My life in translation—or, rather, in reading—has been inseparable from my life in writing. Like any Argentine teenager in the sixties, I read French avant-garde poetry, mainly in the translations that were circulated at the time. Although French was the first foreign language I studied for a while, I was quickly drawn to the English lyrics of rock and roll. I had carefully read the translations of poets such as Theodore Roethke, Edgar Lee Masters, and Wallace Stevens, yet when I first traveled to the United States of America backpacking, I could only recite one song by Bob Dylan in English. Thus, I entered a completely different sonic universe, and I still remember with some excitement how I would closely follow African-Americans on the streets to listen to their voices and their English, which I absorbed with affection. Months later, while working in a metallurgic factory in the South Bronx in New York, where all the female workers were black southerners or undocumented Latinas, my English became livelier. At night, I would work on building my literate English, accompanied by a small dictionary and an elementary grammar manual.
At that time, I discovered Denise Levertov and bought her first books. Perhaps the pristine brevity of some of her poems made them easier for me to read. So, I added translating her poems to my self-taught English lessons to understand her works better. I also wanted to read a column in the Village Voice titled “Lesbian Nation” by Jill Johnston, not because these columns were literary pieces, but because it was the sixties, and the struggle for civil rights had extended from ethnic and cultural communities to the emerging second wave of feminism and the political recognition of diverse sexual identities. One evening, while walking down Broadway, I came into a bar that advertised a reading by a poet named Muriel Rukeyser. Beer in hand, I approached the stage as this woman’s extraordinary voice proclaimed: “Answer me, dance my dance.” She was reading from her recent book, Breaking Open, and we could say I responded to her call, I accepted her invitation to dance by buying all her books and reading her work night after night. Rukeyser opened the doors of her poetry and a poetic tradition to me. My weekend pilgrimages to the bookstores began to evolve into more complex explorations, much like my attendance at concerts and protests in a New York ignited by the anti-Vietnam War movement and support for civil rights. That is how my task as a translator began, a role that was, above all, the work of a reader. I made progress primarily translating contemporary women poets, many of whom, like Rukeyser, Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and June Jordan, were also activists.
Social events and poetry have gone, and still go, hand in hand to me. In an overwhelmingly male-dominated tradition, I wanted to create family and lineage, and I wanted to hear the voices of women. I guess I centered and built there what I came to call my translation borough, to which I have always returned. To translate again what has been already translated by others is extraordinary, and this task seems to be endless. An author can be known better throughout time, especially a contemporary author who continues to write and surprise us with new books. The translator also grows, transforms, and modifies her perception and powers. Whereas the dialogue becomes deeper, the bridge between languages gets narrower and more contradictory.
Of course, meeting the author who is translated and asking her personally about the dark areas of translation is different from working entirely on one’s own. I have experienced both situations, and both are exciting; however, there is something fundamental that does not relate to any of these circumstances. If we talk about the translation of poetry, there is a dialogue that instantly occurs in the first read, in the lightning flash produced by the first poem of an author we read and repeat in the original language while we simultaneously taste it in our language. Something related to music and the spirit that holds it, undoubtedly, plays out there, something I would call love at first sight.
