Cenizas
Alejandra Pizarnik
Ashes
translated by ZJC
La noche se astilló de estrellas
mirándome alucinada
el aire arroja odio
embellecido su rostro
con música.
Pronto nos iremos
Arcano sueño
antepasado de mi sonrisa
el mundo está demacrado
y hay candado pero no llaves
y hay pavor pero no lágrimas.
¿Qué haré conmigo?
Porque a Ti te debo lo que soy
Pero no tengo mañana
Porque a Ti te…
La noche sufre.
The night shattered into […]
The poem Canto from La última inocencia/ “The Last Innocence” (1956) would be considered a ditty if ditties were this dark, this wrapped up in death, catastrophe, torture. Martínez, writing in Salgado’s anthology, analyzes Pizarnik’s obsession concerning death:
As attested by her poetry, death haunted her in the image of a female in many guises […]
A few hours sleep and then more translations. Z. Nelly Martínez, writing in Salgado’s anthology of Spanish American poets, notes that before Pizarnik committed suicide, she left behind, “a few words scribbled on a slate that same month, reiterating her desire to go nowhere ‘but the bottom,’ [which] sum up her lifelong aspiration as […]
I have finished translating Garcia Lorca for now. He is always a joy, but there are over a dozen collected works of his poetry in English and even as I labored with my beloved English-Spanish Dictionary, I wondered: does the world really need yet another translation of Federico? So I wandered out yesterday […]
The last poem of the Gypsy Ballads, is a retelling of the biblical rape of Thamar by her half-brother, Amnón. This is a highly problematic poem, for what Garcia Lorca does here, I argue, is to present us with a sympathetic view of Amnón, that it was his overpowering sexual desire that caused him […]
The last of the three poems based on a saint, San Gabriel (Sevilla), appears whimsical at first glance, but there is a sinister quality to the whimsy. Two figures parade their way through the poem, Gabriel, saint and archangel, who pays a visit to Annunciatión de los Reyes, a gypsy woman, to tell her […]
Even though Garcia Lorca’s San Miguel (Granada) left me feeling a tad unsatisfied, San Rafael (Córdoba) makes up for it in dollops. First, there is Federico’s admiration for the lustrous Moorish architecture found in the city of Córdoba, along with the erotic imagery and a discreet exchange of Niños de cara impasible/ en la […]
This is the first poem by Garcia Lorca I have come across an expression or reference I have not been able to translate. He writes: efebo de tres mil noches,/ fragante de agua colonia/ y lejano de las flores, which I translated as: “An efebo, 3 thousand nights old,/ fragrant with cologne,/ yet […]
It’s only a speculation, but the images I have in my head of the hot-tempered Spanish might have a little to do, in part, with this poem.
Garcia Lorca wrote of Reyerta, “[the poem] expresses the mute struggle latent throughout Andalusia and Spain among groups that attack each other without knowing why, for mysterious […]
Perhaps, next to Romance sonámbulo, La casada infiel is the most famous poem from the Gypsy Ballads. I recall one of the first Dead Poet readings Ruelaine put on (this is 1992 or 93, I believe), Joyce Benvenuto came as the Gypsy of this poem, dressed with two cartridge belts and a sombrero, looking […]
What do we want out of poetry? Wrong question? Right; too voluminous in desire, too “we.” It is always easier to deconstruct than construct what we want.
What do I want out of neo-triad, quasi-shamanistic verse? A sense of other wildness? Order of a theophany type? More “cavort,” […]
I was sent a copy of Enrique Morente’s Lorca, his take on a dozen different poems by Federico, set to his powerful and deep cante, flamenco singing. A poem like Romance de la guardia civil española requires a Deep Song to carry it through. Even if the events of the poem are of […]
Sarah Hillman, as you might have noted from earlier blog posts, not only is a cracker jack1 Certified Nurse Aide and painter, but also a damn fine translator of Afrikaans. I don’t know how many Afrikaans readers I get to this blog on a daily basis, but in the event that someone with gobs […]
This photo was taken by my mother of the three of us; my father, myself and my brother (on the uke), singing in a little cabin up on the western shores of Beaver Island, Lake Michigan, June, 1996. I’d like to say we were singing gypsy ballads, but it was probably songs from the […]
Like the poem Ballad of the moon, moon the motif of kidnapping of a child by supernatural forces continues; however Garcia Lorca has introduced a now explicit erotic subversion. The poem takes place in another nocturnal setting, down by an un anfibio sendero, an “amphibious tidewater,” the seashore, where Preciosa is playing with […]
“Ballad of moon, moon”1 is a simple poem, though there is Garcia Lorca’s preoccupation with the end of his childhood innocence, martyrdom, the world of myth and dream; in other words, it is a poem of the subconscious. Loughran (1994) notes:
1. Forge The trade of the farrier and metalworking in general are tradionally associated […]
Of all the translations of the title of this poem, Romance de la pena negra, Loughran’s (1994) “Ballad of The Black Anguish,” is the closest to getting the same nuance as “Black Dread.” However, to understand why the more common “Ballad of Black Pain,” while an accepted, literal, traditional translation, doesn’t seem to work […]
Lorca’s La Monja Gitana, The Gypsy Nun has been examined as a Freudian metaphor for repressed sexuality; which, considering Federico’s closeted self and the nature of repression in the Catholic Church, really isn’t that much of a stretch for the imagination.
