I try to be careful but I think anyone who gets me to think outside my box is a valuable ally, regardless.

However, I am curious about this statement of yours: “You take on a huge responsibility by publishing it on the web and calling it a translation, for people will google for Neruda and those poems and read them with trust that its a faithful translation.”

Not to be flippant but I thought only undergraduate students surfing the ‘Net to cut and paste essays for the next day’s assignment would take what I present at face value. Nowhere on my blog do I claim to have a mastery of Spanish and if I have not posted a giant red sign reading: “Caution, Amateur at Work!!” it has more to do with a misplaced fashion sense than anything else.

Perhaps it is the way I view blogs, especially poetry blogs, which seem often to be nothing more than sounding boards to complain about jobs, children or love lives (or lack there of). Sometimes there are drafts of poems that appear or even personal manifestos, but blogs all have a very “rough draft” presentation for me; they are very different than published magazines, both on-line and in print, which (to me) are rather well-prepared, professional, even technical, in what they present to the world.

But I could be wrong! Perhaps my view of poetry blogs is a tad cynical? If I took the approach that everything I presented had to be as professional as if it were going into an academic journal, I am not sure what I would do. Panic? Stop writing? Give up taking chances?

Believe me, if I had friends who were proficient in Spanish I would workshop my translations before posting them. Who wants to look like an idiot, cretin, simpleton even if it is all in good humor? But I do not have any friends who can help me, so I make do with what I have; this blog and enough honesty to say that I am new to all this. If I make mistakes along the way, so be it, but most of the time I do not really feel responsible for the entire Internet world if one or two people choose to misrepresent what I post here. Or should I? Hmmm … maybe I need to get that giant red sign sooner than I thought?

I have been working on Garcia Lorca’s Sonetos del amor oscuro for some time but logically, if I was to take the argument that I was only to work with “direct translations of words” then the end result will no longer be a sonnet. The rhymes do not translate in English. However, with a little “tweaking” I can still keep the essence of Federico’s poetry and keep a it a traditional sonnet. But am I breaking any taboos by doing this? Are all “translations” of formal poems really crude “adaptations”? If that is the case, poor Willis Barnstone! His wonderful book “6 Master of the Spanish Sonnet: translations and essays” really aren’t translations by that reasoning (but I still love what he did regardless).

I, personally, would rather read a good sonnet that might not be verbatim what the poet wrote but, in Emily Dickinson’s words, still “blew the top of my head off,” versus a bland translation that was faithful to the original but could not delight, sing, or rollick due to some fundamental dictum that prohibited us from doing justice to other’s words.

To begin with, though I am hungry to learn, I am a student here, an amateur. I state that over and over throughout my blog. I have never once pretended to have a mastery over any language. I do have some ideas and a lot of questions, though. What is, exactly, a “translation”? What is an “adaptation,” for that matter? Are they one and the same? We throw these words around as if there is an universal acceptance on what these terms mean, but I cannot find two people who seem to be in agreement. So let us say there are many different approaches to translating and the arguments Laura puts forth here are as just as legitimate as the ones I bring; this is a conversation, these are points of view.

I fall into the “Coleman Barks School of Translating.” When I read his versions of Rumi’s poetry I am there with that Sufi mystic. They speak to me in a way that other Rumi translations do not. I, too, want to burn with fervor, call on my Beloved, set off looking for my Shams. And not just me, but loads of people seem moved by Barks’ translation, full of sensuality, passion, duende. It could be argued that Barks is not being literal to the originals. But for whatever reasons, the translations of Rumi’s work by other (yes, surely more faithful, literal, traditional) scribes leave me cold. Why is that? Should I turn my back on Barks’ work because they are not as literal?

