Compiled by UA Staff

 

Originally published in the University of Arizona Poetry Center Newsletter Volume 17, #2, Spring 1993.

A central event in the Tucson Poetry Festival XI was a panel discussion on poetry and translation. What follows is an excerpted version of the poets' remarks. It is important to note that only a portion of each participants' comments is included and that surely something has been lost in the translation from fuzzy audio tape to print—most notably, the comments by both Olga Broumas and T. Begley, who sat farthest from the microphone, were inaudible on the tape. The Festival is sponsored by the Tucson Poetry Festival Committee, Inc., a nonprofit organization supported by many private and government sources. This year's Festival was directed by the eminently capable Karen Falkenstrom.

Ofelia Zepeda:

I'm going to begin my remarks with a list of words and these words have something in common besides just the sound. After the sound I'll say a little something about the meaning. One of the areas I am primarily concerned with is moving meaning sort of back and forth between two languages, the first being my primary language O'odham and the second language being English.

ju:kï (noun) rain
ju:k (verb) raining
ju: (verb) (it) rained
ju:khim (verb) had been raining
jujku (verb) raining intermittently, sporadically
si:bañ (verb) sprinkling, only some rain
s-wa'us (adj) damp, moist from rain or natural moisture
s-ju:k u:wĭ (adj) smells like rain
jukiabig mașad rain month, season, typically July through August
s-ke:g ju:kl mașad nice rain month, November and part of December
jujkid to ask for rain
jujkida the act or ceremony of asking for rain
jukĭto to stop raining
jukș to get rained on, unintentionally
s-ju:kig lots of rain in one location, the mountain, etc
s-ju:kima rainlike, probable it will rain
s-ju:kimagĭ full of raindrop-like spots, the spots of rain that you get on your car

If you listen to the list, there is this "ju" form that is sort of the base in the O'odham language meaning rain. Then you have all these variants. It's not that we have, say, twenty words that MEAN rain. We have 20 to 50 or more possible words that we can use to talk about rain. Many of us can go back and forth between languages, and when we have the luxury of having somebody else list these words or us in little lexicons we can look for them. We don't always carry them in our own memories because we don't use them all the time, but they are there. And this is one of the areas that I've been particularly interested in—the fact that you have, for instance, in an American Indian language like O'odham, a very, very rich lexicon that is there and it works very well whether it's simply for description or else creative force—it's there. The problem is trying to move over into another language and to represent it as well. Often times we get only an approximate. Often times we hit it right on the nose. And those are the chances that you take… The creative part is a whole other deal. Mainly because, at least for the few of us who have been writing in the native language here, we're not so much worried about translation, not so much making sure that our forms or our poetry or our songs are available in English. We are concerned just mainly with creating it in the first place. And then translation or having a version that's available in English is secondary and is a whole additional prospect, another road that we choose to take if we want.

Alberto Ríos:

I just learned something interesting and I want to share it. Linguists (who I don't talk to that often) by using electrodes (and this is why)—linguists by using electrodes on the vocal chords have found that English has tenser vowels than for example Spanish or other Romance languages. The body itself speaks a language differently. So that moving from one language to another is more than translating words. It's getting the body ready, it's getting the heart ready along with the mind. I've been intrigued with this information. It addresses the physicality of language in a way that surprises at least me. In a sense we forget that words aren't simply what they mean. They are also themselves physical acts. I often talk about the duality of language using the metaphor of binoculars, about how by using two lenses one might see something better, closer—more detail. The apparatus, the binoculars, are of course physically clumsy, as is learning two or three or four languages and all the signage that this entails. They're clumsy. But once put to the eyes a new world in that moment opens up to us. And it's not a new world at all, it's the same world but we simply see it better and therefore understand it better.

