READIN

Monday, December second, 2013

🦋 The Domestication of Lightning

Another Infrarealist poem: this is by Guadalupe Ochoa, one of the few female Infrarealists.

The Domestication of Lightning
by Guadalupe Ochoa/ tr. Jeremy Osner

the lightning of touch announces
the downpour engendered in our embrace
fiery water of our bodies

posted morning of December second, 2013: 1 response
➳ More posts about Writing Projects

Friday, November 29th, 2013

🦋 Enseñame a bailar

Here is a poem of Bolaño's from Pájaro de calor. (It is quoted in Hiram Barrios' fabulous essay on the infra poets, Visitando al infrarrealismo.)

Teach me to dance
by Roberto Bolaño/ tr. Jeremy Osner

to draw my fingers through the cottoncandy clouds
to stretch out my legs tangled up in your legs...

(translation redacted, write me if you'd like to see it)

posted evening of November 29th, 2013: 1 response
➳ More posts about The Savage Detectives

Sunday, November 24th, 2013

🦋 ¿Quiénes son los «verdaderos» Detectives Salvajes?

Once son ellos, once, ferozmente poetas:
Hernán, Roberto y Montané, chilenos;
el ecuatoriano Nieto Cadena;
de la patria de Sandino: Beltrán Morales;
el peruano Enrique Verástegui,
el también peruano Jorge Pimente;
Luis Suardíaz, del primer teerritorio
libre en América: Cuba, cubanamente;
más tres meshicas que son, qué remedio,
Orlando Guillén, ¡impresente!,
Mario en el camino de Santiago
y Julián Gómez... once son, pues,
y, ¿se fijaron?, ni una sola hembrita,
con tan buenas, guapamente sabrosas que son
y que escriben como Afroditas que surgieran
no de un pantanoso taller literario
sino de un bárbaro océano de pantalones de mezclilla.

--Efraín Huerta

It's eleven, eleven, ferociously poets:
Hernán, Roberto and Montané from Chile;
Ecuadorian Nieto Cadena;
from the land of Sandino, Beltrán Morales;
Peruvian Enrique Verástegui,
and Peruvian too, Jorge Pimente;
Luis Suardíaz, from the first-ever free
territory of the Americas: Cuba, Cubanly;
and there's three Meshicas, what else can I say,
Orlando Guillén, absent!,
Mario on the road to Santiago,
and Julián Gómez... so they're eleven,
and notice? Not a single chick,
for all the lovely, sweet things out there
that write like Aphrodites sprung
not from some fetid literary workshop
but from a savage ocean of blue jeans.

posted afternoon of November 24th, 2013: Respond
➳ More posts about Roberto Bolaño

Sunday, October 6th, 2013

🦋 Soñando caminos: We change the language by what we say.

(with thanks to Leilani for the lovely restatement of Machado's theme)

Wanderer, these your steps
make up the path, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no path:
you make the path by walking.
By walking you make the path,
and turning back your gaze you see
the trail you'll tread upon no more.
Wanderer, there is no path:
just wake upon the sea.

— Antonio Machado: Proverbs and poems â…©â…©â…¨

I've had this poem on my mind quite a bit recently. I thought I would spend a little time writing about it — I'd like to examine its face-value meaning, the metaphor of the poem, and the value of the metaphor, how it speaks to me; and incidentally I'd like to put a little effort into defending my translation, which is fairly different from the standard translation of Betty Jean Craige, in Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, 1979. I think (obviously I think) it is an improvement on Craige's translation; it seems worthwhile to elaborate on why I think that way — how my translation speaks more clearly than Craige's. But that should be a secondary point really; what I really want to talk about is how it is that I find this poem to speak to me so clearly. It is nice as well to get a chance to quote a couple of poems that I've translated and written over the past few years. I think it will make worthwhile reading, see what you think.

Let's reread Machado's first lines. Your steps make up the path, and nothing more. (The "path" dang it, not the road — roads are engineered and built by crews of men over the years, not "made by walking". And a wanderer is hardly confined to the roadways.) A path is a most personal thing. And what Machado's metaphor here is, is the path of one's life: it's not mapped out before one but made up of one's footsteps, the trail one leaves through life. Which one will tread upon no more. The obvious question here to ask is, "But isn't that pretty obviously true?" and yes, of course it is, and has been pointed out before; but an obvious truth that seems perennially to need restatement — one that comes to me at least as a revelation every time I hear it expressed, and doubly so when it is expressed so elegantly as Machado puts it here.

