What about a theory of poetic translation that was tropological, that aimed for the preservation of every antithesis, metonymy, litotes, catachresis, etc... in the poem? If we take the rhetorical, tropological structure of the poem seriously, what would that mean for translation? (Assuming prosody is pretty much a lost cause in translation.)

I've always wanted to do a history of the Spanish lyric course, beginning with medieval cancioneros and romanceros, going through Garcilaso, Fray Luis and San Juan, Quevedo and Góngora, Bécquer, JRJ, Lorca, Guillén, Claudio Rodríguez, María Victoria Atencia, and Olvido García Valdés. I'd probably put in some Latin American poetry as well. It would basically be the canon. Not that there's anything wrong with that. My course in the spring is similar, but emphasizes popular poetry in the anonymous traditions. You would really need two semesters: one for poetry with an author and another for poetry without.

Dilution is what I like to call the general effect in translation of flattening, watering down, blunting the impact, or erasing the tropes of a poetic text. It is a similar concept to Antoine Berman's term "Qualitative Impoverishment" ("Translation and the Trials of the Foreign," in Venuti's Translation Studies Reader), but my term encompasses a wider range of effects. I view dilution as a general tendency in translation in general, even in otherwise good translations. In other words, translation in general tends to go in this direction, and readers generally tolerate this. I will use some examples from Christopher Johnson's recent Quevedo translation (Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo), published by the U of Chicago P. This is not a bad translation at all, in the sense that it is both readable and accurate. It comes recommended by very highly regarded specialists.

Another disclaimer is that Quevedo is the preeminent poet of verbal wit. His effects are not inherently "translatable "in the conventional sense. Furthermore, there are other values in translation other than preserving the original poetic force of the text. Readability, "fluency," rhythmic grace, etc... A translation that didn't dilute might be much less acceptable to many readers. My point is that we should know what it is we're missing. Hence my nitpicking comments, beginning with several things in the first poem in the book, the famous sonnet beginning "Ah de la vida.."


'Aquí de los antaños que he vivido."

"Help, here are the years I have lived."

There is a play on words: antaño means somethings like 'yesteryear" or "formerly," whereas the translator treats it as though it were simply "años." Quevedo makes an adverb (antaño) into a plural noun.

"Falta la vida, asiste lo vivido"

"Missing is life, existence remains"

"Lo vivido" means "what has been lived," the sum total of past life. Quevedo uses words from the same family (vida, vivido) to hammer home the antithesis. The word existence has no sense of pastness about it. The syntactic parallelism disappears, because the translator has inverted the word order in one phrase but not the other. The original is more vivid, with the verb asistir being the perfect complement to faltar. "Life skips class, the lived attends."

"y no hay calamidad que no me ronde"

"and everywhere calamity awaits"

What Quevedo says is that "there is no calamity that doesn't lie in wait for me." That's a much stronger statement. Waiting (or awaiting) is much blander that the verb rondar. Here is means something closer to threaten. Good iambic pentameter, though.

"y he quedado / presentes sucesiones de difunto"

"and so I succeed my dead self again."

I think part of the verbal wit is in the plural noun "sucesiones." The self lives in a series of present moments, in each of which he is essentially a dead man. In the translation, this becomes a single event.

In the sonnet beginning "Miré los muros de la patria mía" Quevedo creates a powerful structure by using a series of verbs in the preterit at the beginning of the first three stanzas: "Miré los muros," / "Salíme al campo" / "Entré en mi casa." The translator varies this, inserting some present participles, and dismantles the effect. In another poem translator uses the word "lesson" to translate "escarmiento," a much harsher word. It does mean "lesson," but in the sense that getting beaten up is a "lesson," in other words, a harsh punishment or very stern warning. I would suggest a word like "scourge."

One thing I've been doing a lot of lately is not collecting stamps, coins, and firearms. My weekends are spent not golfing, fishing, and hunting, while my weekday evening are devoted to not going to the bowling alley. My wardrobe consists of clothes other than stiletto heels, kilts, and baseball caps, while my diet consists of food other than lobster and jello. I spent a lot of time not going to the movies or watching nascar races on tv. but I think I spend even more time not smoking a pipe, knitting, and shooting skeet.

Among the religions I make a point not to practice are Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Shinto. I am thinking of also not practicing Taoism. When I get a little time I'll start not doing that, but I am very busy not playing ultimate frisbee right now. In fact, in the time I spend not doing that I could probably take up the non-practice of animism and start not doing many other things as well. While I have been known to ride a bicycle, it curious that I actually spend more time not doing so. In fact, I sometimes attempt to not ride a bicycle at the same time as I don't play a cello, a violin, a flute, and a clarinet. As you can imagine, this gets a little tricky!

