Email me at jmayhew at ku dot edu
"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
--Kenneth Koch
“El subtítulo ‘Modelo para armar’ podría llevar a creer que las
diferentes partes del relato, separadas por blancos, se proponen como piezas permutables.”
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6 oct 2007
Belitt for a while (in the sixties) had the only widely available translations of Neruda in book form, the only version of Poeta en Nueva York in print. He was the "leading translator." So the resentment about the quality had to do, possibly, with the fact that the American reader with no Spanish had to go through Belitt to get certain things. To then interpose his own poetic personality in such a case seems an affront, given that a reader may or may not want to have to deal with the "translator's ego" (phrase from Weinberger & Eshleman.) It's making a claim on the reader's attention that would only be justifiable --maybe--if BB were a great poet "in his own right."
I don't read Spanish, and I'm curious to know what you think of Eshleman's translations.
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Eshleman chose the hardest possible poet, Vallejo, and worked his whole life getting better and better translations, revising and honing the translations he had already done and studyiing the problematic aspects of the text. Does that mean there is nothing to object to in his translations? No, I might very well have quibbles. But those quibbles would be in the context of a general admiration for what he has done.
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