The Nation

One of my translations of Andrés Sánchez Robayna has been accepted by The Nation. I have sent others to three other journals. If you have a journal and want to publish some of these fantastically great poems, let me know.

5 minutes ... or 5 hours

I might do a short translation in less than five minutes, or tinker with one for several hours. The quick translation might be virtually unimprovable. The long one, result of hours of tinkering, might never be satisfying, despite moving incrementally in the direction of being half-way acceptable.

Translation ... even more thoughts

Translation gives me access to poetic styles that I wouldn't use in my "own" work. That is, I can be more lushly romantic if I am translating that kind of work, work that I enjoy as a reader but wouldn't imitate in my own poetry.

That may or may not contradict the idea to allow no line into a translation that I haven't authored myself, that is not mine in voice, that I wouldn't accept in a poem of my own.

Not really, I hope, because it is an expansion of possibilities, not a transgression. That is, I know that that is how translations are sometimes errant, when the translator has allowed him/her self to expand the stylistic register, because of the demands of the task at hand, and written in a way that he/she wouldn't accept in an original poem. Some even justify this errancy as a legitimate expansion of range or register.

So the question would be one of acceptability? To whom? I don't quite know, but I do have an internal reader who would accept some things and not others.



Wood from a broken chair,

tossed away, unprotected.

It was fatigue and rest,

it was peaceful life in company.



It will take you to the sandy

shore of an abandoned

world. Look at it

and love what’s been destroyed.



Here is an example of what I mean. Nothing here is unacceptable to me, but some is on the border.

Resonance in Translation

You might want to think about translation as the place where two poetic traditions meet up. So to translate a certain line by a Spanish poet I remembered Kerouac's line "in the immemorial light of my dreams." The line in Spanish was "en los ojos del sueño inmemorable." I came up with a variation, "in the immemorial eyes of a dream." I am keeping all the content words but altering their order. When I see the word "coro" in Spanish I might think of "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sing" or "Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn" or "a chorus of smiles, a winter morning." (That's Shakespeare, Keats, Ashbery, if you are keeping score at home.) For "convivir" I used "company," thinking of Creeley's use of that word. If I see the word "morada" (dwelling place) I might think of "Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky" (Wordsworth).

Now this could be overdone, if the echoes are too blatant or shoe-horned in. One translator put in the phrase "from sea to shining sea" into a poem in a very arbitrary way, where nothing in the original seemed to give support to that. What I am suggesting is that the translator have ears pricked for a certain resonance in the poetic language of the target language, and not only to the contemporary spoken language or the language of contemporary poetry at its flattest.

It would follow that the most accomplished translator would have a certain level of poetic culture in her own medium of translation, as well as in the source language.

Grading Translations

I normally translate several poems by the same poet at once. I give each one a letter grade, based on my satisfaction with how good the poem is in English. It is good to do this cold, after a day or so, when no longer caught up in the excitement of the translation process. Now a lower grade might be because the poem is not as interesting in the first place, or because it simply doesn't "translate" well (in the intransitive sense of the verb), or because of my lack of skill, knowledge, or imagination. Or any combination of factors. It doesn't matter. A B- translation is just that, whatever the cause.

Of course, I could just give myself all A s, but I don't do that. I know the difference between an A and a B or C. If it is a C level translation, I try to work on it until it is a B. Then I have a group of poems that are on the A or A- level, good enough to publish. If I am committed to translate an entire book, I have to make sure that most of the translations are at B level or above. Naturally, there will be some variation in quality, because I'll never be totally convinced by my version of every single poem.

I have no way of imposing my grades on the reader, who is still free to think all of my work is mediocre. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that readers will consistently grade me higher than I grade myself, so I wouldn't expect work that I deplore myself to be accepted by the reader. (Actual readers might be far too indulgent for my taste, so I am talking about the reader who is a mirror image of myself, not an inferior reader whom I can easily deceive.)

Translation Notes

1. In the first place, I have to feel that the poem I want to translate it worth it. It has to be able to stand up to the process of translation without revealing any flimsiness. The questions you ask about a translation only make sense with a text of a certain solidity. You can ask if a translation of a weak poem is faithful, accurate, but it doesn't really matter too much.

2. Then, I have to feel that I, personally, am capable of translating this particular text. I could feel that it is simply beyond my powers, that the end result would not be an acceptable one. I wouldn't always know this in advance.

3. The results have to stand up on their own. I don't want to write any line in the translation that I wouldn't accept as a line in a poem of my own. (This simply rule would eliminate a lot of translations. Of course, many poets would accept poor lines in their own poems too, so that wouldn't work.) A translation that is a bad poem in the target language is a double betrayal: it tells the reader that the original poem might be bad, while also doing damage to the literary tradition of the target language.

