READIN

Saturday, January second, 2010

🦋 Imagery

The old men lead their sins to pasture,
this is their only job.
They release them during the daytime, and pass the day forgetting,
and in the evening go out to rope them
to sleep with them, warming up.

-- from "The Old Indians"

posted evening of January second, 2010: Respond
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Monday, April 26th, 2010

🦋 Odiseo en Nicaragua

Pablo Antonio Cuadra's poem "El barco negro" (in Poets of Nicaragua) inspired me to buy the book Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea, which is Grace Schulman's selections and translations from Cuadra's Cantos de Cifar, because I was so dissatisfied with White's translation. A really powerful poem, but the translation is nothing at all...

Well: the book arrived in the mail today; I'm looking at it and enjoying Schulman's translations by and large. But her selections not so much: she did not include "The black boat." Rats... Ok, so here is my first attempt at a translation of a poem.*

El barco negro Cifar, entre su sueño oyó los gritos y el ululante caracol en la neblina del alba. Miró el barco     â€”inmóvil—     fijo entre las olas.     â€”Si oyes     en la oscura     mitad de la noche     â€”en aguas altas—     gritos que preguntan     por el puerto:         dobla el timón             y huye Recortado en la espuma el casco oscuro y carcomido, (—¡Marinero!, gritaban—) las jarcias rotas meciéndose y las velas negras y podridas              (—¡Marinero!—) Puesto de pie, Cifar, abrazó el mástil     â€”Si la luna     ilumina los rostros     cenizos y barbudos     si te dicen     â€”Marinero ¿dónde vamos?     Si te imploran:     â€”¡Marinero enséñanos     el puerto!     Â¡dobla el timón     y huye! Hace tiempo zarparon Hace siglos navegan en el sueño     Son tus propias preguntas     perdidas en el tiempo.

The Black Boat Cifar, inside his dream he heard the cries, the ululating conch out in the mist of dawn. He saw the boat     â€”immobile—     fixed among the waves.     â€”If you hear     from the darkness,     the middle of the night     â€”on high seas—     cries, cries that beg you     for the port:         turn your tiller back             and flee Outlined in the raging surf the boat's hull dark and eaten away, (crying, —O Seafarer!—) the broken rigging swaying and the sails black and rotting             (—O Seafarer!—) He held his ground, Cifar, he clung to the mast     â€”If the moon     lights up their faces     ashy, bearded, jinxed     if they ask you     â€”Seafarer, where you going?     If they implore you:     â€”Seafarer, show us the way     to the port!—     turn your tiller back     and flee! They set sail long ago They're sailing for ages, in the dream     The questions are your own     forgotten in the ages.

...A different selection of Cuadra's "Cifar" poems (an objectively better selection since it includes "El barco negro") is on offer at Pelele's blog, Muchacha Recostada. Also the whole book is online at turtleislands.net.

* Wait no, that's wrong. So, the next attempt in an extremely infrequent series of poetry translations by Jeremy.

posted evening of April 26th, 2010: 4 responses
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Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

🦋 Publication!

(Well not until next summer, but still...) I got word today from Words Without Borders that they love my translation of Réquiem and are going to publish it in their "Homages" issue next July. I'm tremendously excited about this! I remember a line of Edith Grossman's to the effect that the way to be a translator is to assert that you are a translator, to just go ahead and do it; and now I feel like I am a translator, like I am going ahead and doing it. I also heard from John Carvill of the brand-new site oomska that he wants to publish my translation of Pablo Antonio Cuadra's "Black Boat". This is great... I think I will look around for a new story to start working on, maybe something by Soledad Puértolas.

posted evening of September 23rd, 2010: 8 responses
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Saturday, June 4th, 2011

🦋 Fratres:

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time [are] not worthy [to be compared] with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected [the same] in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

-- The letter of St. Paul to the Romans
Chapter â…§: 18-22
King James version

For an epigraph, Pasos quotes from the Vulgate version of the above verses of Romans; but he prefaces the quotation with "Fratres:" -- "Brethren:", which is not part of these verses. Paul's letter is addressed to his brethren the Roman Christians, so this insertion makes good sense. And if you read Pasos' poem as a continuation of Paul's address to his brethren, then the familiar second-person plural is clear from context.

