Translation: Juan Vico [Updated]

I mentioned that I'd found several compelling books of poetry while away, and I've already posted a few pieces by one of the poets, so let me take a break from packing and cleaning to post my translation of a poem by another of those writers, Juan Vico, whose collection Still Life received the XXVIII Premi de Poesia <<Divendres culturals>> in 2011, and was published by the press of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). Flipping through the book I found the combination of lightness and depth, the references to contemporary culture and high art, the relative straightforward quality of the Spanish, and the subtle lyricism all drawing me in.

In the poem below, you can see what I'm talking about as the speaker addresses the late, unsurpassingly strange master artist Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, 1908-2001), whose portraits of young women do feel out of time and deeply suffused with eros yet also carry, at least to me, an air of something lost, missed, amiss, something quite sinister. The speaker has an idea of what--or who--is behind that, and it isn't just the poet, and that agent is also working its seductive magic on the speaker too.

One translation note: the verb otorgar usually means to "grant" or "agree to" or even "condescend to," so I had to find an English word that would convey the meaning while also fitting the other requirements of the poem. English fortunately has an incredibly rich vocabulary, and the quite old, somewhat formal-sounding verb "bestow" seems to capture all these meanings, while also creating a rhyme with "shadows" in the first line of the first stanza, and maintaining the consonant sibilance ending each of the first four lines. It is always a challenge to capture the beautiful sonorities of the Romance languages in English, all of which have baked into them the possibility of much internal rhyme and much more regular rhythm, but English has its own resources and I try, as best I can, to utilize them in service of making the translation as effective as I can.

I'd never come across Vico's work before, but according to his book jacket, he was born in Badalona in 1975, and studied Audivisual Communication and has a Masters in Literary Theory and Comparative Theory.  He's published at least one other book of poems, Víspera de ayer (Pre-textos, 2005), and two notebooks, Gozne (2009) and Densidad de abandono (2011), and has written extensively for a number of cultural magazines on issue literature and cinema. He has a vibrant blog, simply titled Juan Vico, featuring his own and others' works, and you can even see him being interviewed on it (which is the clip at the bottom of this page).

At the bookstore I also saw a novel by Vico, Hobo, set in Mississippi with a protagonist named "Bob Skinny Lunceford," his life seemingly paralleling while also diverging in many key ways from that of the great jazz saxophonist Jimmy Lunceford (also a Mississippi native), but I was watching my euros, so I'll have to get that one another time.  He talks about the novel in Vimeo clip below. the Here is "Letter to Balthus," and as always, any faults with the translation are mine alone, any suggestions or comments are always welcome.

***

LETTER TO BALTHUS

There are neither shadows of the past nor promises
in your timeless bodies, cher Balthus,

but there is Death, who bestows
color on Thérèse's cheeks,

tousles Georgette's hair,
discovers only one breast of Elsa Henríquez

and plays with Laurence's cat
while kissing my forehead very slowly.


CARTA A BALTHUS

No hay sombras del pasado ni promesas
en tus cuerpos sin tiempo, cher Balthus

aunque sea la muerte quien otorgue
color a las mejillas de Thérèse,

le despeine a Georgette la caballera,
le descubra a Elsa Henríquez sólo un seno

y juege con el gato de Laurence
mientras besa mi frente muy despacio.

Copyright © Juan Vico, "Carta a Balthus," from Still Life, XXVIII Premi de Poesia <<Divendres culturals>> de 2011, Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Servei de Publicaciones, 2011. Copyright © John Keene, translation, 2012. All rights reserved.

UPDATE: Kai W. suggests the following translation of the second to fourth stanzas of the poem to emphasize the subjunctive mood required by "aunque":

although Death may bestow
color to the cheeks of Therese,

muss Georgette's hair
and of Elsa Henriquez, bare but one breast,

playing with Laurence's cat,
while kissing my forehead very slowly.

Copyright © Kai Wilson, 2012.