4. The translated poem has to be my own. It has to have my voice, or a voice imaginable for me. It has to have a prosody that I accept, diction with which I am comfortable, etc...

5. Finally, the translation has to find an audience. Translation is for people who cannot read the original, so the translator cannot translate for himself alone. The translator does not belong to that group. Nor does the most expert judge of a translation belong to its intended audience.

6. One more point. I tend to be more literal with the "content words," while tinkering a lot with prepositions, conjunctions, and articles. If the translation is to be my own text, one that I can defend as a poem in its own right, I have to find elements to play with, or elements that have some "play" to them in the sense that they can "give" a little without breaking.

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree



Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

If I was translating this poem to another language I would only care about way / crow / shook / down / me / dust / snow / hemlock tree / heart / mood / saved / part / day / rued. Maybe my target language doesn't have "the" or "a" or doesn't use "my" or "of" in the same way.

A Paradox

The movement I am studying, late modernism, is extremely significant, in my view. Yet it barely registers with my colleagues. This is a difficult paradox for me to manage. My own view is that of course the object of my study is the most significant possible. Yet I have to maintain a certain modesty, because my belief is not widely held.

Summary of Chapters

Chapter 1, “ Spanish Exceptionalism, Poetics, and Intellectual History,” examines the problematic legacy of Spanish “exceptionalism,” a tendency in intellectual, cultural, and literary history that emphasizes those elements that make Spain distinctively different from other European nations. Historically, Spanish modernism—from Miguel Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset to Federico García Lorca and María Zambrano—is strongly tinged with exceptionalism. The legacy of this exceptionalism is strongly present not only the late modernism of Valente and Gamoneda, but also in the critical discourses surrounding this movement. Exceptionalism, in particular the problem of Spain’s recalcitrant or uneven modernity, is also one of the central themes of the discipline of Hispanism itself. This introductory chapter, then, situates modernist poetics in relation to this wider debat.

The next four chapters, “Genealogies,” trace the legacy of historical modernism in the postmodern period. Chapter 2 addresses the work of Jorge Guillén and Luis Cernuda, poets associated with Lorca’s famous “generation of 1927” who were at one time considered to be paragons of two distinct strands of modernist poetry. Guillén has traditionally embodied the self-confident assertion of modernist plenitude, while Cernuda has represented a missing connection with the Romantic and Victorian traditions of German and British literature. The decline in the reputations of these two poets provides an indication of how late modernism has shifted away from both these models. As early as the 1950s, Guillén’s modernism began to seem outmoded, but at the same time his effort to transcend modernism was unconvincing to younger poets like Valente and Jaime Gil de Biedma. Cernuda was ascendant in this same decade, but from the vantage-point of the early twenty-first century his understanding of British and German national traditions looks much less profound than it once did.

Federico García Lorca’s “Juego y teoría del duende,” the subject of Chapter 3, is both a key text of modernist poetics and an overlooked antecedent of the late modernism of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century Spain. Like Roland Barthes in “The Grain of the Voice,” Lorca expounds a theory of cultural nationalism that emphasizes the performative dimension. This text has been relentlessly simplified by readers who view Lorca’s duende as the anti-intellectual manifesto of a poeta tonto. I view it, instead, as a constantly shifting network of references with no fixed center. Lorca’s lecture also prefigures the mysticism that is central to Spanish poetry of the late modern school. Chapter 4, “Postmodern Lorca: Motherwell, Strayhorn, García Montero,” serves as a postscript to my 2009 book Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Here, I view the persisent kitschiness in Lorca’s cultural afterlife as a sign of the transition between modernist and postmodernist ideas of art, examining the repetition of Lorquian motifs in the paintings of Robert Motherwell, in the music of Billy Strayhorn, and in the poetry of Luis García Montero.

It is the philosopher María Zambrano, more than any other single figure, who provided the intellectual ground for late modernism in Spain. Zambrano’s prominence during this period is ironical, given that she would not have been seen as a major modernist writer at all during the period of historical modernism itself. Chapter 5, then, traces the intellectual genealogy late modernism by following the thread of cultural exceptionalism that runs through the work of Miguel de Unamuno, Lorca, Zambrano, and José Ángel Valente.

