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🦋 Learning a new voice
So the first thing I am reading by Roberto Bolaño is the new book of poetry, The Romantic Dogs. The poems are delight, sparsely elegant, the author's voice clear and engaging. I find that I have not yet constructed an authorial persona to associate with this voice, so a lot of my reaction to the readings so far has been seeing who this voice reminds me of -- for instance there are some lines in the title poem that sound very distinctly like Robyn Hitchcock; "El Gusano" is reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's poetry (as I said before); the structure of "La Francesa" (especially its ending) is most similar to Ferlinghetti. I expect I'll find plenty of other referents as I continue to read, eventually they should gel into a new author for me to carry in my head... Here is a passage that's puzzling me a little. See what you think. The poem "Resurección" begins and ends as follows: La poesÃa entra en el sueño
como un buzo en un lago.
...
La poesÃa entra en el sueño
como un buzo muerto
en el ojo de Dios. Healy translates this as:Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver in a lake.
...
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver who's dead
in the eyes of God.
But this seems to me to miss the parallelism. "Dead in the eyes of God" is a lexical unit -- it is making the phrase "en el ojo de Dios" into a modifier for "muerto" -- but what I was thinking as I read the Spanish was, the "eye of God" was what the dead diver was entering into -- it was playing the same role that the "lake" was playing in the first sentence -- so I would have translated it more like Poetry slips into the dream
like a dead man diving
into the eye of God. (Also I would have said "into a lake" in the second line.) Is this a misreading?
posted afternoon of Sunday, April 5th, 2009
➳ More posts about The Romantic Dogs
➳ More posts about Poetry
➳ More posts about Roberto Bolaño
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Translation
➳ More posts about Writing Projects
➳ More posts about Projects
➳ More posts about Mistranslation
Over the past few months reading your blog I've been surprised on how much translators change original texts. It's hard to believe it's because of misunderstanding the original lenguage (I mean, they do it for a living! they must understand it!), so my guess is that their main focus is making texts flow in a similar way to the original, even it that means changing meanings, and maybe (hopefully!) based in a deep knowledge of the original writer's work.
That said, I'd translate the text like this:
Poetry slips into the dream
like a dead diver
into the eye of God.
I mean, he's dead, so he can't dive, just slip!
posted evening of April 5th, 2009 by Jorge López
Right -- that is better than "diving into the eye of God". Thanks, good to see I'm not imagining things...
posted evening of April 5th, 2009 by Jeremy
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