Very very rarely: Douglas Hofstadter has an entire book on the subject of translating a poem from one language to another: check out Le Ton Beau de Marot. http://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/0465086454
Interesting question. I guess a translation could often be better than the original. I write songs and I recently found a really old song called 'Loves last word has spoken' ( English version). I firstly heard an old recording of the French original and I tried to work out a version on my guitar 'cos its such a fine melody. Thats all very well but the French original is actually called "The barge has passed". Sung in French the original sounds utterly beautiful as long as you dont speak french and hence dont know shes singing about barges passing.
I wrote a poem in French about ten years ago: I'm not even close to getting it into English and maintaining the metre and the meaning. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Don't judge translation by songs. They have to maintain the original meter, which is very difficult when moving from the stress patterns of one language to another. For example. all words in French are accented on the last syllable. English words tend to retain the accentuation of the source language, but our native Anglo-Saxon words are all accented on the first syllable unless it's a prefix like be- or for-. That's a big headache for a music translator. On top of that, they almost always try to make it rhyme. That is a colossal headache in English because our words can end in any random assortment of phonemes, at least that's how it looks to foreigners. That's why we have such trite rhymes like walk-talk, maybe-baby, moon-June-spoon; how many other words can you think of that rhyme with those--that you'd use in a love song? In Spanish, every first-conjugation verb has a first-person-plural present-tense form ending in -amos: cantamos, amamos, hablamos, pensamos... That makes for easy rhyming. Many foreign songs aren't translated at all, somebody just writes new lyrics. In your case, it looks like they didn't even try to maintain the same subject matter. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I've read at least one scholarly, sober opinion that "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" in English is better than the original [in Arabic?]. But it isn't the same. I've also seen poetry defined as "that which is lost in translation".
Poets put their language to more arduous use than the rest of us. They get maximum meaning out of minimum words. They utilize nuances, connotations, cultural expectations. They use phonetics: rhymes, puns, alliteration. All of these are attributes peculiar to each individual language. There is no way all of this can survive translation. The best you can do with poetry is to have it translated by someone who is not just fluent but a scholar in both languages, and who is a successful poet in the target language. That way, even though you don't end up with a poem that is the same as the original, at least you end up with a good poem that carries as much of the meaning and beauty of the original as possible, plus some complementary new meaning and beauty to compensate for what is lost.
It is going to change. Sometimes it is better, usually it is worse. But you can, soemtimes, through a whole collection, get a good feel for a poet. I know this because one of the poets I love I can now read in the original since I moved to the country and have become quite fluent. I am sure I still miss things, but not once have I been surprised at how the poetry turned out to be. Surprised by details adn nuance yes, but not the feel and the mood.