This morning I had what seems to me like a good idea for a non-literal translation of the poem's third stanza:

Give me a motor, a motor stronger than man's heart.
Give me a robot's brain, let me be murdered painlessly.
Give me a body, metal body without and within another metal body,
just like the leaden soldier's who never dies,
never begs oh Lord, your grace, let me not be disgraced among your works
like the soldier of mere flesh, our feeble pride,
who will offer, for your day, the light of his eyes,
who will take, for your metal, take a bullet in his chest,
who will give, for your water, give back his blood.
Who wants to be like a knife, like one no other knife can ever wound.

posted morning of June 4th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, June 5th, 2011

🦋 Un poema largo: imágenes dentro de las imágenes, imágenes construidas a partir de las imágenes

¿Cómo puedo entender el «Canto de guerra de las cosas»? Joachín Pasos me parece periodista incrustado en el ejército de la existencia...

Es un poema largo, 19 estrofas, 150 líneas, cada línea (casí cada línea) dibujando su propia imagen y cada estrofa surgiendo de estas imágenes en un cuadro complejo y múltiple. Todo junto es demasiado (para mí) para mantener...

Me parece que el mejor camino de entender el poema entero y también de traducirlo, es bien entender cada línea y cada estrofa, trabajar desde las raíces del árbol más bien que intentar todo en una vez comprender.

posted morning of June 5th, 2011: Respond

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

🦋 El poeta licantrópico

I find myself fascinated by Steven White's statement about Alfonso Cortés, Nicaragua's "poeta loco," that he "was prone to fits of violence that coincided with the full moon" -- I am finding in Cortés' poetry some beautiful fragments without its yet coming together for me as a whole. Inscribed on Cortés' tomb in León (adjacent to the tomb of Rubén Dario) is his poem "Supplication."

Time is hunger, space is cold
pray, pray: only supplication
can satisfy the longings of the void.

Dreaming is a lonely rock
where the eagle of the soul can build his nest:
dream, dream, dream the whole day long.

(I see a couple of references, in the few of Cortés' poems that White includes, to ether -- I wonder if he was a recreational user and if so, whether that had anything to do with his reputation for insanity.)

posted evening of June 26th, 2011: 2 responses
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Monday, July 4th, 2011

🦋 Brandished back against the lances of the sun

Source material for a poem I posted today in comments at Dave Bonta's Morning Porch -- this is from Pablo Antonio Cuadra's Songs of Cifar and of the Sweet Sea (which, happy day, I discover Tony Bigras of turtleislands.net has uploaded in full). Translation is my own, with reference to that of Grace Schulman and Ann McCarthy de Zavala.

Caballos en el Lago Los caballos bajan al amanecer. Entran al lago de oro y avanzan -- ola contra ola el enarcado cuello y crines -- a la cegadora claridad. Muchachos desnudos bañan sus ancas y ellos yerguen ebrios de luz su estampa antigua. Escuchan -- la oreja atenta -- el sutil clarín de la mañana y miran el vasto campo de batalla. Entonces sueñan -- bulle la remota osadía -- se remontan a los días heroicos, cuando el hierro devolvía al sol sus lanzas potros blancos escuadrones de plata el grito lejanísimo de los pájaros y el viento. Pero vuelven (Látigo es el tiempo) Al golpe enfilan hacia tierra -- bajan la frente -- y uncido al carro el sueño queda atrás dormido el viento.

Horses in the Lake The horses come down at daybreak. They enter into the golden lake, and on -- wave after wave the long arched necks, the manes -- into the blinding clearness. And naked boys are bathing their haunches drunk with light they're lifting up their ancient image. They listen -- ears perked up -- to the morning's subtle trumpet and they gaze on the enormous field of battle. And then they dream -- and glimpse remote effrontery -- rising back up to the days of glory, when steel met the sun's proud lances stallions white and squadrons silver the cries of distant birds and of the wind. But they return (Before the whip of time) And struck move slowly back to land -- they bow their heads -- they're yoked to the wagon the dream remains behind asleep the wind.

posted afternoon of July 4th, 2011: Respond

Saturday, July 9th, 2011

🦋 La Alegradora

Scattered throughout Cuadra's Songs of Cifar and of the Sweet Sea are eleven short (even "koanic") poems titled "El maestro de Tarca" -- these seem different from the rest of the text. They are printed in italics, and they all begin with the phrase "El maestro de Tarca was telling us" or "was telling me" or similar. I think these poems might be the framework around which the rest of the book is built... Not sure, but that is anyway an interesting idea. Tarca is not known to Google Maps; other Internet sources suggest it is on the island of El Carmen, off the western shore of Lake Nicaragua. Schulman translates "maestro" as "master"; it could also be translated "teacher". My impulse is to leave the phrase "el maestro de Tarca" untranslated.