I do like this suggestion a lot, because it definitely includes the subjunctive mood and the color it casts upon the poem.  I wonder if it doesn't elide that "sea," though, which suggests permanence (against the "hay" or, had he Vico chosen to use the verb "estar," impermanence); Death (which I have capitalized now, following Kai) is always there, he's saying, I think, and emphasizes this, as opposed to writing "aunque la muerte otorgue / color a las mejillas...." I thus changed "there's" to "there is," maintaining the consonance with "bestows" and the other sibilants. Morever, to keep the meter from clanging I used the English possessive form, reformulating "cheeks of Thérèse" to "Thérèse's cheeks."  I also do like Kai's "bare but one breast," and I wanted to hew closer to the exact words Vico's poem, but "bare" rhymes with "hair" and tracks Vico's syntax more closely. Originally I went with "uncombs" for "despeinar," which is the literal translation--since death of course does just that, but Kai chose "muss," which is great, and that led me to go with "tousle," though in a sense "uncomb," which is a bit clunky, also captures the eeriness of the description. Death is always un-doing something to all of us, to everything. One thing I thought about was that "aunque" usually requires the subjunctive (doesn't it), it's hard to know how much the mood need translate into English. I think it should, but need it be as strong as the "may," or can it be implicit? I'm not sure but I appreciate the suggestions.

Translations: Carlos Skliar

Carlos Skliar (© Copyright Fasinarm 2009)

I'd thought that a large shipment of materials was wending its way east, but a snafu meant that it instead was sitting patiently in Evanston for me to discover it and call upon the good people of United Parcel Service to discharge...and so, now, it is on its way, and there is one less thing to think about on this end. I still am not able to blog as I'd like, but in lieu of a full post, here is a translation of four of the poems in Carlos Skliar's book, No Tienen Prisa Las Palabras (The Words Are In No Hurry), published by Candaya Abierta earlier this year, which I mentioned the other day. I found it in a bookstore in Barcelona and after browsing a few of the pieces, which range from sentence-long aphorisms and aperçus to paragraph length prose pieces shot through with observation and cogitation, I grabbed it. It helped that Spanish was playful but not beyond me ken.

Reading the book on the plane, I found Skliar's poems full of wry wit and keen perspective, offering a clear sense of a mind always moving, turning images or ideas or moments around to see every facet and angle, but also utilizing the resources of Spanish to successful effect.  To put it another way, David Roas writes in his introduction that Skliar, like his mind, is a "a viajero," or traveler, a "un extranjero perpetuo que, como tal, contempla la realidad con ojos nuevos, que mira (verbo esencial en la poética del autor) y nos revela lo que ve y siente" ("A perpetual stranger who, as such, contemplates reality with new eyes, who looks (an essential verb in this author's poetry) and reveals to us what he sees and feels.") (Skliar, 5, my translation). Also noteworthy is his concision and subsequent condensation of meaning, allowing him to do a great deal with very little. Some of his playfulness is hard to capture in English. To give one example, he uses the verb "despedir," which means to "say goodbye to, see off," but also to "discharge, discard, emit, fling," and so forth, the two valences fused in the word. Had he written "Me despedi para siempre de tu vida," that would have been a relatively straightforward "I said goodbye forever to your life," but he retains that rhythmic second-person singular preterite ending "-iste" (which becomes almost incantatory, as "you" in English prose and poetry often does), saying "Me despediste para siempre de tu vida," which turns the address and tone in a different direction. The random person is bidding him farewell--far too formal phrasing for here--forever from his life after basically bothering him relentlessly, so what English verb would suffice. I thought about "discharge," and of course the more benign "say goodbye," but "discard," like that burnt-out "cigarillo" felt appropriate. Perhaps it isn't, but for now it seems to work.