I came to this poem pretty early in life. I can't remember what group it was but I seem to recall its having had an anthemic quality in some vaguely lefty/artistic circles I had some contact with in my teen years — possibly I remember it from Peace Camp, though in what context is not quite clear.* It has an elemental feel to it, something so clearly correct and valuable that it is hard to know where to begin. (And this quality is, obviously, so strong that it shines through a slight roughness of rendering like Craige's, which is the poem I remember from my youth. It was not until I was talking about it with a friend last year and he brought up the objection vis-a-vis roads that I realized a better translation was needed.) I heard it again recently in Oaxaca, a man played guitar and sang it prior to a poetry reading.

Machado's clarity of voice as he addresses you, asks you to reexamine the ground you're walking on, gives you the reader a new point of perspective. Likewise another restatement of this metaphor, this obvious truth — poems of a slightly different form but closely related theme are a few of Pablo Antonio Cuadras's about el maestro de Tarca. The first and eighth poems in his series both feature el maestro sitting up on la Piedra del Águila, telling his disciples what is fitting and just. The maestro's seafarer plays much the same role here as the wanderer (in the desert?) of Machado.

One thing I love about Machado's treatment of this universal truth is how easily it can be parodied, and how the parodies can ring clear, can bring out new shades of meaning in the original. What at first seems paradoxical can with a slight twist of the lenses be made to appear blindingly, obviously the case. Take for instance Leilani Hagberg's line in the title of this piece, or my expansion on it:

For language (while it is of course a facility created over hundreds (or tens?) of thousands of years by all of humanity in concert) has as highly personal a quality to it when considered in the particular case as does one's path. A sillier (and a fun, and rewarding, to be sure) parody, and one that indeed suffers from the same symptom of misunderstanding as does Craige's version, is:

Let's look at another fragment of Machado's concerned with paths and wanderers; this one from "I keep dreaming of pathways":

Not quite sure how to bring out what it is that I find so compelling about the central metaphor these pieces all have in common, why it rings so clear to me and (I hope) to the reader. (—Not to take any unwanted liberties.)

* Also Ellen reminds me to mention Myles Horton and Paolo Freire's book We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (1990).

posted morning of October 6th, 2013: 3 responses
➳ More posts about Poets of Nicaragua

Sunday, August 18th, 2013

🦋 Stories in Mirar al agua: cuentos plasticos por J. Sáez de Ibarra

Occasionally in the past I've blogged about books that I come to with no idea at all in advance, what to expect. Sáez de Ibarra's Mirar al agua is one such. I first came upon the author's name and the title a few weeks ago when Marta Aponte recommended it. This is always a fun way to read, completely free of expectations.

The first couple of stories I've so far just skimmed the first lines of, not found much of anything to draw me in. "Las Meninas" (left) I find fascinating, a story told entirely in dialog, extremely fast-pased. I find it renders very nicely in English. "Una ventana en Via Spermazella" and the next few stories seem very interesting but have not been quite able to crack the code that will get me into the stories. Especially intriguing among these is "La Poesía del Objeto."

"La superstición de Narciso" is just spellbinding. More experimental than anything else thus far. "Escribir Mientras Palestina" (which I'm midway into now) is a nicely engaging piece of first-person narrative about a visit to Palestine.

posted morning of August 18th, 2013: Respond
➳ More posts about Mirar al agua

Saturday, August 17th, 2013

🦋 Metamorphoses

Wow, there is some great poetry in this issue of Metamorphoses. Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Hilst, Orhan Veli, Benny Andersen (whose "Kierkegaard on a bicycle" is going to be my new favorite poem for at least a little while),...

posted afternoon of August 17th, 2013: Respond
➳ More posts about Projects

🦋 Metamorphoses

Another Zupcic story, another Osner translation: "Tescuco, Italy" is printed in the Fall 2013 issue of Metamorphoses, the journal of the five colleges faculty seminar on literary translation.

posted morning of August 17th, 2013: Respond
➳ More posts about Slavko Zupcic

Tuesday, August 13th, 2013

🦋 A house at Mount Irazú

A house at Mount Irazú

posted evening of August 13th, 2013: 1 response
➳ More posts about Poetry

Saturday, August 10th, 2013

🦋 dialog

posted morning of August 10th, 2013: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings

Friday, August second, 2013

🦋 Pardon

Decir que uno no entiende
la conversación en que se está
sumergiendo
decir que Ay, no puedo
escuchar
estos poemas que ando leyendo
que los poemas en que se esté
dispersando/ sean ininteligibles
sería últimamente
no justificable
y por éso, debo
pedir
perdón

posted evening of August second, 2013: 1 response

Previous posts about Translation
Archives