My childhood was spent in two buildings
and in the vast grounds of a school
that is no longer there.
Of those structures, I retain the fragments
that sometimes appear in my dreams,
the isolated cabins of absent ships.
Our houses were eyes through which we scanned the city
Its ways as yet untrodden.
My childhood slipped away through their windows,
balconies and terraces, under a sky
that always assailed us with the question
of why we lived there and not in some other place
with similar buildings to ours.
Going to school was like disembarking
from one ship and embarking on another
Unmoored from the adjacent streets.
There were other children there,
watching the city of their asylum drift past their windows.
It was out there, indifferent,
as unattainable as those cities
lost by our parents and grandparents.
To explore its streets and confront its silence
was a secret desire that sustained us,
never longing then to travel farther.
After lunch, it bestowed upon us
a silence of men paused
in different parts of the street;
For as long as they looked upwards,
the trees, the lampposts, and the houses would file past.
At six in the evening, everything came back to life,
a torrent of maids headed for the bakery.
They giggled as they guided us
because they were watched from afar.
We didn’t understand; following without thinking
the natural run of those seams.
Catalan
When I was a child, my parents
buried it from moment to moment.
Or wore it like their indoor clothes.
My grandmother, on the other hand,
lived out every day
leaning on her mother tongue.
Her Catalan grew there, too,
in that arid ground
where I had two names,
the one my parents called me
and that of my wild and marginal self
which lived in my grandmother’s mouth.
I no longer have that language
or that name,
only the memory of the harsh climate
from which my grandmother spoke.
There was an excess of noise
that prevented me from knowing
what my parents
were not saying when I lost it.
But I can still hear
its elusive music,
it gives me what I need to feel my way
through the darkness.
I can’t settle
as my grandmother used to do,
for imagining that words arise
only to give shape to thought.
I need them to make me stumble,
to make me notice, abruptly, that I cannot see
and to force me to pause, to stop.
My brother
I had to take more care of him than of myself.
We were shy, like our mother,
who, whenever she smiled, would look away
and seem to be somewhere else.
We built a barrier of silence
so that hardly anyone would come close;
he knew how to keep quiet and listen, storing everything deep inside.
I only imitated his reserve,
but it was impossible for me to escape the strangeness
of not being able to be a child,
of thinking he was judging me, just like my parents
who were never children because of the war.
I remember us in the music room of our nursery school,
very scared at having arrived early and from far away,
carrying our coats and our lunch
as if bound for another exile,
as if that enormous school were a train
that would carry us off to who knows where.
They never taught us to be children,
my siblings and I.
Mum barely got to be one.
She never played,
though in her youth
she did a bit of theatre.
Dad was a boy who drew pictures
and lived in the cinema.
Because of the war, they didn’t know how
to be with other children;
and although our childhood amused them,
it also astounded them.
With us, in front of us, all they could do
was talk too much, and overact.
For years, their performance
unfolded a world for us
which they themselves,
as exiles do,
were forever discovering, and inventing, too.
In our teenage years,
their friends,
and ours too,
came to marvel at
that strange milieu:
like a theatre company,
with a grandmother, a girl,
and sometimes a cat.
I have drifted along,
bearing the weight of that stage,
trying to look
at its unhappy ending.
Even now, with some distance,
I cannot do it.
It was the first thing I walked on.
It is the floor beneath these steps
that I keep taking, half up in the air,
as if living in a dream
from which I never fully awaken.
My Two Grandfathers
For Ana
At the end of the Spanish Civil War,
Mum’s father and Dad’s father
ended up in France
on the beach at Argèles-sur-Mer,
then a concentration camp.
Mum’s father had left Spain as a fighter,
Dad’s father evacuating the school in Ibiza
where he was headmaster.
In the end, both of them, without knowing each other
because they came from different parts
of Aragon and Catalonia,
found themselves in the same sand,
their lives, like those of so many others,
reduced to that desert
on the edge of that sea.
I read about the depression
brought on by this sand,
and how those whom currents had once divided
and adversity had brought together
tried to alleviate it with talks and magazines,
and by circulating what books they had.
The same happened in other spaces
where their exile continued.
