00000I approach the self-obliterating ecstasy of translation with trepidation. The more so

because my own language derives from a Europe whose history of military and economic

conquests deprived so many other cultures of their indigenous languages.

00000I may hope that my own translations are less colonial raids into other languages than

subversions of English, injections of new poetic forms, ideas, images, and rhythms into the

muscular arm of the language of power, but I know they are both.

00000I look to translations to refresh American English.

00000When I myself translate, I work to introduce into American English some of the

essential and distinctive qualities of the language from which I’m translating. Not only its

image repertoire and subject matter, but the sequencing of its sounds, the rhythmic pulse,

the distinctive syntax, and the more subtle suggestions of resonant relations. In a good

translation, the original is veiled, but it doesn’t disappear.

00000The maverick Progressive Era writer Mary Austin became convinced that

environmental rhythmic patterns are translated into the physiology of people attuned to

them. So the prosody of the Gettysburg Address, as she reads it, expresses the rhythms of a

man who spent many hours splitting rails.

00000When children die in rural pueblos in Mexico, they are sometimes buried with silk

handkerchiefs over their faces. It is thought that worms, respecting silk because it is a part

of them, will refrain from eating a child’s face.

00000When I translate Mexican poet Pura López Colomé, I try to make a line that is

equally flexible and propulsive, one that might accommodate the architecture of successive

clauses that modify perceptions in process, actively, without dragging, so that when a

sentence ends, the lineal arrangement and the syntax and the rhythm all conspire to draw the

reader forward. This is part of the contour and momentum that I feel in her poems in Spanish.

00000I am not above inventing rhyme or wordplay in translation where there is none in

the original in order to make up for wordplay or rhyme that is lost elsewhere. But a

translator can justify such “recoveries” only as acts of faith, by translating not individual

words, but the poem as a whole.

00000Chaucer’s attention to the rhythm of the French alexandrine surely inspired his own

shift of convention from tetrameter to pentameter verse lines.

00000Emily D, #842: The Fox fits the Hound—

00000As a translator, I try to make something equivalent, not equal.

00000Petrarch, himself a translator as well as a poet, observed that what the translator

writes should be (in Nicholas Kilmer’s version) “similar, but not the very same; and the

similarity, moreover, should be not like that of a painting or statue to the person

represented, but rather like that of a son to a father, where there is a shadowy something—

akin to what painters call one’s air—hovering about the face, and especially in the eyes, out

of which there grows a likeness that immediately, upon our beholding the child, calls the

father up before us.”

00000The thoughts that are expressed to me by music that I love, wrote Felix Mendelsohn,

are not too indefinite to be translated into words, but on the contrary too definite.

00000In an oversized notebook, Picasso translated the poems of Gongora into remarques,

figural embellishments across the page and in the margins of the poems.

00000Even mistranslations have spurred significant developments. The supposedly newly-

discovered poems of 3rd century warrior-poet Ossian—in translations forged by Scot

prankster-poet James MacPherson—fueled Joseph Herder’s Romantic re-conception of

German identity.

00000And like Herder, the American poet Ezra Pound launched a new literary movement

stimulated, in part, by translations based on a mistaken interpretation of the nature of the

Chinese ideogram.

00000In contemporary Mexican poet Pura López Colomé’s art, wordplay is an integral part

of the intended meanings of the poems. When she writes, in “Los Cachorros” (“The

Cubs”):

0000000000Siluetas que se arrastran

0000000000por el mármol,

0000000000el mar del mal,

0000000000la mía entre ellas

--the words might be translated to stress semantic meaning as:

0000000000Silhouettes that drag themselves

0000000000through the marble,

0000000000the sea of evil,

0000000000my own among others.

00000The colors of Giotto’s painted mountains are derived from crushed stones excavated

from those very mountains. Just so in translation: words are obliterated to allow for new

words suggestive of more and less than the original meanings.

00000But what would be lost in a literal translation of Lopez-Colome’s lines is essential to

the poem in Spanish. In English, we lose the rich sounds in Spanish, the repeating r’s, m’s,

and l’s. Even worse, the deformation of mármol into its constituent near-phonemes, mar and

mal, introduces a Kabbalistic inquiry, one which is central to Pura López Colomé’s poetic

project, one which links the sounds and spellings of words to orbits of mystical, moral, and

spiritually-and-imaginatively transformative possibilities.

00000Friederich Holderlin rendered an entirely literal translation of Sophocles’ Antigone,

word for word. And Louis Zukofsky translated classical Greek poems homophonically (and

not always regardless of literal meaning).

00000In 1944, prior to “D Day,” the BBC broadcast to French Resistance fighters a code

based on a phrase from Paul Verlaine’s poem, “Chanson d’Automne.” The first line,

translated as “The long sobs of the violins of autumn,” announced that a British and U.S.

invasion was imminent. On June 5th, a phrase from the second stanza, “Wound my heart

with a monotonous languor” alerted the French Resistance fighters to the invasion at

Normandy and allowed them to coordinate their own attacks.

00000In my translation of Lopez-Colome, I choose to alter the literal meaning in order to

stress an equivalent degree of linguistic play and complication. I translate the lines as

0000000000Silhouettes dragged

0000000000through granite hills,

0000000000grey-nets of hell,

0000000000mine among them.

00000Perhaps that doesn’t quite work either.

00000Are you aware that the glow generated by light-producing organs on the undersides

of some fish acts to countershade them, erasing the shadow cast when they are viewed from

below against the lighted water above?

00000Just so, the translator must disappear.

00000Plutarch’s translation of an epigraph on a statue of Isis: “No mortal hath lifted my
veil.”

00000Lopez-Colome co-edits a literary magazine called Gato por Liebre. Cat for Rabbit.

You ask for a rabbit, but they give you a cat. How would you translate that into English?

00000I asked for water, you gave me gasoline.

00000The translator may try to disappear that the music of the author’s mind might be

heard anew, and though something is heard and something does appear, it appears to and is

heard by only you, reader. And only you may judge it.

00000Cunt: from queynte, aka bele chose, “lovely thing”.

00000I think John Ashbery might be referring to the meeting between author and

translator when he writes, “In the presence of both, each mistook/ The other’s sincerity for

an elaborate plot.”