Skipping, skipping, skipping

I'm now skipping over three Nobel winners because of the "read it already" rule.

Camilo José Cela (1989) is perhaps an answer to those who think the Prize only ever favours lefties, or those who have been persecuted by their own government. Although his novel La Colmena was banned, he otherwise seems to have been - at least - comfortable in Franco's Spain. The wikipedia entry suggests he informed on fellow writers, and he seems in general to have been fairly unpleasant. I've read some of La Colmena and some of his travel writing. He'll continue to be useful as a reminder of how drab isolationism can be.

Naguib Mahfouz (1988) is more worth a look. His novels are anti-drab: sprawling stories of life in Cairo, written in what I presume is an Arabic style of extravagantly flowery description. He seems to have negotiated the pressures of writing in an Egypt undergoing transformation and the challenges of nationalism and fundamentalism quite gracefully but not without personal danger. Of these three writers he's the one I'd recommend. Try Adrift on the Nile, if only because the translator is Frances Liardet. I met her once. She was lovely.

Joseph Brodsky (1987) was a Russian-American poet and essayist. His poems seemed to feature quite regularly in the magazine Encounter, which I used to see in our school library. It was financed by the CIA. Anyway, the poems seemed quite dull, and as they were, it seems, self-translations from the Russian, he qualifies for that exemption too. Also, and I can't stress enough how trivial this point is, how could anyone want to read the poetry of a man who looks like this?

So I can happily go back to 1986 and Wole Soyinka, even though I fear that this is another one who'll suffer from being a playwright.

Nobels: 1990: Octavio Paz

I think I had heard of Octavio Paz before I started this project but I certainly hadn't read anything by him. I've been reading rather randomly through this selection of his poetry, in a parallel text with translations by various people (and of varying quality - I'll come back to this).

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.