The second section of the book, “Continuities,” is devoted to three major poets of the second half of the twentieth Century. Chapter 6, “Fragments of a Late Modernity: Samuel Beckett and José Ángel Valente,” is an exercise in comparative literature that attempts to tease out the implications of the paradoxical belatedness of Spanish modernism at the end of the twentieth century by examining Valente’s mostly unacknowledged debt to Beckett, a major figure of late modernism. Antonio Gamoneda, for many decades a relatively obscure poet, has become an increasingly dominating figure in contemporary Spanish poetry in the past few decades. His work fulfills certain expectations associated with the lingering prestige of high modernism, while also confronting the question of historical memory. Unlike Valente, whom he admires very much, Gamoneda is not primarily an ideologue or a theorist. It is interesting, then, that he identifies so closely with Valente’s poetics, benefitting directly from the institutional structures identified with Valente’s high modernism.

Claudio Rodríguez, the subject of Chapter 7, “What Claudio Knew: From Pragmaticism to Mysticism,” is a Lorquian poet ... [to be continued]

Sonnets

While working on my writing in the morning, the rest of my days are spent doing household chores, hanging out with my daughter, and reading (memorizing) English romantic poetry. The revival of the sonnet is particularly interesting. I don't associate it with 18th century poetry or neo-classical poetry at all. No prominent sonnets by Dryden, Pope, Johnson,or even Blake or Burns, in contrast with the centrality of the form for Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, and Donne. Milton wrote few, but significant ones: "soul animating strains, alas, too few." Wordsworth really makes the form his own, in a very self-conscious way. Shelley uses the form to denounce Wordsworth, "once having been, that thou shouldst cease to be." Keats writes a very technically self-conscious sonnet, "If in dull rhymes our English must be chained." The sonnet is the perfect length to memorize easily and a kind of perfect laboratory for poetic form. Rhyme schemes, which seem fixed, are extremely variable in practice, from Keats' almost random lay-out in this sonnet, to Frost's terza rima ("Acquainted with the Night") or couplets ("A bird half wakened in the lunar moon."). The English-language sonnet is often more Italianate then Shakespearian.

2nd paragraph of kitsch chapter

My 2009 book, Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch, partially addressed this problem, but without reaching a satisfactory conclusion. One reason for my incomplete treatment of this critical problem was my negative view of certain North-American manifestations of Lorquismo. The word kitsch, of course, bears an unavoidably derogatory charge, and my natural tendency in this study was to privilege American versions of Lorca that side-stepped groan-inducing stereotypes: I preferred the American Lorca before he became completely identified with a cartoonish version of the duende. It was also important for me to exercise my own aesthetic judgment in order to evaluate the degree to which US poets were able to engage with Spanish culture without reducing it to a caricature. What did not occur to me, however, was that kitsch (among other things) is the perfect name for a certain kind of commodification of modernist aesthetics in the postmodern period. In this sense the kitschiness of the American reception of Lorca is not only inevitable but also revelatory of the historical relation between modernism and posmodernism.

1st good paragraph I've written in a while

Federico García Lorca is one of the most influential Spanish poets of the twentieth century, and yet his ongoing legacy, both in Spain and abroad, is strongly marked by kitsch. His influence, in other words, frequently takes the form of flattened, simplified, and caricatured versions of Andalusian folklore or of other manifestations of Lorquismo, including his evocations of the urban landscape in Poeta en Nueva York. Since kitsch is, in some sense, the dialectical opposite of modernism, the persistent kitschification of Lorca has serious implications for Lorca’s place within the modernist canon.

Another SR poem

Gulls in the old cloister:

light, wing, and stone together.



Who has come here, who sees them

perched on noon.



Years before he crossed these patios

under other fleeting clouds.



Who is the shadow passing now.

Who would recognize him.

Sánchez Robayna Translation

“The White Street”

Your steps have brought you to the edges,

to an open place, an empty street

in the immemorial eyes of a dream.



It is a white street. Between high walls

the sky spills out, and there’s no longer anyone

in the muteness of the air. In the silence,

untouched,

all shall be fulfilled.



And you flow through the dream, through the etched light.



Words grow quiet, you walk along the white street.

The Paradox of Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis rejects the notion that surface motivations, or intentions held consciously in the mind, are sufficient. It delves deeper down. It seems naive to accept human consciousness as self-sufficiently aware of itself.

Yet these deeper motivations are inherently less knowable than the contents of consciousness. The human mind cannot know itself consciously, but it can know even less about the unconscious, and what it can know it can only know through the conscious mind's ability to construct systems of thought.

With literary criticism, for example, we might distrust what the author says about his or her own work. It might be self-serving, a conscious lie, or simply a statement that does not reveal the real, hidden motives. But we have no way of knowing better. It seems even more naive to suppose that we can uncover the unconscious of a writer with any greater degree of certainty.