Synesthesia (noun) The description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally describe another.
I don't know any Greek, which is a shame. I don't know Spanish either, but I know less Greek than I do Spanish so I have chosen something by a Spanish poet to translate today. Not just any poet and not just any poem, mind you, but a sonnet by the last poet of Spain's Golden Age, the first great poet of Spanish America, Mexico's very own Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz.
To go into any lengthy biographical detail of this astounding poet would derail my purpose just now (though all the authors I mention here have excellent information). I was in close proximity with a book several days ago ("reading" would be a lie; let us say I was "looking" at it), Poesía Erótica: siglos XVI-XX, and I found a sonnet by Sor Juana in it. Even though it was sensual in nature it was also highly spiritual. Willis Barnstone insists that is the case with her work. He states: "[to] read Juana Inés as a primarily confessional poet (which she was not) is to deprive a seventeenth-century baroque artist of her imagination" (Barnstone, 66). And here I must pause and give warning. I am treading on dangerous grounds. It is something to which Sor Juana herself had a lot to say about those of us with limited knowledge in a subject and what a threat we might present to others. She writes particularly about people full of hubris, arrogance, pomposity, who gather knowledge simply to sound impressive on the subject. She says:
"And I add he is even better (if stupidity is a qualification) who has studied his bit of philosophy and theology and has a smattering of languages, for therewith he becomes a fool in many branches of learning and language, his mother tongue not offering room enough for a great fool" (Trueblood, 230).
A Great Fool! I do not wish to be such a person, but when it comes to translating I am afraid I might reflect more of those qualities than I know. Why translate in a language I am not skilled at? Simple: I love the words, even if I don't know 100% of their meanings. However, by following the path of other translators I can arrive at versions of my own. What is important isn't so much that I can carry on a conversation in Spanish, it is that I can pick out the best words in English to help the poem sing in a new language. Here is Sor Juana's sonnet in question:
Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo,
imagen del hechizo que más quiero,
bella ilusión por quien alegre muero,
dulce ficción por quien penosa vivo.
Si al imán de tus gracias, atractivo,
sirve mi pecho de obediente acero,
¿para qué me enamoras lisonjero
si has de burlarme luego fugitivo?
Mas blasonar no puedes, satisfecho,
de que triunfa de mí tu tiranía:
que aunque dejas burlado el lazo estrecho
que tu forma fantástica ceñía,
poco importa burlar brazos y pecho
si te labra prisión mi fantasía.
I spent hours this morning simply reading the poem out loud. I could not tell what it immediately said, but I did not exactly care at first. It was the power of the poem that blew me away; the terrible passion.
So at the end of this morning in 99% humidity I went down to my university library and found three different English translations: Barnstone's, Alan S. Trueblood's and Margaret Sayers Peden's. Now I add my name to that list:
Return to me, shadow of my darling,
obsession of the one I most cherish,
luscious dream for whom I'd gladly perish,
sweet lie that makes this life so exhausting.
If all your wooing is like a magnet
that pulls on the dull steel of my body,
why do you bother with love's subtlety
if you will so soon betray me, bandit?
But you cannot, once you're satisfied, boast
of me that it was your tyrant's passion:
you might have escaped the narrow noose
I hoped to snare you with, fancied ghost,
little do I care if you deceive me, seduce
me, when my passion shall be your prison.
It was strange to see how divergent the different translations were. The sonnet's rhyme goes: ABBA CDDC DEF DFE. Of the three poets, Barnstone was the only one who kept to the original rhyme. Barnstone's was also the translation that seemed to have the freshest play with words. Still, there were several directions where I felt the translation could have gone in different ways. Again, this has more to do with gut feelings than a mastery of the craft, having one word in Spanish bring up associations of completely different sorts in English.
Let us take the first word of the first line in the sonnet, detente, which my dictionary simply translates as "hold." As an expression to a lover, even a metaphysical lover, "hold" seems lacking. The English word sounds vaguely militaristic and lacks the sort ofsummoning, dramatic expression that could draw the reader in. To cry out in urgency at a false love, to plead from the soul, requires a stronger voice. Turning to other translations, we have, "don't leave me" (Barnstone, 93), "stay," (Peden, 183) and "hold still" (Trueblood, 81). It is of interest to note that while the other two poets place the command in the same place Sor Juana does, in the beginning of the poem, Trueblood uses it as an end rhyme, thus losing some of its urgency.
In the next stanza, even though she has just announced that she is willing to die for this love, that without it life is, penosa, "exhausting," she questions whether she can ever get away from it as well. To her, all this wooing is a like a magnet which pulls on her pecho de obediente acero, "the dull steel of my body." The literal translation is "my obedient steel breast;" however, in order to keep the rhyme I was trying for I changed "breast" to "body," which I felt still kept the original essence intact. She then uses a curious word to describe her paramour, fugitivo, which Barnstone and Trueblood leave out of their translations altogether and Peden calls simply, "fugitive" (Peden, 183). Nonetheless, while it is a faithful translation of the word, "fugitive" always has a desperate flare to it to me. Fugitives have no choice but to run away while bandits are one-step beyond our ability to control and take the law into their own hands.
Finally, although she acknowledges that her lover is fundamentally, completely, utterly false, this does not seem to bother her as one would expect. The last six lines declare that though this person escape from the snare she set, el lazo estrecho, she will allow no conceit, bragging, swagger be heard that the two of them were lovers. In deed, even if escape seems sure her lover is forever caught since, si te labra prisión mi fantasía, "my passion shall be your prison," or, as Barnstone puts it, "I've got you locked up in my fantasy" (Barnstone, 93). I suppose if this is a spiritual poem, then she is dealing with one fickle god.
In a way I am sad I translated the poem, since now I know the meaning of each word I cannot go back to my original naivety when I was happy with the words for simply being what they were. Still, I am content with what I have done. It is not a light thing to be a Great Fool and if I misrepresented anyone, I am sorry. It was, however, an exquisite ride.
***
Work Cited
Barnstone, Willis. Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (1993)
Peden, Margaret Sayers (trans) Poems, Protest, and a Dream: selected writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. New York, NY, USA: Penguin Books (1997)
Trueblood, Alan S. A Sor Juana Anthology. Foreword by Octavio Paz. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1988)
