To change the subject and in connection with some of the issues that we've been talking about concerning translation, here's an essay that I wrote on a poem by Vallejo --"Book of Nature." The article was published a year or so ago in Translation Review. Hopefully the footnotes won't be too squirrelly to read. But this is a look at the issue of translating culture in a specific instance.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.cm

				Vallejo's "Book of Nature"					


	Translation is a necessary art. At least I have always found my translations are impelled less by desire than by a sense of necessity.  To understand the original text, I must translate it. There is always a sense of criticism involved, for the failure of the existent translations is implicit in the necessity to translate. Every translator is, in a sense, a critic of all the other translators who have wrestled with the same text. One translates to rescue, to redeem, to illuminate what has been lost in the available translations. 
	Recently, I was impelled to translate a poem by César Vallejo, while  reading the provocative collection of essays, The Monstrous and the Marvelous, by Rikki Ducornet.  As a translator and longtime reader of César Vallejo, I was particularly interested in her essay, "Books of Nature: The Poetry of César Vallejo and the Boxes of Joseph Cornell."  The juxtaposition of Vallejo's work with the miniature boxes of Joseph Cornell seemed a fruitful one, and Ducornet's remarks were rich and insightful, for instance her sense that "so many of Vallejo's poems observe processes–cycles and trajectories of all kinds" or of Vallejo's work as  "nostalgic rage and passionate piercing together of a world in collapse."  The opening of the essay dealt with Vallejo's poem "El libro de la naturaleza," from The Complete Posthumous Poetry as translated by Clayton Eshleman and José  Rubia Barcia, a volume which received critical acclaim, including the National Book Award.  Ducornet used only the English translation in her essay, though I am including the original Spanish for the purposes of this essay:
El libro de la naturaleza

Profesor de sollozo–he dicho a un árbol–
palo de azogue, tilo
rumoreante, a la orilla del Marne, un buen alumno 
leyendo va en tu naipe, en tu hojarasca, 
entre el agua evidente y el sol falso, 
su tres de copas, su caballo de oros.

Rector de los capítulos del cielo, 
de la mosca ardiente, de la calma manual que hay en los asnos; 
rector de honda ignorancia, un mal alumno, 
leyendo va en tu naipe, en tu hojarasca 
el hambre de razón  que le enloquece 
y la sed de demencia que le aloca.

Técnico en gritos, árbol consciente, fuerte,
fluvial, doble, solar, doble, fanatico, 
conocedor de rosas cardinales, totalmente 
metido, hasta hacer sangre, en aguijones, un alumno 
leyendo va en tu naipe, en tu hojarasca, 
su rey precoz, telúrico, volcánico, de espadas.

¡Oh profesor, de haber tánto ignorado! 
¡Oh rector, de temblar tánto en el aire! 
¡Oh técnico, de tánto que te inclinas!
¡Oh tilo! Oh palo rumoroso junto al Marne!


	The Book of Nature

	Professor of sobbing–I said to a tree–
stick of quicksilver, murmurous
linden, at the bank of the Marne, a good student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
between the obvious water and the false sun,
his three of hearts, his queen of diamonds.  
	Rector of the chapters of heaven,


of the ardent fly, of the manual calm there is in asses,
rector of deep ignorance, a bad student,
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage
the hunger for reason that maddens him
and the thirst for dementia that drives him wild.

	Expert in shouts, conscious tree, strong,
fluvial, double, solar, double, fanatic, 
knowledgeable in the cardinal roses, totally
embedded, until blood spurts, in stingers, a student
is reading in your deck of cards, in your dead foliage,
his precocious, telluric, volcanic king of spades.

	Oh professor, from having been so ignorant!
Oh rector, from trembling so much in the air!
Oh expert, from so much bending over!
Oh linden! Oh stick murmuring by the Marne!
				(Poem 149)

Ducornet speculated about the meaning of the poem: 
One wonders–is the foliage unreadable because he cannot decipher its message? Or are the leaves of Heaven's Book devoid of meaning?  If hunger for reason drives the tree-man wild, nevertheless he thirsts for that madness because knowledge contains the possible promise of transcendence–as does love. Perhaps, the Queen of Diamonds is here revealed as Sophia–she who exemplifies wisdom. 