In my MLA talk I'm making the argument that Venuti's notion that "translation today bears little sign of these [modernist] developments" (The Translator's Invisibility [2nd ed.] 164) has to be questioned. Yes, there is a whole swath of mainstream translation that receives little influence from more radical Poundian principles. What Venuti unwittingly minimizes, however, is the entire phenomenon of the postmodernist poet-translator from Spicer to Rosmarie Waldrop. It is true that he mentions some of these significant names in passing, but he prefers to see translation as marginal and victimized rather than as central to modern poetics as a whole. Take away translation, and we have a mutilated modern/postmodern poetics. Maybe this modernist poetic practice of translation is marginal within the total universe of translations, but it is central to American poetry itself. Poet-translators employ a huge range of techniques, from Richard Wilbur on one end of the spectrum to Rothenberg on the other.

If we take "translation" as our area of concern, then modernist translation (as defined by Venuti) is a small part of the whole. Yet if we take "modernist / postmodernist poetics" as our area, then translation becomes absolutely central. You have to be able to see the duck as well as the rabbit.

Venuti's emphasis on the binary opposition between fluency and its discontents also has the practical effect of putting all "fluent" translations in the same category. Yet surely all "fluent" translation are not created equal, and there is a huge continuum of practices between the fluent and the obtrusive. Venuti's deep distrust of theories that make the translator invisible has the paradoxical effect of making certain kinds of translation less visible. Maybe interesting things are happening in Marianne Moore's LaFontaine, for example. Someone should look at that. Isn't that another variety of "modernist" translation?

Our conference starts this evening. In the meantime, I did laundry and wrote 900 words of my MLA talk in about an hour and 15, will have lunch then tackle a friend's poetry manuscript. My talk is turning into an indirect response to Venuti's review of my book. The final version will await my next free day. It's interesting that I think I need a whole day to write for an hour and 15 minutes.

Two centenarian deaths: Spanish novelist Francisco Ayala and French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

A new post on Arcade where I talk a bit about my response to Venuti's review.

Right before the recital of the poem that made Amiri Baraka lose his laureateship he was singing the Monk tune "Misterioso." Another poem was accompanied by "Monk's Mood." I bet only Ken Irby and I and a few other people in the SRO audience got those references. This blog isn't called Bemsha Swing for nothing.

I'm wondering if my Haydn obsession isn't a reaction to preparing the jazz course, in that jazz has suddenly become "work."

Ok. I'm on face book but I won't twit. That's where I draw the line.

Should I facebook? What do you think? I've been resisting it up to now. Surprising, because I was an early blogger. A lot of my colleagues are on it and they were saying I should, but I don't know. Will it eat up my time?

Someone coming to our Mid America conference on Hispanic Literatures (MACHL) this weekend is going to be talking about Ullán. This is unusual because almost nobody works on him in this country. I also recognized a title of another talk, and looked in my files: I had reviewed this same talk in its article version for a journal--anonymously.

I'm going to be introducing our keynote speaker, the Spanish philosopher Eduardo Subirats, seeing many old friends and making some new ones.

The profession can be very isolating, in that, for instance, my university is not going to hire someone else in my same field just to keep me company. I'm it for Spanish poetry here. It was nice to have Margarita here for a few months, but now I'm back on my own. The good thing is I have conferences in November, December, and January.

We have an expression, "caer en saco roto." Something like "falling on deaf ears." A lot of scholarship in the humanities falls into the torn sack, and maybe deservedly so. That's why the few opportunities for actually having a conversation with someone who's read my work and has actually read the poets I am working on are so valuable.

Since I'm kind of a loner anyway I have to make a special effort to have a wide network of people. When I forget to do this or don't have the energy to travel I suffer greatly. On the one hand, being a loner allows me to work alone and get things done--something that would drive many people crazy. On the other hand, I'm in a situation where most of the people who actually know something about what I'm working on are thousands of miles away, where i can go months in virtual isolation.

***

Baraka's talking about Barack today at 7 at the Kansas Union. That should be interesting.

I have three relatively short writing projects: MLA talk in Philly about Paul Blackburn (see you there); intro to a critical edition I want to do; talk in Madrid in January about Ullán. I've decided to try a different method of working. I have Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, and the following Tuesday more or less free. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I am going to see how much I can get done on Ullán. Thursday I will devote to Blackburn, and Sunday to the critical preface. Tuesday I will back to Ullán. In other words, every free day I will work on one of these projects in rotating fashion, for the rest of November or until I finish them all. This is not how I usually work, but I don't want to get bogged down on any one thing. The idea is to devote one day to try to get as much as possible of one single task done. In other words, I can probably do about 80% of any of these projects given one free day, so I'll need about 6 days in toto.

Time for the November Lorca giveaway. The first person who emails me with her US mailing address at jmayhew "@" ku.edu and gives me a "good" reason why she deserves the book Apocryphal Lorca will get a copy. No requests in comments this time: it can be embarrassing to ask for something. I'll announce the winner shortly.

Since all the winners so far have been of the male persuasion, this month's copy will go to the other gender, as my pronouns above imply.

[We have a winner! Maryrose Larkin.]