My Spanish reading level is just about good enough to read poetry, but the translations help with some of the obscure words. I'm enjoying the book very much, eventually. As with Walcott, the real quality seems to be in the longer works but his style is completely different. Heavily influenced by Eliot in his early works, the ones that enchant me most are those that were influenced by visits to India. There's a kind of extended imagism about them, where time is slowed down and non-linear while the language spins around the subjects. These poems need many readings and I think I'll be carrying this book around for some time.
In this project I'm largely ignoring poetry in languages I don't know, largely because with poetry I don't trust translations (I'll come back to this). But it's also struck me that so much understanding of poetry depends upon familiarity with the tradition it lives in. So for example you'd miss a lot in Bret Harte if you weren't familiar with Walt Whitman. The only other Spanish poet I've read in any depth is Pedro Salinas but even that connection is useful and helpful here: there's a similar kind of music in the language, even though Paz's style is much looser and (as it happens) Whitmanesque. Conversely, it can be instructive to see the ways in which non-anglophone poets adopt and adapt the influences of people like Whitman and Eliot.
But let's turn to the translations. There are some very odd choices made by the translators here and since I haven't banged on about translation theory for a while, I'll give a few examples. The poem Viento Entero (translated as Wind from all Compass Points) begins with the phrase El presente es perpetuo - a phrase that acts as a kind of refrain through the poem. Paul Blackburn translates this as The present is motionless, for some reason avoiding the obvious perpetual (and the alliteration that goes with it). Maybe he thinks this is a more evocative concept. Maybe he thinks the alliteration is clunky. Maybe he's right (he isn't) but it's not a translator's job to improve a text.
The poem, like many of Paz's, is formally loose. There's certainly no rhyming scheme and no fixed metre. Lines are indented at will presumably with the intention of highlighting key words. Blackburn generally respects and preserves that, but again feels the need to add something. One line reads [los ninos] Rezan orinan meditan. He gives this as [the boys] Pray pee meditate and those extra spaces are completely unnecessary.
But that's my theory of translation: translations should be as close as poss to the original, losing as little as poss but adding nothing. Maintaining strangeness, even if that might mean keeping infelicities. I know many disagree. But if a translator-poet feels the original work needs improving the better strategy is to write your own poems, write them better.
No comments:
Post a Comment