{"id":995,"date":"2014-05-28T01:40:03","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T01:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=995"},"modified":"2014-05-28T01:40:03","modified_gmt":"2014-05-28T01:40:03","slug":"the-translators-greenhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/the-translators-greenhouse","title":{"rendered":"The Translator\u2019s Greenhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"

November 12, 2013Lisa Rose Bradford<\/span><\/p>\n

\"kumquat-shamichatterjeeflickr\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo by Shami Chatterjee\/Flickr
\nJuan Gelman\u2019s prose poems remind his translator of \u201ceating juicy kumquats, tart little explosions of flavor.\u201d In her attempt to generate versions of his poems that capture both their startling imagery and delicious musicality, Lisa Bradford found it crucial to maintain this conflictive pairing, often evoking a visceral response from readers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival,\u201d wrote Vasily Zhukovsky, nineteenth-century Russian author and translator of the English Romantics, and although I cannot speak for all translators, I have recently discovered that the second half of this dictum may sometimes be true. There is, no doubt, an ethical responsibility to the originating poet, but a seminal, loving response\u2014\u201crespons-ibility,\u201d to quote Manuela Perteghella\u2014drives us translators to boldly and even competitively reengender figures in our quest to produce captivating poems in English that measure up to the original text.<\/p>\n

As a translator of poetry, transplanted from Ohio to the Pampas, I have often envisioned my craft as both a regeneration of delight and a grafting of cultures. As I begin to read a poem in Spanish, I immediately imagine the words growing in sundry colors and hear them singing in new environs, but a piecemeal approach rarely works. Shelley\u2019s analogy captures the truth of the process: a translator should not merely grind and distill a verse\u2019s petals but rather grow a poem from a passionate seed, as does a writer. It is a challenging and pleasurable activity, rather like cultivating exotic plants and, as such, as satisfying as it is frustrating. Those blooms and fruits, moreover, now and then take on scandalous shapes, so much so that, at the end of the season, some posies must be dismissed or pressed in personal books. Nevertheless, I had never thought of this as a rivalry, until just lately.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, my most recent project, C\u00f3lera buey (1965\/71; Oxen rage), a watershed collection of poems by Argentine poet-in-exile Juan Gelman. Known for his moving lyricism and social commentary, this recipient of the prestigious Premio Cervantes has published twenty-plus books of verse, the last of which, Hoy, was just released in May of this year. Though most of these books were written during an exile that began in 1975 with the military dictatorship of Jorge Videla and deepened with the \u201cdisappearance\u201d of his son in 1976, C\u00f3lera buey came to life between Argentina and Cuba and garnered him recognition throughout Latin America. Composed with his customary penchant for rewriting the Argentine lyrical past and social present, this is a diverse volume, made up of more than 150 poems divided into 11 parts, two of which are designated as \u201cTranslations,\u201d thus initiating Gelman\u2019s inspired use of pseudotranslation, \u201ccom\/position\u201d (\u201cgenerative translation\u201d), and intertexually driven commentaries and citations, all grounded in a conception of translation as a con\/versational and creative art form.[1] Rife with speculation and uncertainty, this is a book of ruminations, written in language at times unorthodox and full of quirky coinages, often playful and paradoxical, always musical and richly imaginative.<\/p>\n

In the pithy prose poems of my selection for World Literature Today, Gelman dryly mulls the task of the poet in times of injustice, rage and revolution. One reads these brief poems expecting a story and instead discovers flashes of intense euphony and poignant irony. Seemingly simple as regards vocabulary, they are chock-full of translation quandaries that demand inventive and sometimes daring solutions.<\/p>\n

Many of these prose poems remind me of eating juicy kumquats, tart little explosions of flavor. In my attempt to generate versions that capture both the startling imagery and delicious musicality, it became crucial to maintain this conflictive pairing that frequently evokes quite a visceral response from readers. For example, in \u201cComely Company,\u201d I needed to create a similar twofold zest: a seedy, sour kumquat dipped in powdered sugar. In order to achieve his, I felt compelled to alter the face of a bird\u2014though not his manners\u2014to re-create the alluring sounds of Gelman\u2019s expression. My first version read:<\/p>\n

Beautiful Company<\/p>\n

it\u2019s a perfectly ordinary occurrence to have a vulture working at my guts not devouring them exactly but loving them or rather ripping them out to bring to light my latest faces and look at them he says look at what you\u2019re eating beast says the beautiful vulture [2]<\/p>\n

