Accessing the Aesthetic Potential of Poetry Via Translations

Poetry often becomes accessible across languages and cultures only through translation. But how faithfully translations convey the aesthetic and emotional experience of the original still remains unexplored. Since in most cases, gaining data from readers is not feasible, other methods are needed to tackle this question. The present study proposes a middle reading approach (Jacobs 2023, Krautter 2024) and combines a computational predictive modelling analysis of experimentally verified hidden text features with qualitative close reading of stylistic devices to assess the aesthetic and emotional faithfulness of poetry translations. The focus is on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27 and Pushkin’s Ja vas ljubil and human and machine generated translations into German, Russian, and English. Faithfulness is quantified in terms of correlations between originals and translations across six empirically validated dimensions of aesthetic space, close reading evaluates the preservation of stylistic devices. The results show variation as to how faithfully translations preserve the aesthetic and emotional potential and they reveal differences for both original poems. Overall, they demonstrate the basic feasibility of the method and open up perspectives for refining the tools applied. Most importantly, they highlight the benefits of integrating computational modeling with expert qualitative analysis for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural assessment and comparison of aesthetic experience.