Thank you Rebecca,

.rtf files are exceptional. I will let you know as soon as I get to it.
Besides that, I am collecting some observations on translation and I will
quote the author if and when I use material which does not belong to me. It
is a fact that with Wallace I will be touring all around Italy, for an
innate shy person like me the prospect seems worse than hell. That is why I
keep on collecting other people's thoughts and haven't faced my paper yet. A
sort of sacred terror has its grip on me.

Till soon, anny

From: "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]>


Hi Anny,

No, Anny, you're not filtered out from my mail! I haven't filtered anyone
out, much less would I filter you out. What address did you send the mail
to? This one, at earthlink, has periodic problems, last night a couple of
messages bounced back and I had trouble sending anything this morning. Also
the drunkenboat address has changed to [log in to unmask] after that
last incident (as you know!)

I'll send you the file this morning. Any particular sort of attachment? I'll
try rtf. If you don't have the file in an hour or so, let me know, and I'll
send from another address.

Anyway, I hope you like the essay, and I look forward to your comments,

warm regards,

Rebecca

-------Original Message-------
From: Anny Ballardini <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04/22/03 10:44 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Vallejo's "Book of Nature"

>
> It seems I am filtered out (this is a good one) from your mail, since I
b/c
you to yes, please, send me the attached file, I might be interested in
reading the lot without interferences, but the mail came back, thus this
mail,
anny

From: "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]>


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
<a target=_blank
href="http://www.thedrunkenboat.cm">www.thedrunkenboat.cm</a>

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 CÃf©sar Vallejo, while
reading the provocative collection of essays, The Monstrous and the
Marvelous, by Rikki Ducornet.  As a translator and longtime reader of
CÃf©sar
Vallejo, I was particularly interested in her essay, "Books of Nature: The
Poetry of CÃf©sar 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
processesâ?"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 JosÃf©  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 sollozoâ?"he dicho a un Ãf¡rbolâ?"
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 capÃf­tulos 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 razÃf³n  que le enloquece
y la sed de demencia que le aloca.

TÃf©cnico en gritos, Ãf¡rbol 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, telÃfºrico, volcÃf¡nico, de espadas.

Ã,¡Oh profesor, de haber tÃf¡nto ignorado!
Ã,¡Oh rector, de temblar tÃf¡nto en el aire!
Ã,¡Oh tÃf©cnico, de tÃf¡nto que te inclinas!
Ã,¡Oh tilo! Oh palo rumoroso junto al Marne!


The Book of Nature

Professor of sobbingâ?"I said to a treeâ?"
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 wondersâ?"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
transcendenceâ?"as does love. Perhaps, the Queen of Diamonds is here
revealed as Sophiaâ?"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 â?~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 â?~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: â?~his three of cups, his horse of
golds.' In American playing cards, these figures correspond to â?~hearts'
and â?~diamonds,' and the â?~horse' to the â?~queen.' the cups are not
really cups, but chalices and the â?~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 "asÃf­/ 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, "ApÃf©ome del caballo jadeante,
bufando/ lÃf­neas 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 forÃf¡nea,
estornuda, cual llamando tambiÃf©n, 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 â?~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 â?~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
â?~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 estÃf¡ divinamente meado
y excrementido por la vaca inocente
y el inocente asno y el gallo inocente.

Penetra en la marÃf­a ecumÃf©nica.
Oh saqngabriel, haz que conciba el alma,
el sin luz amor, el sin cielo,
lo mÃf¡s piedra, lo mÃf¡s nada,
      hasta la ilusiÃf³n monarca.

Quemaremos todas las naves!
Quermaremos la Ãfºltima 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
â?~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 detrÃf¡s de tu burro
santurrÃf³n,/ te vas . . ." you who behind your sanctimonious ass, go away.
.
."
I also wonder at the translation of "el hambre de razÃf³n" 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, "razÃf³n" 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 tÃf¡nto 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
â?~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 animalâ?"horse or assâ?"is driven forward by spurs or goads,
whereas
the individual animalâ?"man or animalâ?"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"
â?~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 Ãf¡rbol," "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 â?~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 sobbingâ?"I said to a treeâ?"
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 CÃf©sar Vallejo and the
Boxes of Joseph Cornell." The Monstrous and the Marvelous. San Francisco:
City Light Books. 103-110.

Vallejo CÃf©sar.  The Complete Posthumous Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman
and
JosÃf© Rubia Barcia. Berkeley: University of California, 1978.  149.

Vallejo, CÃf©sar. Obra Poetica Completa. Alianza Editorial. Madrid: Alianza
Tres, 1980.  263-264.

Vallejo, CÃf©sar. Trilce. Trans. Rebecca Seiferle. Ed.  Stanley Moss. New
York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1992.
>