When I was three or four, my parents bought a house in what would later become a small suburb of Nogales, Arizona on the border of Mexico. My father was born in Mexico on the border of Guatemala, my mother was born in England. I had languages. As we kept driving out to watch the house being built, my mother got to make a number of choices regarding details among which was the color of the various rooms. My mother, when asked what color she wanted the kitchen (this was Nogales in the fifties), said to the workers who were all Mexican and who spoke little, probably no English—she said to them, because she was trying to learn Spanish and because she wanted a yellow kitchen, she said “limon." Well, the workers nodded, "Yes." But when we came back the next day the kitchen was painted bright green like a small jungle. Mexican "limones," my mother found out, are small and green—that color exactly. It wasn't a mistake. So that's the color the walls stayed for the next eight years. She said it was a reminder to us all that there was a great deal to learn in the world. You might laugh at first, but after eight years you start to think about it! And she was right—it was a perfect small example of that other way to see things and for eight years the kitchen for us was perhaps in a very large way an even better place than school.

Rosemarie Waldrop:

I want to start out with the statement by the Brazilian poet, Haroldo De Campos, who once said, "Translation may not have a muse, but it has an angel and that angel is Lucifer!" And that was impressive, you know, and so I at first thought he means of course translation sheds light on another culture. And he meant that a little bit. But he went on to say, "When I translate I feel like Lucifer and I say, 'Non salviam'… I will not serve." And what I will not serve—I want to get this straight—is the seemingly natural relationship between form and content in which content is considered dominant. And then he very reasonably admits that he will serve the form, but he will not serve the form considered as a rhyme scheme or something like that, but form as intentionality, as the whole way the poem relates to its language and culture. And I thought this is wonderful and this is exactly how I feel about it. Because it also shows you that the  unit of translation, of literary translation, is not the word. It's not the line. It's the whole poem. And you have to sort of deal with the whole poem at the same time at every moment even when you try to concentrate on a little detail. And this may be hard but it's also the translator's salvation, because you can never do what the original does right in the same spot. But if you think globally about the work, you can do the kind of thing the original does maybe in a different spot and thereby get something of the same way this poem wants to speak to the people in its culture. You can get an echo of that. I think there is another devilish aspect to that and that is this really requires a whole lot of destruction. I think of the process of translation really as breaking down the original, attacking it and taking it apart, and sort of melting it down to something like the genetic code behind it. And then I write from my understanding of this "genetic code" of the original and at this stage the translation process is very much like writing my own poem, because I have a nucleus from which I build something up. And I think this gets at another thing. I think I try to translate out of envy. The things that I have translated were works that I was envious as hell, you know, as a writer—why didn't I write, and why I couldn't I ever write this! And then I found a way of writing it and that is translating it.

Carolyn Forche:

I want to give you just a little background. I sort of fell backwards into translating. I had what writers endure as a dry period? silence? block? I couldn't work at all—and I made a very naive assumption. I was offered an opportunity to translate a Salvadoran woman poet. I was 27 years old. I had studied Spanish in college. This Salvadoran woman poet had never been translated into English and I had the opportunity to do this. And I actually thought that it would be very like writing, in other words if I can't write my own poems then I'll write someone else's in English. I admire the way Rosemarie Waldrop worded that much more than the way I'm wording it. I thought, well, it would be easy because I had studied Spanish. All I had to do is buy a fat Spanish/English dictionary and look up all the words I don't know. That's what I thought translation was. And so I sat down and began to try to do that. And very quickly I experienced another difficulty, which was that this language of Claribel Alegría's had suffered the impress of an extremity which she had endured and therefore her language had endured, and that impress was the extremity of political repression in a military dictatorship. So the whole of the poem that one can piece together again—Walter Benjamin in "The Task of the Translator" has the image of the vase, or the urn. And he says you can pick up all the pieces and glue them back together and it will look something like the vase once looked, but all the cracks show and it won't hold water. That's how, I think about the poem after it's been translated. So I was trying to pick up all the pieces of this ruined language without having understood or assimilated what had ruined it. I was a North American with no knowledge of what had ruined it. By ruin I mean what had marked it, what had made this language what it is.