	Once I went to the Spanish,  I began to see that Ducornet was interpreting elements that existed only in the English translation, not in  Vallejo's original. I began by  looking up each individual word in the poem, with all the variant definitions.  This process of looking up even the most obvious, simplest of words, is essential to translating a poet like Vallejo,  who as Ducornet aptly put it, pares "language down to the bones...What is revealed is the marrow of language." A comparison to the original lead me to see immediately that the "queen of diamonds" is not in the original. Spanish card decks are different from their American equivalents: instead of clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds, the Spanish deck has cups (or chalices), clubs, swords,  and gold coins.  
	 When Eshleman translates the original "su caballo de oros," to "queen of diamonds," he's not translating the Spanish but translating to the idea of the English equivalent. He's saying that the Spanish "horse of gold coins" is equivalent to the American  "queen of diamonds."    Perhaps, in a multiple choice test in a Spanish class, a teacher would prefer this answer,  but this ‘equivalency' interjects a completely foreign element into Vallejo's poem. By assuming that the translator can assume that equivalent meanings exist not only linguistically, but culturally, an alien and  foreign connotation is introduced into the poem.  In Vallejo's poem there is no queen, no feminine presence.  Ducornet, a subtle and provocative interpreter of texts, is here lead astray by an ‘accurate' translation. Indeed, in our American culture, the queen of diamonds may have any number of connotations, all the way from the Hagia Sophia to the material girl of Madonna or Marilyn Monroe's "diamonds are a girl's best friend," and yet this element and all its connotative freight is completely absent in Vallejo's poem. Ducornet was right to wonder, and, appropriately, at this point, she leaves the oddly muffled and obscure effect of the poem to discuss more general tendencies in Vallejo's poetry. Eshleman himself  knew better, writing in his end notes:
 "The literal meaning of this line is: ‘his three of cups, his horse of golds.' In American playing cards, these figures correspond to ‘hearts' and ‘diamonds,' and the ‘horse' to the ‘queen.' the cups are not really cups, but chalices and the ‘golds' (sic) figures of the sun."
	The "golds" are, in fact,  often gold coins, and the card called "the horse" is not just the animal, but a young aristocratic man on horseback.  The Spanish equivalent of the "Ace" depicts a single large chalice, club, gold coin, etc., and the next ranking card is a king, and then the young man on horseback, and then a similar young man on foot.  There is no Queen, no feminine element. Leaving the information to an endnote allows the poem to wander away freely,  taking that extraneous feminine element with it, wherever it goes, misleading any number of perceptive readers and writers.  Eshleman and Barcia are consistent in their translating the card  suits , for instance in "Mocked, acclimated to goodness. . ." "doblo el cabo carnal y juego a copas," is translated to "I round the carnal cape and bet on hearts," and "así/ se juega a copas" is  "thus/ one bets on hearts," even though, again, Vallejo's poem is devoid of the romantic freight of this image of betting on hearts, and, by romantic, I mean, the weight of sentiment and personal feeling, of romantic and bohemian pose, as well as the literary philosophy of Romanticism.  "To round the carnal cape and bet on cups or chalices" evokes a very different wager, the sense of betting upon the chalice of communion or the cup full of wine, an image much more connected to Vallejo's work with its preoccupation with the collusion and collision of the sacred and divine. 	


	Surely, a minimal obligation of  the translator is to be aware of the connotative weight of his or her own language and to introduce no foreign elements into the poem. Furthermore, to introduce such an extraneous element is to make Vallejo's work incomprehensible, to disturb the organic connection of its imagery and symbols and development over time, to make his work appear to be "wild," while at the same time linking it to archaic terms or the cliched symbols of our own cultural assumptions.  For instance, to make the horse a queen in this poem breaks the linkage to all the other occasions when a horse appears as an image in Vallejo's work. In Trilce, we see in LVIII, a poem located in the cell, "Apéome del caballo jadeante, bufando/ líneas de bofetadas y de horizontes" "I dismount the panting horse, snorting/lines of whips and horizons" or in LXI, when the speaker returns home on horseback to a darkened house, how the horse is almost God:
Dios en la paz foránea,
estornuda, cual llamando también, el bruto;
husmea, golpeando el empedrado. Luego duda
relincha,
orejea a viva oreja.


God in the foreign peace,
sneezes, as if calling also, the animal;
sniffs, pawing at the paved stone. Then doubt
neighs
pricks ears for the living ear.

