Wittgenstein’s Conception of Translation in His Later Philosophy of Language as an Approach to Cummings’s Untranslatable Concrete Poetry

Abstract

E.E. Cummings’s concrete poetry raises the canonical problem of poetic untranslatability. It is commonly accepted that a poem is constituted as a unity of form and content, and any change in the form of a poem results in the loss of the poetic value and, eventually, translation failure. Two basic approaches have been proposed regarding the untranslatability of Cummings’s concrete poetry: mimicry and equivalence of effect. However, the former is impractical, and the latter is an indirect one. This paper proposes employing Wittgenstein’s conception of translation in his later philosophy of language to solve the question of the untranslatability of Cummings’s concrete poetry. By analysing three of Cummings’s concrete poems ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’, ‘mOOn Over tOwns mOOn’, and ‘Buffalo Bill’s’, this study suggests that poetry is translatable in the sense that the same language-game in the source text (ST) can be played in the target text (TT) by reconstruction or invention.