So I was giving up. It was hopeless. I said I can't tell what's happening in these poems. For example, she would have "mutilated hands" and I thought this was metaphorical, this was figurative language. This guitarist had suffered and could no longer play his guitar because of some emotional pain, not recognizing of course that she was bringing into the poem the mutilated hands of Victor Jara whose hands were mutilated publically in Chile after the coup of 1973. So I didn't know these things—so I decided to go and stay with the poet in Spain for the summer. I'd never been to Europe so this was very exciting. Maya, the poet's daughter, said, ''Well you can ask Mommy if you have questions about the poems and she'll explain it all to you"—well, Mommy tried to do that. And it's a very mixed blessing to have the poet with you, especially if the poet knows the language you're translating into but not extremely well. Claribel would make suggestions to me like, "Why don't you have these hills be rolling, you know, actually moving like rolling hills." And I said, "Claribel, everyone has also thought of that many times. It's a cliché in English, Claribel."So this is how we would do it and sometimes I would come up with something and she would say, "I like that better, maybe I should change it." And I would say, "Don't change anything!" We would go back and forth like this. And it was beautiful—the relation, but it was also very problematic because there was a human being there as well as a human language. There were two speakers—Claribel and her language. And they didn't always understand each other. Neither did I understand her or the language very well, but slowly I made this book; it's a very naive translation because it still thinks of translation as possible in that dictionary, lexical, denotative sense.

Jerome Rothenberg:

I'm certainly in agreement about translation being a defining characteristic, virtually a synonym for poetry and the poetic act. Particularly if one sets oneself the task of getting away from, however political it may be, from the merely personal confessional in the poetry—the self-absorption that's been taken to be almost a mark of what poetry is, almost a defining notion of that.  So translation becomes one way to address that trap that poets seem to be so often the victims of. And I suppose to myself in a rather grandiose way, I can recognize—and maybe many of us share this—a desire to bring the poetries of the whole world together intact into a new vision of poetry and perhaps from that into a new vision of life and for that, in any sense of the word, translation becomes absolutely necessary. You can't function without it—but we don't function without it. And we all as human beings are engaged forever every day in all our social interactions—we are engaged in acts of translation and it doesn't have to be literary to be translation. Again maybe I am part of a generation which has sought to break down those distinctions between what we do as poets and what we do as human beings.

Two or three years ago I was asked to contribute to a book edited by Brian Swann on the translation of Native American literatures because, in a very different way from Ofelia, I have been involved with things like that. And what I wanted to make clear was that—this is part of another translation project—I wanted to say something about translation and the nature of translation and why one is involved in that and to create some context thereby. I will read just something from the opening to that essay which I subtitle "American Indian Poetry and the Problematics of Translation" because I think that translation is finally a problematic enterprise.

"There is a mystery about translation. There is a mysticism about translation and a mystery. It all goes together finally and I would be wrong when dealing with a poetry as grounded in the sacred as the Indian to treat translation as merely literal, a mechanical act for which the rules only need to be laid down and the intended results will follow. I do not mean that we work without precision or without some rules or limits, without reference beyond that to the source from which translation comes, but that we must also work in ways that do not lend themselves to easy explanation. If we translate poetry, we should be ready, as with poetry, to break the rules which keep us from the poem itself. My poetry like my life has proceeded over the years by various acts of translation, not only that part where translation is evident, from text to text so to speak, but equally where the work is personal and introspective, or personal and looking for a link into a given social nexus. I speak to a stranger and he asks me to repeat myself in different words until he gets the drift of what I am saying. Do you mean this? Do you mean that? We ask each other. It isn't much different with a friend except that we take our common speech and common terms for granted. As a poet too I find myself engaging in translation every moment that I write. Experience, perceptions, thoughts and feelings brought into a language that we take as common and that isn't. The table in the poem is not a table, this pipe is not a pipe, as the painter Magritte—well didn't say—but he put into the painting. The shock of feeling, standing in the empty field one summer morning in Treblinka is translated into words. The language of the dream is translated into speech. The speaking voice translated into writing and then back to speech again. Myself translated to myself, from there to another who will read or hear me, so that every act of reading is finally an act of translation, a balancing between what is there and what I read or misread of what is there. This is the continuum into which translation proper enters, the move between one human language and another, or within a single language, from dialect to dialect, or time-the-past to time-the-present."