In LXI, the speaker is alone with this horse, this beast of burden, the animal upon which he rides, which is both another presence and a symbol of God and his own body.  Similarly, the "three of cups," the combination of the chalice with the number three, is recurrent in Vallejo's work.  The three is always that number of the trinity, the cup is always the chalice but not only of divine love but of the profane. So these images as they exist in the original are deeply rooted in Vallejo's work. To change them to the three of hearts with its suggestion of sentiment and personal feeling or the queen of diamonds with its connotations of feminine idealization confounded with wealth is to  alter Vallejo beyond recognition. 
	The assumption that the ‘accurate' translation is the culturally equivalent one is, I think, erroneous, and becomes most problematic in translating the idiomatic. It's not the first time I've run into the issue of idiomatic equivalency. In my translation of Trilce's XIX,, I was faulted for not translating ‘Quemaremos las naves!" as "Let's burn our bridges!"  And it's true that in a Spanish class, the preferred answer, the equivalent in American English, might be "to burn our bridges," but that idiomatic equivalency ignores the fact that, in Spanish, it's literally to burn the naves, of the vessels that brought the Spanish to the New World, and of the churches, those embodiments of the faith.  "Burn our bridges" doesn't exist in the Spanish language, literally, or imaginatively, and so to ‘correctly' translate these phrases as equivalent injects a foreign element into the poem, an intrusive element from another culture or viewpoint. This becomes particularly questionable when the poem is, as Vallejo is, a rewriting of the Nativity scene, where:
El establo está divinamente meado
y excrementido por la vaca inocente
y el inocente asno y el gallo inocente.

Penetra en la maría ecuménica.
Oh saqngabriel, haz que conciba el alma,
el sin luz amor, el sin cielo,
lo más piedra, lo más nada,
		      hasta la ilusión monarca.

Quemaremos todas las naves!
Quermaremos la última esencia!

The stable is being divinely urinated
and defecated by the innocent cow
and the innocent ass and the innocent cock.

Penetrate the ecumenical mary.
Oh saintgabriel, face what the soul conceives,
the lightless love, the skyless,
the stoniest, the most nothing,
	              up to the monarchial illusion.

We will burn every nave!
We will burn the ultimate essence!

