New York: Ugly Duckling Presse. 2023. 40 pages.
“es carnaval y yo soy Leonardo / tortuga ninja te pico en pedacitos / qué calora este disfraz / me saco la careta / me sale la melena” [“its carnival n i’m Leonardo / ninja turtle i chop you up / hot as she/it in this costume / i take off my mask / i loosen my mane”], we read towards the end of Isadoro Saturno’s estimado representante. After narrating, in short verses, the experiences of a trans youth in Venezuela, playing with the gender of the nouns and articles that stand out from the text—mentioning the high school’s “timbra,” mom’s “carrito vieja,” the “espeja” in which he feigns shaving—the licenses the author takes cease to be mere questions of style and serve, instead, to punctuate the bond between gender and nation. After all, saying “la calora” (as opposed to “el calor”) in Barquisimeto or Caracas would not be so unusual. These grammatical alterations come not from an arbitrary aesthetic, but from an exploration of the I that never separates from the we, of identity as a fundamentally social phenomenon.
Saturno’s poetry collection is a singularly Venezuelan treatise on the premonitions of childhood, here linked to our body and heart. It was brave, then, for Ugly Duckling to publish it with a facing translation into English. How to achieve, in a language whose names tend to lack the masculine or feminine, its literary gestures? How to achieve them, what’s more, while maintaining the intersectionality that is their motivating factor? These were the challenges faced by E.R. Pulgar, who has seductively stained the text with their own magic.
To wit: the words quoted between em-dashes in the preceding paragraph are translated, respectively, as “belle,” “old mitsubi/she,” and “mir/her.” These constructs do not represent dialectical twists, as in Saturno’s case, but rather reflect the correct pronunciation of the words they evoke. They affirm the importance of orality in these poems from another body, another grammar. The ludic, which is proper to childhood—and to the poetic portrait of this particular childhood, of course—is authentically restored. If to translate is (inevitably) to betray, then Pulgar’s disloyalty is crystal clear. Might we even call it necessary?
We tend to classify the unfulfillment of promises or expectations, and especially of economic and political projects, as failure. I suppose our expectations when we read subtitles or texts written in languages beyond our grasp are that the original meaning should flow through as much as possible—that we shouldn’t lose anything. But not achieving a goal, often set arbitrarily by others, does not mean the result must be somber or disappointing. Jack Halberstam, a professor at Columbia, was right to link queerness to the art of failure; we see Pulgar’s special attention to gender in their translation when they turn “me dice la maestro / leemos mamá oso papá osa” into “my teach/her says / let’s read mamá he-bear papá she-bear.”
“Pulgar’s translation coherently gives life to the spirit that seeks to knock down said cubicle’s walls: this is not a transcription but a transportation”
Halberstam points out that people with non-normative sexualities are accustomed to failure, but that this “may in fact offer more creative […] ways of being in the world.” He also tells us, “Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers.” Beyond the translation, these takes on failing to live up to expectations are faithfully reflected in Saturno’s collection. For those who negotiate with linguistics conservatively or prescriptively, the aforementioned twists of gender are no synonym for victory. The climax of the story-in-verse, “soy niña niña niña” [“i’m a girl girl girl girl”] in the face of the childhood pressures that force our first identifications, in the face of the apparently banal circumstances that set the course of our destiny starting in infancy, as well as the cutting lines that follow, “es hora de la cena / y el pan es el pan / y el vino es el vino” [“it’s time for dinner / n the bread is the bread / n the wine is the wine”], imply a need to be patriarchal, Catholic—it seems una pan or una vina is beyond our conceptual limits—that limits any and all exploration. estimado representante contains a naive and poetic experiment, primed for childlike wonder, in a cubicle of stereotypes. Pulgar’s translation coherently gives life to the spirit that seeks to knock down said cubicle’s walls: this is not a transcription but a transportation.
So, when we read dear parent or guardian, the English-language version of the collection, we read a literary translation: a translation whose goal, as Kwame Anthony Appiah would say, is to produce a piece of writing whose relationship to the linguistic and aesthetic conventions of its readers’ culture reflects those of the original text. But Appiah points out two possible activities—two genres (or genders), let’s say—within this variety of translation: (1) seeking to write a literary work in and of itself, whose value “depends very little on what it tells us about the culture from which the object-text it translates has come,” and (2) through glossaries and annotations, coming up with a text that serves the purposes of literary education. And it’s not easy to place Pulgar’s version of the collection within either of these categories. They comment aptly in their translator’s note on why they decided on this approach to the poems’ fluctuations between conventional Spanish and local flavor: “As a fellow Venezuelan immigrant, I couldn’t dream of not writing out the bastardized word plátana.” There is a certain liminality here, not just surrounding the didactic and the radically aesthetic, but also in relation to the gender identity that defines estimado representante. The text and the translation evade all simple definitions; they take confusion as their muse.
It’s clear, then, that Pulgar feels they have no choice but to imprint their own identity on the English re-elaboration of Saturno’s verses; after all, how couldn’t they when, from the translator’s nonbinary gender, from the poet’s position as a trans man, their personal experiences form the most solid possible bridge with which to generate words and phrases that are intimate, sincere, real? T.S. Eliot famously wrote, “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”—which is to say, the clear presence of the poet’s style and values corrupts the poem—but Pulgar shows us that progress rather requires that we bring vulnerable voices into the chorus. Without the wet stamp of their personality on Saturno’s book, their translation would be a mere mold, a mere stone.
“Traduire, c’est trahir,” goes the famous saying on the art of moving between languages. But Pulgar, in this exercise, shows us how translating can be—and sometimes must be—trans-telling. A form of failure that is necessary if we are to dig tunnels under grammatical walls. A path from an examination/account of childhood to a radical affirmation of the self, of roots that are unique but might sprout up anywhere. A bridge between tradition and openness.
Saturno’s verses are as creative—an astute reaction to the limits of the language we practice every day—as they are frank. Pulgar’s, respectively, are responsible and rare: not only in how they follow the original’s fragility, especially in terms of gender, but also in how they conscientiously convey the intimacies of the body of one’s own, queer and displaced, through the power of the written word. If we take Pulgar’s translation as a failure, we must clearly redefine this term in the most positive light: not as error, but as essence. I hope Saturno’s poems and Pulgar’s versions will push us to appreciate more critically the art of translation within the literary circles of Latin America—or to turn our backs on canons, free to find joy in the language and angst of the new.