I'm interested this morning in the ninth poem of this series, one which Schulman and Zavala do not include in their edition. It presents a few challenges for the translator; key among them is the term "La Alegradora". "Alegrar" is "gladden", so "alegradora" would be "someone who makes you happy" -- span¡shd!ct.com gives it as an archaic term for "jester". This is pretty clearly not the meaning intended in the poem; a little digging around with Google* turns up a blog entry from No-Nan-Tzin [you will get an adult content warning when clicking this link, you can safely ignore it], who tells us that "alegradora" is the Spanish rendering of the Nahuatl term "tlatlamiani", a prostitute in pre-Columbian Mexico.

Well: "prostitute" works semantically in the poem; but why did Cuadra not use "La Prostituta"? Was "alegradora" still idiomatic in 20th-Century Nicaragua? Is the usage intentionally archaic, hearkening back to ancient times (this seems likely)? I believe the Aztec empire included Nicaragua; so this is my working assumption, and I am going to leave "La Alegradora" untranslated. But if a Nicaraguan reader would recognize it immediately as meaning "prostitute", this may be a poor choice.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (Ⅸ) El maestro de Tarca me decía: La Alegradora con su cuerpo da placer, no con su recuerdo. Con la mano hace señas con los ojos llama, no con su recuerdo. La Alegradora es el puerto la tierra que sólo es del pobre en la noche.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…¨) El maestro de Tarca was telling me: La Alegradora gives you pleasure with her body, not with her remembrance. With her hand she beckons with her eyes she calls you hence, not with her remembrance. La Alegradora is the port is the land which the poor man only knows by night.

* The same round of searches also brought to my attention this ode by Aztec prince Tlaltecatzin, who praises his love as a "precious toasted huitlacoche". The original Nahuatl is here.

posted morning of July 9th, 2011: 3 responses

🦋 Lo desconocido

In the third "teachings of el maestro de Tarca" poem, the customary introduction is reversed: here Cifar is speaking to the teacher. This suggests to me that the other poems in this series, where el maestro is speaking "to me" or "to us", are told from the POV of Cifar.

The two main difficulties for me in translating this poem were the conditional tense of "juraría" and the parallelism in the final two lines. I'm not really sure what conditional tense does -- from its name it sounds like it has a similar function to subjunctive. Schulman translates "juraría" as "I would swear", which sounds ok, but makes me ask what the condition is. I am going with "I could swear" which sounds a little more natural to my ears. (As a weak bonus, "I could swear it" scans the same as "juraría" -- though in the rest of the poem, I am not doing much to preserve the metric pattern.)

The last two lines, el maestro's response to Cifar, are the koanic element of this poem. In the original there is a strong parallelism: "Lo conocido/ es lo desconocido." I am going with a literal rendering to preserve this parallelism even though I think it mangles the meaning of the words slightly. Schulman uses the wordy "That which is known/ is the unknown", which I think is slightly closer to Cuadra's meaning, but not nearly as pleasant to read.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (Ⅲ) Maestro, dijo Cifar, seguí tu consejo y crucé el Lago buscando la isla desconocida. Fui con viento benévolo a la más lejana, virgen y perdida Pero que yo conocí esa isla juraría! que su sonoro acantilado devolvió mi canto un día juraría! que era la misma mujer la que allí me esperaba casi lo juraría! Sonrió el maestro y dijo: Lo conocido es lo desconocido.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…¢) Maestro, said Cifar, I followed your counsel and crossed the Lake in search of the unknown island. I sailed with a gentle wind to its farthest point, untouched and lost But I knew this island I could swear it! her echoing cliffs had once already returned my song I could swear it! it was the same woman who was waiting there for me I could almost swear it! El maestro smiled and spoke: The known is the unknown.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£) Dijo el maestro de Tarca: Coge la cigarra del ala Al menos llevas en la mano el canto.

EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£) Thus spoke el maestro de Tarca: Seize the locust by its wing At least carry in your hand its song.

posted afternoon of July 9th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 The links of Tarca

Here are a few resources for the "el maestro de Tarca" poems and more broadly, Songs of Cifar and of the Sweet Sea. I will add to this list over the coming weeks if I find more that seem worth including.

• Sergio Ramírez, a member of Nicaragua's Academia de la Lengua, delivered a paper on El maestro de Elqui: la narrativa de Pablo Antonio Cuadra when he entered the academy in 2003. It is online at Ramírez' home page. A shorter version of the same paper is at La Prensa Literaria. Ramírez also has a short piece in Ancora from 2002, in which he seems to indicate that el maestro de Tarca is Cuadra himself.
• Folk musician Carlos Mejía Godoy recorded his album "Cantos de Cifar" in 1992. A few tracks are online at YouTube, and I found "El maestro de Tarca" (the first poem in the series) online at Radio La Primerísima.
• The full text of the book is online at turtleislands.net.

posted afternoon of July 9th, 2011: Respond

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