According to the book jacket's brief biography of Skliar, he was born in 1960 in Buenos Aires, he works as a researcher at Argentina's National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, and in the program in Education at the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty.  Since 2005, with Diego Skliar (who may be his brother? Son?), he hosts a radio program in Buenos Aires entitled Preferiría no hacerlo (I would prefer not to do it). I said he was witty.  He is the author of of the collections Primera Conjunción (First Conjunction, 1981), Hilos después (Threads After, 2009), and Voz apenas (Voice Only, 2011), and of the book of aphorisms and essays La intimidad y la alteridad (Intimacy and Otherness, 2006). He has written a number of important essays, published in his own critical volumes such as The Education of the Deaf: A Historical, Cognitive and Pedagogical History (1997), and Intimacy and Alterity: Experiences with the Word (2005), or ones he's edited, among them Derrida and Education (2005), Between Pedagogy and Literature (with Jorge Larrosa, 2007), Experience and Alterity in Education (with Jorge Larrosa, 2009); and The Said, The Written, The Ignored (2011). [Title translations are mine.]

What his brief bio doesn't say--and why should it?--is whether despite the differences in the spelling of their last name he is any relation to the late, brilliant Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011), who was born and grew up in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state in that country, which direct abuts Argentina and Buenos Aires Province. Perhaps they share common roots in Bessarabia, where Scliar parents were from, or closer ones still, depending, with Moacyr his uncle. This online biography, which points out that he received a doctorate in Phonology, with a specialization in Human Communication and has been served as an adjunct professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, thus suggests close ties to the Gaúcho state, so perhaps the familial links are clear enough.

Here then are several pieces from the book. These are first passes at translation, so the faults are mine; you can read his Spanish directly to gauge the full effect of his work. Also, Mr. Skliar did write a comment on my earlier post, so perhaps he will see and offer corrections--and anyone else should feel free to do so--with this one. Enjoy!

Four from No Tienen Prisa Las Palabras

Me pediste que me detuviera en medio de la calle. Me pediste que te diera un cigarillo, que te lo encendiera. Me pediste que te dijera la hora, que te orientara acerca de un sitio que yo desconocía. Me pediste que olvidara la pregunta. Me pediste otra vez la hora. Me dijiste qué frío hace. Me preguntaste si yo era de aquí. Me pediste otra vez fuego porque el cigarillo se había apagado. Te fuiste. Me despediste para siempre de tu vida.

You asked me to hold up in the middle of the street. You asked me to give you a cigarette, to light it for you. You asked me for the time, to direct you around a place I was unfamiliar with. You asked me to forget the question. You asked me the time again. You told me how cold it was. You asked me if I was from here. You asked me once again for a light because the cigarette had gone out. You left. You discarded me from your life forever.

***

Detrás de un ventana entreabierta, un niño castigado mira incansablemente el juego de otros niños. Acompaña con su cuerpo los movimentos de cada uno, goza y padece cada una de las vicisitudes ajenas, aunque nadie lo vea. Será un buen hombre. Si lo dejan salir al mundo.

Behind a partially-opened window, a little boy on punishment tirelessly watches other children playing. With his body he shadows the movements of every one of them, enjoys and suffers every one of the others' vicissitudes, even though none of them sees him. He will turn out to be a good man. If they allow him to go out into the world.

***

El sonido de un idioma extranjero que te abre los oídos, pero no te deja abrir la boca.

The sound of a foreign language that opens your ears, but doesn't let you open your mouth.

***

La vida es la diferencia entre el tiempo que pasa y lo que pasa en el tiempo. O, quizá, la diferencia que hay en el interior del tiempo que pasa. La diferencia como intensidad. El tiempo que hondura. Tiempo anciano y tiempo niño, a la vez. Podríamos llamar "de travesía" a esos segundos que no quieren pasar, aun pasado. La percepción los detiene, los retiene, los recuerda. El pensamiento podría dedicar sus mejores horas a esos segundos que ni se van ni se quedan.  A esa serpiente enroscado, verde y negra, que al morderse la cola parece que siempre retorna.

Life is the difference between the time that passes and what passes in time. Or perhaps, the difference that exists within passing time. Difference as intensity. Time's depth. Ancient time and youthful time, at the same time. We could call "crossing" those seconds that do not want to pass, even as they're passing. Perception detains them, retains them, recalls them. Thought could dedicate its best hours to those seconds which neither leave nor stay. To this coiled serpent, green and black, which, in biting its tail, always seems to return.

Copyright © Carlos Skliar, all poems from No Tienen Prisa Las Palabras, Prologue by David Roas, Barcelona: Candaya Abierta, 2012. All rights reserved. Copyright © John Keene, translation, 2012. All rights reserved.