Vallejo's poem which ends "Se ha puesto el gallo incierto, hombre," "The cock itself has doubted, man," riddles  the very origins of the Catholic faith and church.  In the context of his poem's preoccupations, to interject the American equivalent  "let's burn all our bridges"  is to interject a foreign element that disrupts the context of his poem. Furthermore, the translator by  translating the idiom, on the assumption of cultural equivalency,  creates a poem in English that would indict an English poet; what English poet rewriting a bodily nativity would suddenly shout out "let's burn all our bridges?"  Yet, the translator may suggest that Vallejo's sensibility was so wild. Part of the perception of Vallejo as a ‘wild' man is partly the result of  translating his work into the wildest English possible, without regard to the context of the individual poem or the context of his body of work, and how the particular image or idiom may develop in that body of work. The idea of translating the idiomatic to a cultural equivalent is particularly troublesome with a writer like Vallejo who often uses idioms incorrectly, with the wrong article, the wrong number, etc., altering the idiom in some way to suggest a speaker who wishes to speak conventionally and yet cannot. By doing this, Vallejo returns the idiom to its etymological roots; the expression seems to break down, suggesting that these idioms, which after all are the way of expressing what we all assume to know in common,  are in reality deeply questionable and devoid of meaning. To then translate the idiom to its conventional equivalent in another language is to essentially undo Vallejo's work. 
	But to return to the translation of  "The Book of Nature."	There are other questions in the translation, for instance,  "la calma manual que hay en los asnos" "the manual calm there is in asses" is not just "manual" but also "easily handled," "tractable, pliable." With  "pliable, tractable or easily handled,"  Vallejo would be offering an oxymoronic sense of the animal, because, as anyone knows whose has worked with these creatures, asses are intractable, noted for their stubbornness. And, again, these "asses" appear elsewhere in his work, as we see in "the innocent ass" of the Nativity scene, or in his earlier work in Los heraldos negros, The Black Heralds, where he exhorts a mule driver "arriero, que detrás de tu burro santurrón,/ te vas . . ." you who behind your sanctimonious ass, go away. . ."  
	 I also wonder at the translation of "el hambre de razón" and "la sed de demencia" as the hunger and thirst for reason and dementia, respectively.   The translation seems to shift toward the American/English worldview where we are used to thinking in terms of the hunger for reason or the thirst for dementia.  But the more important issue with this translation choice is ignoring the syntactical repetition. The entire poem uses this syntactical form as part of its structure, its pattern of linguistic repetition,  "professor de" "rector de," etc, and Eshelman and Barcia follow that form until this point.  It is true that "tener sed de" is usually translated as "the thirst for," but should we ignore the syntactical repetition?  Is  Vallejo  talking about anything so pedestrian as the hunger for reason or the thirst for madness, or  rather the starvation/famine/hunger of  reason and  the extreme craving/thirst  of dementia?  Furthermore, "razón" may also be "justice," "truth," or "words," or "speech, "a very different hunger, and "aloca" can be not only crazy in the sense of wild and reckless, but dazed, stunned by a blow or a loud sound, giddy, dizzy, disoriented, a very different thirst.  
	Similarly in the line  "de haber tánto ignorado, " translated as "from having been so ignorant," "ignorado" means to be ignored, obscure, unknown.  Having translated the previous  "honda ignorancia"as "deep ignorance," Eshleman and Barcia translate  "ignorado" as "ignorant." Here, two different words are translated as equivalent, though previously with "de",  the same word was translated to two different meanings. Of course, in a certain sense, it is inevitable that this should happen, for instance, the Spanish prepositions often correspond to several English propositions, and the translation that may suit one usage may not suit another. One of the difficulties of translating Vallejo is the way in which he creates multi-layered meanings; it's perfectly possible to translate some of his lines into three or four accurate readings.  My argument is that  the deciding factor should be the context of the poem itself, that the translator must always lean toward Vallejo's context.  Here,  the line could be translated "Oh professor, from having been so obscure!" which gives a multilayered and ironic meaning.  There are several ways in which the translation seems to overlook currents of meaning that exist in the original. The "hojarasca" translated as "dead foliage" is also excessive verbiage, anything useless and meaningless particularly in terms of language or promises.  Vallejo is not talking about just the condition of ignorance but about the condition of deliberately willed obscurity in the poem, of the intelligence lost, obscured, in excessive, useless words.  So just as I would argue that the syntactical strategy of the poem would require that the ‘de' be translated consistently throughout the poem, here, I think the context of multilayered meanings in the original would argue for a translation that sounds out that meaning, rather than merely repeating the drum beat of ignorance. 
	In the third stanza "en aguijones" could be "in stingers," but it could also be "in spurs" those particular Latin American spurs that have one point, or "in goads" and "in pricks."  Here, Eshleman and Barcia prefer the biological definition as "in stingers, " as if we were talking about jellyfish or scorpions, etc.  This choice  seems to prefer a more narrow, and perhaps more startling, definition at  the expense of missing  the poem in significant ways. One possibility might be to prefer "thorns" as the phrase follows upon the "cardinal roses."  "In spurs" takes us back to the "caballo de oros," and, obliquely, connects to the "tractable asses" where we have this preoccupation with driving something forward.  The image of spurs, goads, pricks, plunged in all the way, until it bleeds, is an image that recurs in Vallejo's work.  It is an sexual image, but one that suggests identity itself as a wounding in time,  a mere functionality of origin, of how life is driven forward, of how the animal drives itself forward in time.  So the animal–horse or ass–is driven forward by spurs or goads, whereas the individual animal–man or animal–is driven forward in time by the goads and pricks of sexual desire and reproduction.    This is undoubtedly a sexual image. And that's the other current that Eshleman and Barcia's translation  seem to miss, even while it interjects this hint of sentimental/romantic imagery with hearts and queens and diamonds, the gambling of love.  In this poem, sexuality is presented not in terms of gender and relationship, of personal feeling and loss, but as mere functionality, "totalmente metido, hasta hacer sangre, en aguijones," "wholly inserted, entirely stuck in, plunged in totally" "until there's blood, in pricks." In the book of nature, sexuality is only a  process, without romanticism or gender.  The earlier "palo de azogue" or "stick of quicksilver" also plays upon this.  Similarly the voice of the stick, full of rumors,  seductive but unintelligible,  and the "te inclinas" ‘bending over' of the expert  also evoke this sexuality.  The final image of the poem is of this tree as if it were a stick, not only beside or near the Marne, but "junto" joined to it, united with it, together. "Junto" is a term that Vallejo uses throughout his work to portray the two lovers joined together. It is a kind of image of sexual union, a stick embedded in the Marne, this fixed desire to embed and propagate, stuck in, stuck beside,  in the flow of time. 
	The poem is also double, twofold in nature.  Ducornet in her reading of the poem assumes that book of nature, the tree, the professor, the rector, the good and bad student are one identity. This passage follows immediately after her questions about the Queen of Heaven and seems to flow from the confusion engendered by the translation of the poem. Since a speaker does exist in the first line "he dicho a un árbol," "I said to a tree," I think it could be posited that the professor of sobbing, the rector, the expert, are identified with the tree of life, the book of nature, but that the "I" is the good student, the bad student, a student, reading in your deck of cards.   A speaker reading the cards of his identity, his three of cups, his horse of gold coins, his telluric, volcanic king of swords in the dead excessive ornamentation useless words trash of the leaves of the tree of nature.  There is a duality in the poem, not only in the pairing of good student/bad student as Ducornet notes, but a duality of subject, the I/you, the dead tree leaves of nature/the unique cards that one takes out of that deck, etc. So by the end the professor is a professor of sobbing as a consequence of the process of being obscure.  And the rector so deeply ignorant from so much trembling in the air.  There is a kind of development in the poem toward consequence.  In the penultimate stanza, while "doble" may be translated as "double," for the Spanish and English terms are quite similar here, to do so overlooks the possibilities within the original. "Doble" may also be twofold, two-faced, and thick or sturdy as a tree, and may suggest that the underlying image  is of a tree doubled by the weight of its own leaves, as the expert is bent over, bent over by the weight of his own excessive and meaningless words.  To opt for the nearly literal equivalent loses the multilayered meaning for the English reader who will not know that this could also be twofold, two-faced,  for "double" and "double" seem oddly flat, awkward in English, as if closed and resistant to meaning, when the Spanish is quite rich and open.
	Having begun with a mere draft of possibilities, I then began to translate the poem into English. It soon become apparent that the most crucial issue was the translation of "hojarasca." I tried "dead, excessive leaves," but that seemed to miss the connotation of meaningless words, of arid verbiage.  "Dead foliage" seemed too narrowly correct; the English reader would think of a blighted tree, of a season of loss, but miss the connotation of meaningless words, a sense which seemed central to the poem. As I spent more time with it, the poem seemed to be very preoccupied with reading a text, "the book of nature." Finally, I hit upon "dead, wordy leaves," the "wordy" evoking both the connotations of excessiveness and of language.  I can just imagine the reader of Spanish shaking his or her head saying "well, there is no ‘wordy' here."  This kind of literal equivalent looking for word by word.  But, even so the connotation is in the original, and the narrowly correct choice would forfeit that connotation which seems central to the poem. Similarly, "rumoreante" is the noise of rumors, the noise of voices in the street, not really the same as "rumoroso" in the poem's final line. "Linden spreading rumors," seems to capture the meaning more closely.  As usual with Vallejo, I'm not certain that I'm finished with this translation.  But in my translation, I hope I have included more of the richness of his poem, its preoccupation with dead and living words, its indictment of the professor, the rector, the expert,  of nature as a misread book, to which Vallejo juxtaposes his own sense of identity always in terms of functionality: the functionality of reading, of sexuality, of thirst and of hunger; and in terms of his own chalice or cup, his own animal of value, his precocious sword which cuts into the book.   
	

