Editor’s Note: Se vive y se traduce (Living in Translation), the autobiographical essay on translation by Laura Wittner, was published in Spanish in 2021 by Editorial Entropía.
What is translation?
How is it that I read a sentence in English and my brain chooses and orders words in Spanish? Sometimes I try to freeze the mechanism at a given moment to observe it, and I feel like I’m losing my mind.
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And in the periods when I’m not translating, toward what do I employ this incredibly specific mechanism of transference? Toward mental processes that don’t call for it, slowing them down?
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I lived in New York for a year thanks to a Fulbright scholarship. Every morning, I settled into the eighth floor of the university’s library. I translated the poems that Charles Tomlinson had written in New York, decades ago, thanks to a Fulbright grant. And like him, like every foreigner, I wrote (why would I have escaped the cliché if neither Calvino, nor Lihn, nor Simone de Beauvoir, nor García Lorca had) a long poem about New York (which was really about me).
So through the books, the parks, the subway trains, the streets, I trailed my translation unintentionally: We walk up Madison. It is the end / Of a winter afternoon. And I walked up Madison on my way home, and it was the end of a winter afternoon, and I chose […] the street / That seems like a home returned to, grown / Suddenly festive as we enter it / With the odour of chestnuts on the corner braziers.
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To translate is to think about oneself.
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&: an untranslatable authorial gesture?
A conversation with Shira about the ampersand in relation to a poem she’s translated and that we’re editing: it’s a subtle gesture, she tells me. Let’s make another subtle gesture, I say. Leaving the ampersand isn’t so subtle: it means introducing a symbol from another language. And what about using a “+”? But + also exists in English. It suggests an abbreviative intention, says Shira. A notation, I add. But colloquial. Yes, a gesture of speed: it saves two out of the three characters in “and.” And is there anything briefer than “y” in Spanish?
Sometimes to translate a poem, we try to get far deeper inside the author’s head than they themselves did.
Really, who do we think we are.
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The preposition: that restless artefact that keeps us awake.
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Everything that must work well, dynamically speaking, for one to be able to sit down and translate: the eyes (sometimes they go blurry), the breath (sometimes it falls out of step), the hands (sometimes they hurt), the wrist that controls the mouse (it’s permanently inflamed), the neck, with its entire long, problematic continuation that it is the spine.
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If the translation gets jammed up, you have to step away.
Go to the bathroom, get water, look for nail polish.
If the translation gets jammed up, you have to unjam the body.
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It’s possible to keep translating while crying.
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Half the searches related to a translation lead us to a place we weren’t looking for but that is very close to us. Suspiciously close.
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When you’re translating, it’s important to read lots of other things that are completely unrelated to the translated text because, by some miracle, the answers to all your questions will appear.
Or watch movies with subtitles.
Or watch movies.
Or read signs on the street.
The problematic word comes to us from the depths of chance.
It’s the magic of translation.
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I can’t translate a book gradually, one day on and three off, mixing in other tasks: a book is a mass you must throw yourself into, give into—I might even say with which you must become one.
Many hours a day.
Every day.
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Yesterday, in the translation workshop, we were working on a poem by Ted Hughes and we jumped unexpectedly to Miguel Hernández. How? There was a rhythm, a syntactical disposition, and a diffuse semantic sentiment.
I have the sense that the task of translation always leads everything to merge with everything. An hour of concentration and discussion about a text and we’re swimming in the general ocean of form and content.
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In the translation videocall sessions with Shira, I always jot down individual words around the poem we’re working on. They’re usually clues or ideas or names that the tangential conversation has led us to: the place we’ve arrived after drifting further and further from the specific problems of the translation (but isn’t this the most specific problem in translation? Returning you to the world, in the broadest sense possible?). I make these notes to remind myself to read some author we’ve mentioned, or—most often, I think—to develop in my own writing some germ of an idea that’s come up in our chat. Curiously, that intention, impassioned in the moment, rarely comes to fruition. Once we’ve said goodbye, I move onto some other task, returning the page we’ve been working on to the file labeled “Shira” (one of those accordion folders), where it remains until the following week. I’m always fantasizing about going through those pages and writing something based on those notes. Or at least trying. It’s a lot of honest material, the fruit of collaboration, I think. And it’s sitting there, abandoned. But it’s not abandoned: it’s inside the translated poem. The passage from English to Spanish included all of it. The new version contains in its mortar all those notes from the illuminated rush.
Some notes whose meanings I barely remember:
From “Comice” by Stroud:
-empathy
-Mervin: Ancient/Asian figures
-Rabassa, Goldstein, Bly
-Sweet Adeline (Berkeley)
From “Dissolving” by Stroud:
-Fragile things [this one ended up being the genesis and title of a poem I wrote]
-Alexis
From “This Waiting” by Stroud:
-“all morning” poems
-Eugene, Oregon
-Sufi poetry – trans. Daniel Ledinsky
From “In Sepia” by Stroud:
-Salinger: happiness is a solid
From “After the Opera” by Stroud:
-Workshop: a single sentence – rhythm
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After reading her version of a poem by Tomlinson in the translation workshop, Laura tells us: “This time I followed my instincts, and I was a lot happier.” “It shows in the poem,” we tell her.