Poem: Juan Diego Tamayo

Juan Diego Tamayo Ochoa (1968-) has begun to make his name in Colombian and Hispanophone poetry on the strength of his graceful language and visionary themes, and the poem below, "Del escriba," translated by Nicolas Suescún, gives a sense of what Tamayo is up to in his work. There is a metaphysical and spiritual element in his poetry, and the poem below shifts quickly from what reflections on the importance power of the poet's poetry for his being to something deeper, a series of analogies and figures that both enchant and provoke interpretation, for he is, essentially, telling us that he's a medium, a vessel, a stylus, for forces beyond the human: what he pens comes not from his heart or mind alone, but from worlds hidden to most but not, as this designated medium, to him.

Yet we may have questions. Why and how is he the "stellar sign"? Where is this "assembly" where "men" conspire against each other for power--or rather, where isn't that? And why and how is the poet "wrenched from the mauve sunset?" One danger of such poetry is that it spins off into, as I noted above, a network of enchanting figures and abstractions, but may press our patience, leading us to ask, even if we accept the poetic conceit and symbolism, what ultimately does it all mean and how does it connect? On the other hand, isn't every poet who's deeply into her or his work wrenched from and into something beyond simple description or requiring a figurative one, and doesn't this also with certain poems happen to the reader as well? And doesn't and shouldn't the reader, like the "scribe," ask even with the most transparent poem, what's going on?

A native of Medellín, Tamayo has published one highly regarded book of poetry, Los elementos perdidos [The Lost Elements] (Medellín: Ediciones Fábula, 2005), and has several unpublished manuscripts still waiting to be put into print.  If you enjoy the poem below and read Spanish, you can find more of his poems in Spanish on the website of the Medellín International Poetry Festival, which he co-founded.


ON THE SCRIBE

As I write, I write myself. I am the one who has spent endless hours with the night ink, committing men’s memories to paper each day. I have written on the desert and every period is a grain of the same. Letters on the sea have been liquid and every word is anguish when it concerns oblivion. Sometimes I am the distant sign that judges. Other times, the letter that extols love. Almost never the one talking about what is just. In me are all the alphabets and I have tried complex calligraphies brought to me from unknown peoples hour upon hour. I have written in blood about gory battles. I have celebrated the triumph of death. I have celebrated the consecration of life with the sap of trees. I am the stellar sign. The sign of so many times that I am lost in it. I have written epistles of pain, of rejection, of sentences. Most times my hand shakes. At some moments my hand enjoys what I write and I feel as if I were caressed by a lost dove. I have brought order to obtuse thoughts. I have reordered the stars and their movements. I have attended the assembly where men conspire against others for power. Death also dictates its judgements to me. I am the celebrant of ancient alphabets in this half-lit room. Only the candelabra keeps me company and with its light I write a better horizon for the future generations. I write now, possessed by the syllables, I write on the stone of sacrifice. Hence the writing. The letter that accompanies me polishes my blood as if it were a diamond. I write with blood, with the same I have seen shed, like rivers of ink, in battles, with the same blood I have wrenched from the mauve sunset, I shall use the same blood to add the full stop to these folios on which I write my life.

And the original Spanish:

DEL ESCRIBA

Mientras escribo me escribo. Soy el que ha gastado horas eternas con la tinta de la noche para dejar en el papel del día la memoria de los hombres. He escrito sobre el desierto y cada punto final es un grano del mismo. Líquidas han sido las letras que del mar hablan y de angustia cada vocablo cuando del olvido se trata. Algunas veces soy la grafía distante que juzga. Otras la letra que enaltece el amor. Casi nunca la que al hablar de lo justo se trata. En mí están todos los alfabetos y he ensayado horas enteras complejas caligrafías que me traen de incógnitos pueblos. Con sangre he escrito sobre cruentas batallas. He celebrado el triunfo de la muerte. He celebrado con la savia de los árboles de primavera la consagración de la vida. Soy la grafía estelar. La grafía de tantos y tantos tiempos que ya en ella me pierdo. He escrito epístolas de dolor, de rechazo, de sentencias. La más de las veces mi mano tiembla. En algunos momentos mi mano se solaza con lo que escribo y me siento como si acariciara una paloma perdida. He dado orden a obtusos pensamientos. He reordenado los astros y sus movimientos. He asistido a la asamblea donde hombres confabulan contra otros por el poder. La muerte me dicta también sus arbitrios. Oficiante de antiguos alfabetos soy en esta habitación en penumbra. Sólo el candelabro me acompaña y con su luz escribo un horizonte mejor para las generaciones futuras. Escribo ahora, poseso de las sílabas, escribo sobre la piedra del sacrificio. Así la escritura. La letra que me acompaña pule mi sangre como si de un diamante se tratara. Escribo con sangre, con la misma que he visto correr, como ríos de tinta, en las batallas, con la misma sangre que le he arrebatado al ocaso malva, con la misma con la que pondré punto final a estos folios con los que escribo mi vida.

Copyright © Juan Diego Tamayo, "Del escriba," from Oscura ceniza, first published by PIW, 2009. Translated by Nicolás Suescún, Copyright © 2009.

Borges' Birthday + Poem/Translation: Borges

Today would be the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the poet, fiction writer, essayist, and aesthete, who was without a doubt one of Argentina's and Latin America's greatest gifts to the world of arts and letters.  I tend to think of Borges as a fiction writer, since it was through the genre that I first encountered his work, and it was as an innovator in the short fictional form that his global reputation took hold, but he began his writing career in his native country and, I think it's fair to say, thought of himself primarily as a poet. He was a very good one, sometimes an exceptional one. As he wrote in his poem "Inscripcíon" (Inscription), in the posthumous collection "Los conjurados" (The conjured ones), "Escribir un poema es ensayar una magia menor" (To write a poem is to attempt a minor magic.)  I should note that Borges is one of those writers (like Wallace Stevens, for example) whose politics and personal beliefs I disagree with, but whose work I nevertheless have a great affinity for.  His poetry in particular has grown on me as I have gotten older.  In honor of Borges' birthday, I am posting a few links to articles on him, and one of his late poems that I love, as it captures the simplicity, rhetorical skill, and evocative power that at his best he would often pack into the shorter poems he wrote towards the end of his life.

The links:
Christian Science Monitor: "Jorge Luis Borges: What Made Him So Good?"
Guardian Online: "Jorge Luis Borges' Google doodle celebrates the master of magical realism"
El Clarín (One of Argentina's major newspapers): "Hoy Borges cumpliría 112 y se los festejan"

The poem:
"El cómplice" (The Accomplice), from La cifra (The Limit) (1981) needs little explanation. It is also simple enough for me to translate, and all the faults in the English are mine, but if you can read it aloud in the Spanish, you also will get more of Borges' original music, the repetition of the "c" sounds in the first line, for example, or the sustained grammatical and syntactic repetitions of the first four lines, which he reverses in the fifth, shifting the speaker's agency from response to the head of the sentence, after he has endured a series of trials, including hell/the inferno.

EL CÓMPLICE

Me crucifican y yo debo ser la cruz y los clavos.
Me tienden la copa y yo debo ser la cicuta.
Me engañan y y debo ser la mentira.
Me inciendan y yo debo ser el infierno.
Debo alabar y agradecer cada instante del tiempo.
Mi alimento es todas las cosas.
El peso preciso del universo, la humillación, el júbilo.
Debo justificar lo que hiere.
No importa mi ventura o mi desventura.
Soy el poeta.

THE ACCOMPLICE

They crucify me and I must be the cross and the nails.
They hand me the cup and I must be the hemlock.
They fool me and I must be the lie.
They set me on fire and I must be the inferno.
I have to praise and thank every instant of time.
Everything nourishes me.
The precise weight of the universe, humiliation, jubilation.
I must justify what wounds me.
My fortune or misfortune is of no importance.
I am the poet.

Copyright © Jorge Luis Borges, from La cifra (1981; Emece Editores, 1993). Translation © John Keene, 2011.