The final words, \u201cbeautiful vulture,\u201d echo each other with their long u\u2019s, but there is no alliteration to accompany the assonance, so the heightened wit of the resonant \u201cbello buitre\u201d falls to the wayside. I eventually came up with \u201ccomely carrion crow,\u201d which is lyrically more ironic, though it lost the caped villainy of the vulture. Some may associate the vulture with devious evil because of its bald neck and hunchback stance, more so than with the crow, but the image of a bird pecking away at the speaker\u2019s live intestines seemed to me more disgusting than a vulture\u2019s appearance. Thus, in order to re-create a comparable chiming in the poem, the vulture became a crow, and almost became Poe\u2019s raven as I had at one point ended with \u201cquoth the comely carrion crow.\u201d Though I liked the sound, it\u2019s one thing to morph the bird and another to push the lost Lenore onto the stage. In my next version, the gnawing question regarding what the speaker is feeding on and the revelation of his various faces are enhanced with the painful and resounding long a\u2019s and e\u2019s in the words of the crow:<\/p>\n

Comely Company<\/p>\n

it\u2019s a perfectly ordinary thing to have a carrion crow working away at my guts not devouring them exactly more like loving them or ripping them out to bring to light my latest faces and look at them he says to me see what you\u2019re eating beast says the comely carrion crow<\/p>\n

All that made for a very fresh kumquat, according to my palate, but when I received the proofs of the poems that WLT was going to publish, there was an accompanying image of a crow, which seemed to be scolding me for my licentious translation behavior. By the same token, I was reminded of the thoughtful question translator Katie Silver posed as I discussed these poems at a group session during the Banff International Translation Center program this year: \u201cWho are you translating for? English readers or the author?\u201d Quoth the raven: Who am I performing for? Can a crow get work as a vulture? Has my greenhouse created a mutant love-child? Or is this a co-rivalry between poets?<\/p>\n

Fortunately, the poet\u2014who is a translator himself\u2014has allowed and even encouraged me to take liberties when, for reasons of euphony or rhythm, a more literal approach would fall flat, and though our con\/versations have been rich and invariably friendly, he will sometimes draw a very firm line. I shot an eleventh-hour email to him, explaining my decision and, I suppose, asking him to bless my beast. His answer was short and tart: \u201cDear Lisa, it\u2019s a vulture.\u201d I could hardly ignore that directive, though not a few readers had come to love this comely carrion crow.<\/p>\n

One of Gelman\u2019s most famous and popular poems, \u201cRegarding Poetry,\u201d[3] may shed some light on this conundrum. It begins by commenting on the lack of readers of poetry and the lamentable status of poets to then relay the story of an uncle, t\u00edo Juan, who sang tweet tweet till the day he died (probably from inanition), finally turning into a little bird that continued to chirp and chirp on its ride to the city crematorium (a harassingly uncomfortable embarrassment to some). The final quartet reads:<\/p>\n

it\u2019s lovely to know folks can tweet and tweet<\/p>\n

in the most unusual of circumstances \/<\/p>\n

t\u00edo juan once deceased \/ me right now<\/p>\n

just so you will love me.<\/p>\n

Was my transfiguration due to rivalry? Had I been infected by Gelman\u2019s flare for generative translation practices? Perhaps a bit of both. In any case, similarly lacking in readers and funds, the translating writer must grant a poem new life by cultivating fresh and tasty fruit, if only to receive some crumbs of love, especially from the poem.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mar del Plata, Argentina<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1] See my \u201cNotes on Translating Juan Gelman\u2019s Com\/posiciones\u201d (2013), at the Creative Literary Studio blog.<\/p>\n

[2] Las bellas compa\u00f1\u00edases muy com\u00fan que un buitre me trabaje las entra\u00f1as no devor\u00e1ndolas sino m\u00e1s bien am\u00e1ndolas o como desgarr\u00e1ndolas para sacar a luz mis rostros \u00faltimos y m\u00edralos me dice mira la que te comes animal me dice el bello buitre<\/p>\n

[3] Click here to listen to Gelman reading the Spanish version of \u201cSobre la poes\u00eda.\u201d<\/p>\n

From http:\/\/www.worldliteraturetoday.org\/translators-greenhouse?utm_content=buffer0f010&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#.U4U9q3JdXgR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

November 12, 2013Lisa Rose Bradford Phot … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[256,255],"views":979,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":997,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions\/997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}