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Translating is guessing.
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Over and over, I make that naïve mistake of thinking, “It’s a very straightforward translation.” It never is. Translation is always the knot of a problem. The simplest decision can have ramifications for crucial ones, for details that have yet to be solidified (always the note of the note of the note, that provisional state of the word); the most superficial step from one language into another tends to take on indefinite depth.
(Today I confirm this yet again while translating a very short story by Bruno Munari.)
César Aira: Now That I Don’t Translate
A translator is constantly considering the big little problems of writing’s microscopy. I stopped translating ten years ago, and it was a relief, but over time I began to feel I had lost something. And I still do. What I miss aren’t the easy parts of the trade but its difficulties, those specific perplexities that would awaken my generally drowsy thinking. Now that I don’t translate, I have to make up new ones.
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Did I already know this? Today, translating Stroud with Shira, I found out that “escalera caracol” in English is “escalera espiral,” and she found out that “spiral staircase” in Spanish is “snail straircase,” and we both laughed.
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Each time I encounter one of those upper-case letters that English uses to name languages, movements, historical periods, etc., I feel a certain inexplicable pleasure when changing them to lowercase in Spanish.
As if I were boasting about how my language doesn’t bother with that nonsense nor bow down to concepts with pompous hierarchies.
My nature is made up of these arbitrary and impulsive feelings, too.
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In the new translation workshop, there were eight people on the first day. One of them is Pabla—we’ve been friends since middle school. Together, we lived many important moments. Together, we remade language and accumulated vocabulary and stories. We translated from Latin; I have a gorgeous photo of her sitting at the table in my apartment on Acevedo, giving a smile of true joy and holding up high, one in each hand, our respective Vox Latin-Spanish/Spanish-Latin dictionaries. We rarely see each other anymore. Of the eight people in the workshop, she was the only one who came up with the same solution as me for the first line of Stroud’s “Cathedral.” I was excited, sure that it spoke to our friendship, our history.
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Anne Carson: Saying Things Less Well
I like the space between languages because it’s a place of error or mistakenness, of saying things less well than you would like, or not being able to say them at all. And that’s useful I think for writing because it’s always good to put yourself off balance, to be dislodged from the complacency in which you normally go at perceiving the world and saying what you’ve perceived. And translation continually does that dislodging, so I respect the situation—although I don’t think I like it. It’s a useful edge to put yourself against.
Fabio Morábito: The Words More or Less Coincide
When you start translating, you come up against a problem that, to me, is irresolvable, and it’s that, in a sense, translation is impossible. Not even the translation of poetry but rather the straightforward kind, such as, “I like a dog.” It would seem such a simple sentence wouldn’t cause any issues, but it does because translation happens at a cultural level. We translate not just a language but a culture. At first, you confront the fact of the words more or less coinciding, but then you feel that the meaning isn’t the same, and that’s paralyzing. […] There’s something there, a metaphysical problem.
I read and nod my head.
Translating is beautiful.
Translating is horrible.
Translating is exasperating.
Marcelo Cohen: Perhaps I Don’t Have So Much Faith
I should stop hiding from myself that I may not have so much faith in the efficacy or feasibility of translation anymore. I do it because it comes relatively easy to me, because it suits me more than journalism or teaching, because I didn’t have the patience to study biochemistry, or because I’m stubborn.
I’m quite surprised to notice how that faith in the feasibility of translation decreases with time and experience. There are days when I outright exclaim, frustrated, alone in front of the monitor: “Translation is impossible!”
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Nevertheless, beginnings are sexy: early in the morning, there’s that exhilarating moment in which every word, in both English and Spanish, vibrates with sound, meaning, and associations—they all seem to be telling me so much! The two languages size each other up and merge, and for a few minutes we all frolic (the words and I) in a morning etymological orgy.
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It’s midnight on a holiday, and suddenly, as if in the ocean, I feel the wave lift me up and move me forward: the desire to translate. It’s been a while since I’ve felt it so strongly. The specific desire to translate poems by Marie Howe, rapidly.
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A poet’s body, face, way of walking, way of speaking: I watch Frank O’Hara read “Having a Coke with You” a thousand times. It’s so helpful when making decisions for the translation: the cigarette pinched between his fingers, the confidence in his own voice, the speed at which the words of those long lines leave his mouth.
This poem is fast. It was intended to be read fast. The translation shouldn’t slow it down.
By contrast: Jimmy Schuyler reading “Salute.” A slow, sad drawl. Drugged.
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Translating is guessing. Guessing at the other.
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Hello, I’m your translator. I’m remodeling you. Sh! Let it happen.
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Talking about everything at once, casually, no time limit, no preconceptions: the best way to co-translate.
It’s difficult to find a translation partner, but when we do, it ignites us.
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Suggestion for lifting the spirits: shut off the internet or shut off the electricity, sit down at the dining room table to translate—poetry, by hand, without a dictionary.
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The desire to translate seizes you in the most unexpected or impossible—uncomfortable— moments. Like sexual desire. Later, when you have to translate, when it’s the time and place to do it, sometimes it goes quiet.
Translated by Will Howard