The more I think about it, the more the terms “translation” and “adaptation” seem suppressive, arbitrary, shortsighted. All translations, regardless of their “literalness,” are the work of another person, not the poet. Thus, to claim to “know” what the poet “meant” is a conceit. Perhaps because I grew up being frustrated at certain levels with the English language (my only tongue, in case you couldn’t guess) I am rather meandering when it comes to choosing my words. This can be both a strength and weakness, but I seem to like it in others when it comes to passing on linguistic information.

Take another Neruda translator, Stephen Mitchell’s rendering of “Gilgamesh.” He states in his introduction that he does not know ancient Sumerian, but wanted to bring the story to a modern audience regardless. Mitchell pointed out older translation of the epic poem were subject to social and cultural forces just like the rest of us (even ones by translators who were skilled in Sumerian) and thus the translators introduced to the poem the same fixed cadences and iambic rhyme schemes that almost all Greco-Roman poetry was being translated in at that time. Mitchell’s translations take those forms away. Is it a translation now? Is it an adaptation? What can I say? For me it functions as a translation; rhyming couplets were popular at one time, now they sound rather stilted. One can ask (like Barks) if Mitchell is being ethical, honest, literal to the original? No, he is not. It seems Mitchell sacrificed some of the poem’s original linguistic devices, structure, style to make it flow to the modern ear.

Is that problematic? I do not know. Laura, you take a rather fundamental (dare I say puritan?) stand on this business of translating. Your write: “you take on the responisbilty of representing the original, part of what you are translating is the duende poetry of the poem, the beauty of the poem—turning a great poem into a bad poem just for the sake of translating is a crime.”

No, I disagree. Rape is a “crime.” Killing another human is a “crime.” A bad translation? It is a sad statement of our culture that the act of presenting ones talent (however limiting in skill) or even simply educating oneself, in other words the art of learning in all its myriad of complex, perplexing, profound ways, has ever be seen as a “crime” (this borders on the grim world of Thought Police, a fascist system as there ever was, even if it the year 2006) — though I admit we do not treat our students with the love and encouragement they desperately need.

I will close on a remark I heard Philip Levine make this year in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at a reading with C.K. Williams. He was asked if a poet was afraid of producing bad poetry how could they ever move forward with their skills? Levine shrugged and said: “Go ahead, write bad poetry for chrissake, it’s not like your hurting anyone.” I think I shall take that stance as well. I am merely a student here, learning.

feliz ano nuevo everybody,
L.

I think river is a lovely word, maybe it would have worked as well in your translation. Does “creek” violate the spirit of the poem? Well, not to me…but that just tells me that I’m looking for the borderline in a different place than Laura is. If the translation fails on an aesthetic level, if using the word “creek” is not just imprecise but tone-deaf, then we’re back on more basic poetry-criticism-ground, and can have that discussion.

Similarly, I think a more interesting discussion is not, e.g., “La United Fruit Company (the original) is written in past tense, it is a historical poem, end of story” but rather: what does it mean for the poem to be shifted to present tense? In a sense, even knowing that the poem is written in past tense in the original, I find the present-tense version quite powerful. Maybe because it is now in present tense. Yes, Neruda wrote the poem in reaction to an event that happened in his time, now many years ago. And yet this poem could be written now. This poem didn’t happen: it is *always* happening. One might still argue that this shift violates the “reality” of the poem. And one might argue that it does not. I don’t know where this reality lives, or how to pinpoint in words how I know for myself when the subtler laws of meaning are broken, and when (again for myself) they aren’t.

I completely disagree with Marilyn Hacker saying a bad translation is better than none at all. As a translator, you take on the responisbilty of representing the original, part of what you are translating is the duende poetry of the poem, the beauty of the poem–turning a great poem into a bad poem just for the sake of translating is a crime–take Ben Bellit’s Neruda “translations”–consensuly agreed as awful “interpretations” But thousands buy those books and think that that poetry is Pablo’s poetry. It is not. Check out Alastair Reid’s translations, or “The Essential Neruda”–you can learn from them. Keep at it. Paz y feliz ano nuevo,

L.