The idea of the nun, sewing bizarre and sensual designs into her lemon-colored cloth […]
My good friend Sarah from South Africa surprised me about a week ago with a translation of one of my poems, the mermaid sonnet full/ from the waves, into her native Afrikaans. It was one of the poems I submitted to the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Contest, with the understanding it wouldn’t be published anywhere […]
I have spent the morning trying to find an Armenian translation of Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat other than what I am working on. My tutor, Lucine, told me that she was familiar with the poem, having read a translation of it in high school. She could not recall who the translator was, or […]
“A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than any place else in the world.”
– FGL
Here is the second part of Garcia Lorca’s ballad concerning the gypsy, Antoñito el Camborio. It is an interesting device the poet uses, having a character within the poem talk to the poet as if […]
One down side to having to flee off to work at 3 in the afternoon each day is when you’re on a roll, say with one’s blog, it hurts having to stop in mid-sentence. Having said that, I went back to the translations I was working on when I abruptly broke off yesterday and […]
One of the reasons I am keen on translating this poem is the sense of bright drunkenness Rimbaud crafted. I have been reading and re-reading “Arthur Rimbaud,”1 while one song plays endlessly on loop: “believe it now/ a wave is breaking/ I’ve been tracking you across the sky … look at you your hands […]
Translating a work into two languages simultaneously is hard work. I have been examining six French to English translations, Simpson, Sorrell, Mason, Spitzer, Cameron and Hill; all of them lacking. With the exception of Spitzer, what I take objection to is the various ways translators have butchered the poem simply in order to […]
Disclaimer: Ekaterina Evseyeva is a friend of mine, a Yakuts scholar and poet from Siberia. I had written to her during my research for various forms of international sonnets. She translated an article written in Russian by T.N. Vasilyeva and sent it to me. Translation, discourse and copyrighting being what they […]
“And I am a pretty/ piece of flesh, I am a pretty piece of flesh”; I got the news last night when I got home from work, the anthology is: “alive.”1 Yes, ISBN: 0595370594 is a reality. What, might you ask, is ISBN: 0595370594?
About six months ago a group of Lansing […]
All this translating gives me a heady feeling; as if I am gobbling on ballad mongering; omnivorous with Modernism and chewing up rhapsodism. There are several Armenian artists I would like to find on the Internet, not because I like to gab and blab over e-mail but that I am always curious if my […]
“… I think the world is so complicated that I can’t be so presumptuous as to justify pessimism or optimism, so I’ll stay agnostic. But I like waking up every day and I think breakfast is a fantastic thing.”
Moby, as quoted in Time magazine, 10/24/05
Thinking about the comments I made in yesterday’s post, I might […]
“I know you’re in there - I can smell your brain …” Return of the Living Dead (1985)
I suppose if I were forced by powers beyond my control to come back as a zombie, a flesh eating one might be of some interest. Yet it seems so stereotyped, commonplace, platitudinous. And why […]
“It is very certain that the desire for life prolongs it.” — Byron
Կյանքի տենչը անշուշտ երկարացնում է այն: — Բայրոն
Yesterday was Thanksgiving in Canada. Over the weekend I went to my first Tim Horton’s. It’s good to know one’s own weaknesses, and one of mine is caffeine and industrial, refined sugar […]
Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O, my Best Beloved; I have been reading blogs of late. I find it interesting that many poets post short lists of what they are reading; however, the one thing we do not do very well as blog-poets and thinkers […]
In an earlier post, the Introduction to my translations in fact, I presented a poem, “Narcissus’ Lament,” translated into German, French, Afrikaans and Eastern Armenian. Over the last week, however, I was able to get the poem translated once more. This time into Swahili; the work of Alphonsine Busabusa from Burundi.
“Narcissus’ […]
Apparently in early September the “Seven Things I Plan To Do Before I Die” list was circulating the poetry blog world as I keep finding more and more people posted it. Artichoke Heart’s #6 wish is: “See the Jellies: Living Art exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.” I like that; it calls up […]
Around five years ago, while living in Las Vegas1 I fell in love with Carcharodon carcharias, the Great White Shark. It happened in the same manner other people fall in chocolate, Jesus and pet rocks “Obsession,” might be a better word. Sharks appeared in my dreams, my poetry, even my magazine subscriptions. […]
It was about a year ago I started my search for the Armenian Sonnet. It was a description of the work of Vahan Tekeyan (1879-45) by Diana Der-Hivanessian, poet and translator, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: “… his painstakingly honed sonnets have earned him a reputation as a visionary” (page […]
One of the aims for this website is to generate a new home for translations. The whole concept of the power of good translations was brought home to me during one of the conversations held at the 2004 Dodge Poetry Festival at the Duke Farms. I attended “The Mysterious Life Within Translation” […]