Words and drawings creating home
even in the middle of the sea.
I never met my Dad’s father,
he died when Dad was twelve,
but he remained so alive in him
that he would draw and describe
all the films he had seen
as if they were a refuge
and at times a truer home.
Dad absorbed all that sadness
of endless sand,
imprinted by that camp on his father,
a sensitive and well-read man,
his hopes and his humour, too.
Dad oscillated between an absurd sadness
and an indescribable joy,
the world was sand in which nothing would grow,
and that is how he taught us to imagine it.
But he also loved our Mum’s father,
who was not affected by the sand of the camp
in the same way
and was not melancholic: he was a travelling salesman
and would go happily to work in Mexico
even in the worst of times.
With him, Dad laughed
because Mum’s dad had known him as a child
in the Dominican Republic when he still had his father.
His positive attitude to life freed him
from the burden that he, the son of a widow
and separated from his sister, had to bear.
Translated by Jules Whicker
Insights from the Translator
Alicia’s poems are so simple in appearance that they seem like they would be easy to translate. They don’t present the usual challenges of rhyme or meter. The language, moreover, seems plain. One might think that it is simply a matter of translating word-for-word et voilà. But it doesn’t work that way. There are structures within the poems that one must be alert to: repetitions, patterns, and, more importantly, the impression created by the poem’s intricate rhythms, where the line ends, and how the weight of sound or meaning falls at the beginning and the end.
These poems are about memory and reflection. One must think of memory here as things commemorated: stories told, phrases used, fragments preserved. Then there is reflection: thinking about the process of memory, reflecting on its strangeness, and how things are left behind, abandoned by those who went into exile, or remaining as relics in their places of refuge. Not just how some things are left behind, but how everything is left behind, especially people: specifically, by exile, and more universally, by the passage of our lives. What Alicia does is, paradoxically, mitigate loss by recalling and recording its indelible impacts in her poems. The particular character of her writing, therefore, is the interaction between the remembered artifact and the processes of memory.
When translating, you have to find a way to capture those processes. The poems have structure, but it lies there quietly, waiting to be found. If you bring it out too far in translation—as I fear I have done at times—the poem risks becoming merely an artefact, a printed text, rather than a path to explore, and the reader risks losing the sense of entering into a mind that is actively piecing the past together. Even before we read a word of the poems, we notice their unprogrammatic quality: poems and lines alike are of uneven lengths. Their form and extent are not arbitrary, however. Instead, the words map the organic formation of thoughts, and each one, in its place, is filled with meaning. When translating, therefore, I’m trying to find English words that preserve not just the literal meaning, but also the shape and impact of the thought. This requires an attentiveness to pace and timing: tuning your ear to the cadences; finding the pauses, the interfaces between objects, memories, reactions and reflections… sometimes all it takes is ending the line in a different place. I think about my role as translator, too. Often the translator is imagined as a stand-in for the writer, but I think the translator is really an avatar for the reader. As their translator, I read the source material with intricate care, weighing every word, seeking a deep and detailed understanding of intent and effect before searching for the means to share the experience of reading Alicia’s poems in another language.
Another reason I’m not a stand-in for Alicia is that translation doesn’t replace the poems as she wrote them. No one who can read the original text turns to the translation except out of curiosity. What translation does is enable the reader to open a door to a world that would otherwise be closed to them. The translator is also seeking to give the reader just the right amount of assistance. It is as much a mistake to explain a text plainly as to make it too strange. Without a sense of exploration and discovery reading is impoverished. As for how to read the poems—translated or otherwise—I think this should mostly be done slowly. Some passages are self-accelerating, but often its best to read as though you’re lifting something up to the light to discover its true colours. Something else you might do as a reader, and that translators do a lot, is to read them aloud, discovering, as you choose where to pause in each line and where to set down its weight, how this affects its sense and impact. These are my thoughts about translating Alicia’s poems. I hope they help you to enjoy them.
Jules Whicker
Department of Modern Languages
University of Birmingham
Selection of poems from Sea of Shadows / Mar de sombras, edited by Mónica Jato and Marta Simó-Comas, for the exhibition hosted by the Instituto Cervantes (Manchester), June 14-July 19, 2024.