If my first encounter with the North American poet Muriel Rukeyser meant the beginning of my work in translation, my first encounter with Sophia de Mello Breyner, a contemporary Portuguese poet, opened the door to a language unknown to me. By 1999, I was invited to an international poetry festival in Coimbra, Portugal, where I met many contemporary Portuguese and African poets who speak Portuguese. After the festival, I spent some weeks in Lisbon and visited the bookstores with my notebook full of recommendations made by new friends who tried to educate me about the local literature. I had read almost nothing in Portuguese by then—though Carlos Drummond de Andrade was a poet I passionately read in my youth—yet I trusted in the closeness of our languages to achieve it. I bought many books because, except for Pessoa, my ignorance was considerable. However, my curiosity did not let me feel satisfied with the reading lists suggested by others, so I decided to explore the bookshelves of poetry by myself. Thus, I found Sophia’s complete works, which no one had recommended to me, maybe because when talking to travelers, poets tend to emphasize the most current and least known expressions of the poetry of their time. Surrendered to that mysterious characteristic of the miracle that takes place when one discovers an essential author, I was still reading Sophia when the lights of the bookstore went off. I brought home three volumes of her work with the joy of someone who plunders a treasure far away and comes back home with it. Then summer came, and I finally had the opportunity I had been waiting for; day after day, I got up early to translate Sophia de Mello under the shade of willow trees. She taught me Portuguese, or she just taught me the Portuguese of her poetry. I read her poetry out loud and sang it, trying to weigh its sound, its melody, and I made such quick progress with the first drafts and the most polished versions that it was as if I had written those poems myself in another language. It is hard to describe that happiness. The translated author is other, and the poems are hers, we do not forget it, and here and there we stumble over difficulties that are more related to transcription than to translation. A close language is very tricky, sometimes it is more deceptive than a distant one, but when we are captured by a voice or by the voice’s tone, we get it right. Everything is solved mysteriously, intuition and some steady flight join us, and we never want the task to end.
As I said, I found Sophia de Mello Breyner on the bookshelves of a bookstore in Lisbon; her complete oeuvre was provided by the fine edition of the publisher Caminho. There, everything I sought, explored, and admired, my list of authors written down on a piece of paper, disappeared. Or it was washed out, reborn in that shining white, in that frugal music that Sophia de Mello’s lines unfurled in front of my eyes and heart. Greece and Portugal shaped, in the form and specificity of topics, the lyrical intensity of her lines; even in the most intimate poems, her transparent and disaffected language remained tied to the common language, to the common good. Her quests for the right words and for a fair world seemed to be one and the same in her lines. In Sophia de Mello, the old alchemy of poetry performed again, joining history in its own way, or in an embrace that renewed it and made it human and believable. That is how I fell in love with this close and foreign language that is Portuguese, which is why I say she taught me Portuguese. Her diction was so pristine and brought me such joy that I began translating her work to brush against the substance of her writing, the invisible articulation that, in great poets, seems as natural as a fruit on a branch but is the result of a life devoted to the poem. What lovely days! Days of singing in another language and, at the same time, in my own—the language of an unknown woman who, long after I learned it, lived in Lisbon. She taught me about her country, time, and language more than any trip, encyclopedia, essay, or manual. Here is poetry tied to the world, speaking from it through a subjectivity chiseled by the mastery of craft and the delicacy of spirit.
After my adventure with Sophia de Mello Breyner, I gained a certain status as a translator of Portuguese, which I personally doubted, and I was asked to translate contemporary Brazilian poets. I did so with fear and pleasure; fear, of course, of not doing it well. Poets such as Hilda Hilst, Ferreira Gullar, and Adélia Prado, whom I greatly respect, were included in an anthology of Argentine and Brazilian poets published as Puentes/Pontes. This selection was proposed by the Brazilian anthologist Eloísa Buarque de Hollanda, and it was a task I accepted with pleasure, as I already said. However, this experience was more difficult for me, and I couldn’t stop wondering why.
I would like to give an account of the drift stirred by that questioning. At first, I told myself that living with a poet’s work for a long time—as happened to me with Sophia—was different from working on a pre-defined selection. Then, I wondered why reading peninsular Portuguese felt easier to me than reading Brazilian Portuguese, even though Brazil is geographically and historically closer to Argentina, and both countries speak languages that evolved as forms emancipated from colonial rule under the Iberian Peninsula. Perhaps this is because the colonizer’s tradition—with its own internal colonies, the Sephardic and Arabic traditions, to mention some of them now—continues to appear to the colonized as their cultural cradle. It would also be necessary to consider a sense of belonging in terms of social class, both for the translated authors and the translator. For example, though Sophia de Mello achieves a perfect balance, she seems to write with the confidence that comes from viewing cultural assets as a naturally received inheritance; we don’t always get this impression with authors who come from disinherited social classes. A paradox worth noting arises from this situation: even if the translator comes from disinherited classes, as in my case, it is likely that, due to the need to appropriate so-called high culture to practice the profession—especially if they are initially unfamiliar with the spoken register of the language—they feel more familiar with a poetics rooted in the literary canon. Ultimately, this canon creates a sort of shared niche or literary lingua franca within the written language. This paradox is painful; it points not only to the nightmare of an unjust society divided into classes and the uncomfortable position of the colonized, but also to the migration every author born outside the dominant classes is forced to experience. This tragedy affects not only writing practices within the translator’s country and language, but also the practices of reading and translating. This paradox deepens when the translator’s contact with the author’s language has been limited, as the translated language, like any other, is in constant transformation and bears the subjective and historical traces of the people who live in the specific region to which the author belongs.