	The Book of Nature

			Translated by Rebecca Seiferle

	Professor of sobbing–I said to a tree–
stick of quicksilver,  linden spreading
rumors,  at the edge of the Marne, a good student
keeps reading in your cards, your dead, wordy leaves,
between the evident water and the false sun,
his three of cups, his horse of gold coins.

	Rector of heaven's chapters,
of the fervent fly, of the pliable calm of asses,
rector of profound ignorance, a bad student
keeps reading in your cards, your dead, wordy leaves,
the hunger of reason that crazes him,
and the thirst of dementia that dazes him.       

	Expert of  cries, conscious tree, powerful,
fluvial, doubled, solar, dual,  fanatical,
connoisseur of cardinal roses, wholly stuck in,
until there's blood,  in pricks, a student
keeps reading in your cards, your dead, wordy leaves,
his precocious, telluric, volcanic king of swords.

	Oh professor,  from having been so obscure!
Oh rector,  from quivering so much in the air!
Oh expert,  from so much bending over!
Oh linden! Oh rumoring stick, joined to the Marne!


Sources

Ducornet, Rikki.  "Books of Nature: The Poetry of César Vallejo and the Boxes of Joseph Cornell." The Monstrous and the Marvelous. San Francisco: City Light Books. 103-110.

Vallejo César.  The Complete Posthumous Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia. Berkeley: University of California, 1978.  149.

Vallejo, César. Obra Poetica Completa. Alianza Editorial. Madrid: Alianza Tres, 1980.  263-264.

Vallejo, César. Trilce. Trans. Rebecca Seiferle. Ed.  Stanley Moss. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1992.