To Carry Across an Elephant: Translating a Children’s Poem

While the subject of translating poems for adults between modern languages is a common field of study worldwide, critical study of the artistic methods and challenges of translating poems for children remains rare across popular and academic literatures. This essay examines multiple approaches to translating “Circus Elephant,” a short imagist poem in English written by Steven Withrow. Versions of the poem in Spanish, Greek, Afrikaans, French, and Italian are included, along with the translators’ notes about choices of diction, sound, structure, and denotative and connotative meaning. The author also explores the idea that composing a translation that moves beyond a hastily constructed, wordfor-word trot is a creative act, an artistic form in itself. Honoring the spirit of the poem requires a patient, painstaking, sensitive, imaginative translator who thinks and acts as a poet. A good translation balances craft and inspiration.