By translating Lélia Coelho Frota, for example, I could recognize, in several of her poems, the presence of an old tradition I’m familiar with, from medieval song-poems to Galician-Portuguese heritage, the Kharjas, and the school of troubadours (I think of poems such as “Ipótese de Maio” or “Dois Desgostos de Agosto”). In Adélia Prado’s work, however, the unsettling and unstable encounter, the state of conflict between speech and the written tradition, challenges us from a different perspective, pushing us into risky terrain without which translation would not be possible. The liveliness of the spoken language, so full and delightful, is acknowledged by the translator, but if she has not experienced it firsthand, her sense of estrangement haunts her while simultaneously drawing her into an adventure that engages both her language and the other, along with their inherent regionalism. In the most stabilized register of language, what has been crossed out, what has not been inscribed, bursts forth. Faced with this challenge, the translator’s literate knowledge reveals its insufficiency.
Describing my encounter with Hilda Hilst would be a separate chapter unto itself; through her work, I touched the grace of reading and felt a profound desire to translate her poetry fully. In Hilst, we find the intense, sober syntax of a classical poem, with Horace sometimes seeming to peek from behind her lines. It’s a syntax that Hilst, like a surfer riding the waves, bends to reveal the almost invisible mysteries of representation, binding dissonance (the emancipated slave of speech) to syntony (the written tradition), a rupture in the smoothest melody that leaves us breathless. I celebrate her as a major poet, and my desire to capture her work remains an unfulfilled longing to translate more of her.
To bring a sense of closure to this review of specific experiences in translation, I would not like to leave unmentioned certain circumstances that a dependent country like Argentina has experienced. A country that has long lived with the dream of emulating the major centers of power, or even surpassing them, and where translation has been an essential task. This has meant staying up to date with the works being read in New York, London, and Paris, almost simultaneously, while paying far less attention to the writings of other Latin American countries. Undoubtedly, this focus has also been a path to independence that has sparked discussions and productions in response. When we say, “this text needs to be translated,” we mean we want to expand it, communicate it, and discuss it with others. It implies that the text poses questions or provides answers that resonate with our subjectivity and our time. When Argentina enjoyed some abundance, a publishing industry, and a broad reading market, this phenomenon took on distinctive characteristics that I won’t address here. Without a doubt, we produced some of the best Spanish-language translators on the continent, as well as in Spain, “from a specific space of enunciation: the south,” as Patricia Wilson says in La constelación del sur. Those good times are gone. In poetry, however, little seems to change; as far back as I can remember, poetry has been translated purely for the love of it, rarely as paid work. Translators undertake it for the joy of seeing it published in specialized journals or by small presses, the same channels through which contemporary poetry circulates.
