OK, I finally got to read this post this morning, and finally haved a
moment for very brief comments.;
1. The translation is a much better poem than the Eshelman, and my very few
comments shouldn't mask my sense of how wonderful it is.
2. But poets usually expect their audiences to read the mundane meaning of
a word or phrase and come to the other possibilities over further
readings--one of the pleasures of poetry. The commonplace lexical meaning
is always in play.
3. Eshelman sacrifices the inner meanings to the commonplace. Rebecca
[Rebecca, pardon the third person--it's hard to know how to manage address
in a web forum] sacrifices the commonplace. So, the Spanish deck,
unfamiliar to estadounidenses, has an exotic sound, altho in Spanish it's
at most mildly archaic, mildly Spanish as opposed to latin american, but
certainly familiar. And that exoticism makes the similarities to the tarot
deck more apparent, with all the baggage that brings along. It's obviously,
nonetheless, the right choice here, I think.
4. But that exemplifies a theoretical issue: the proposition that "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" is simply impossible to fulfill. One makes choices of what
foreign elements to allow.
5. Rumoreante and rumoroso are both commonplace words. Rumoreante means
something like buzzing--at any rate, making a low-level constant sound.
Palo rumoroso is perfecly conventional Spanish, rumoring stick is tortured
English. And rumor in English has been limited for a long time to the
spreading of news or gossip. It may be that this is one place where to
maintain something like the tone of the Spanish what needs to get lost is
the repetition.
6. Palo de azogue. I don't think that palo here is a stick. Palo also means
a pole or a log, even the trunk of a tree isn't pushing it too far. It also
often means tree, especially in the Americas, and it means wood as well.
Azogar means to cover with mercury so as to make a mirror. The image is of
polished wood. Are we dealing with a dead tree burnished to silver, or of
the effect of light at a particular moment? Quick silver as a somewhat
archaic synonym for mercury (how many fans knew that Quicksilver Messenger
Service referred to the god Mercury?) that highlights its liquid state--it
moves as if quick, alive. Azogue says none of that. Silvery trunk? Not
good, but an alternative. Shiny timber? "...I said to a tree,/ shiny
timber, murmurous linden/ beside the Marne, attentive student/ reading..."
7. Hoja, from which hojarasca, means both tree leaf and leaf of a book.
Although leaf=page is less insistent in English than it is in Spanish I'd
go with dead leaves. And it has the advantage of allowing the primary
meaning to remain primary.
I know that all of these comments are disputable. For what they're worth.
A superb job, nonetheless.
Mark
At 12:51 AM 4/22/2003 -0600, you wrote:
I'll try again, the accents turning into ??? is too annoying.
Though this may be no better. If not, you can b/c and I'll send an attachment.
Best
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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.
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