--I figured that I would encounter multiple translations on the internet.  To my fortune, there existed only one professionally published English translation (W.S. Merwin) but a wealth of amateur translations published on the internet.  This would assist in completing research based on my hypothesis that there is a multitude of accessible translations available today that are maybe not as accurate or do not hold as much authority as translations by scholars, which have still earned their passage through publishing houses.

 

After beginning research on "Puedo escribir," I was surprised and exhilarated to find that Neruda's poem had more in common with "Prometheus" than I had initially thought.  Like Goethe, Neruda wrote the poem in question at a young age.  Unlike Goethe, Neruda published the poem on his own whim, all at the tender age of nineteen.  Looking at the manuscript for the poem, it seems as if editors decided not to change much of the young prodigy's work, either: the spelling, the grammar, all approaching excess in precision.  Like Goethe, Neruda's early work was genius--it did not meet overestimation upon its release.



With these two works it has been my aim to examine the role of translation in the 21st century, the validity of online translations, and the value of translation in general:  what its role is, and who gets to choose which translations the world reads and how--and why.