We want to translate not only because we have fallen under the spell of an author but also because that author offers a complex labyrinth of conceptual, ideological, and representational associations that speak through them and through which the translator, too, speaks. The task of translation teaches us, above all, to think differently about our own language; it makes language unstable, revealing unexpected cracks and invisible contradictions, making it feel far more “foreign” than we had imagined. Music, however, begins with meaning; what is older, more archaic, mysterious, and rebellious comes closer, forming a shared riverbed from which we read and translate. This shared riverbed has numerous bifurcations, streams, watersheds, and little waterfalls where we swim in amazement, discovering potentialities in our mother tongue that were always there but that we had never seen before. A strange scale continuously organizes the rebellions and laws in new ways; this is what poetry does at the core of language and, therefore, in the translation of the poem. As Julia Kristeva said: the poet’s action within language is violent. Since the poet cannot erase this action—and thus remove mediation, the distance that separates us from “the thing,” from Eden, from what condemns us to the vulnerability of individuation and language—he undoes this mediation and makes it speak again. This struggle is vividly present in the task of translation. Translating a poem demands great attention, as even the abyssal silence of what is yet unwritten offers no aid; instead, the translator works with a line already crafted by someone else. It’s like stepping into an extraordinary garden only to dismantle it with a shovel, then reconstruct it, if possible, in all its architecture, details, colors, sounds, scents, and textures. This is both a process of appropriation and, at the same time, of acknowledgement that the poem belongs to another. We do not create an original poem; we overwrite an original poem. The translator is loyal through disloyalty, generous in authorship, and sometimes intoxicated on the border between what is personal and what is foreign. Have you ever noticed that the translator speaks of what she translates as though it were her own creation, which sometimes she loves more than her own books, if she has them? Yet, she must never forget the original garden, always recalling the unique beauty and precision of the first poem.
Therefore, if the translator is a poet, she will blend the golden waters of her readings in her native language—in my case, Castilian Spanish—with the readings provided by various translators and those delayed, painful, or joyfully exalted readings she or others have undertaken to make them resonate in her language. Everything will nourish the translator, both in writing her own poems and in translating the poems of others. She will smile at the insufficiencies of language, its ambiguities, its elusiveness like a sly gazelle darting and hiding in the forest foliage. She will trust in tone, color, rhythmic foundation, and the subtleties and roughness of melodies as much as in conveyable meaning. She will experience her language as unique and the chant as shared. She will be faithful to both singularity and voice.
Translating another poet may mean finding a voice that feels close to us, where we honor the other with admiration and, if the translator is also a poet, recognize that the translated author has reached heights we cannot attain, where we celebrate a certain ideal. Translation can also be the opposite: it can be an encounter with what we would never write but admire, and this is a different kind of adventure. It is as if we lack the craft of translation at the outset and must learn it as we attempt to create a version in our own language. This experience can be extraordinary too, and may even modify our writing to some extent. In both cases, translation involves a delicate exercise in otherness. We must not confuse the writing of others with our own, nor translate without desire. We cannot allow ourselves to be consumed by the original text, nor can we absorb it entirely. A strange Eucharist occurs, a ritual in which the material body of language is swallowed and then regurgitated, on the high peaks of this task filled with patience, attentiveness, and grace.
It is not possible to progress too quickly in the translation of poetry; or, more accurately, it is not a suitable position to take, because poetry is not merely an act of communication. We do not simply extract meanings from poetry or prose, for the latter also has its rhythm and tonal mysteries. However, this seems to be more radical in poetry, for poetry does not unfold over time; it concentrates. Rather than seeing it as an act of communication, we witness an act of communion, where rhythm, melody, and sonic matter have profound meaning, and this is what we try to translate. We will never achieve that perfect tremor, yet at times we will produce another one in a different part of the text or line, which will seem to resonate more deeply in our language than in the original. It is necessary to let the original language speak aloud and in concentrated silence, allowing it to unfold within ourselves, in the heart and body. There is nothing more material in language than what happens in a poem. Matter cannot be forced; we must recognize its laws and density, find the lock, and possess the keys that will unlock it with a single delicate movement. To make the other speak, to disappear behind her voice using a local and temporal language that builds us, that shapes our subjectivity, and at the same time to feel that this voice also speaks for us, is a marvelous and violent procedure. The best we can do to a garden is to shape it and let it be, in its unexpected diversity, its dedication, and in endless fugue.
Translated by Angela San Martín
From the essay collection La pequeña voz del mundo (Caballo Negro Editora, 2011)
