The Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale has won the Cervantes prize. She is 95. I have a one or two of her books, so here's a poem:
RELACIONES TRIANGULARES
Hace un rato
que en la encina cercana
protesta un grajo.
Mi vecina, la gata
blanquinegra e inaudible,
asoma en la ventana.
Mira el árbol
y encerrada imagina
la aventura riesgosa.
Mira al grajo y me mira.
No sabe a quién apoyo.
Para alguien que no existe
un raro trío hacemos
en tres lenguas distintas,
dos silencios y el ruido
del grajo inaccesible.
Click on the title of the poem if you want to read it in English. It is wonderfully complex: the speaker of the poem and her female cat are looking out the window at a bird (a rook) in a tree. The cat is imagining going after the bird, and looks at the speaker as though to be asked to be let out for the hunt. Then the speaker posits an imaginary spectator ("someone who doesn't exist") in order to frame the entire scene.
I gave this to a graduate class once and a student had a kind of blasé reaction to this. Of course you can't make someone be wowed by what has impressed you, but that moment stands out as a teaching disappointment. It is true that the effects are on the subtle side.
***
I could try to translate her poems myself. I want to think about the way translating and song setting are not very similar ways of transforming or adapting the poem. The translator has several options, but within a certain semantic constraint:
It's been a while now
that in the nearby oak
a rook has been protesting.
That's what I came up with with a few seconds thought without looking at the other translation, and the translator I'm linking to has:
For a while now
a rook has been protesting
in the nearby oak.
There are other possibilities, but they will overlap with these considerably unless they move in the direction of much freer translation:
That damned crow
won't stop screeching
in the holm oak tree.
My neighbor, my zebra-striped
soundless cat
stalks it on the sill.
She looks at the tree
weighing the risks
from captivity.
She looks at the bird
and back at me
testing my loyalty.
For the imaginary spectator
we form a strange trio
in three different languages:
two mutes and the clamor
of the unreachable black bird.
In fact, I like that better! But I can't come up with a free version of "she looks at the tree" and things like that.
The songwriter can choose any possible melody in any available musical style or genre, and it is unlikely that if you put 10 composers in 10 rooms you'd get anything similar among any of them, even if they professed similar philosophies of song setting. There is no "literal" version from which to depart.
6 comments:
The free version is far better.
Translation is hard.
Yes. I think it is hard. The literal translation I found on line was very unimaginative and uninspired. We don't have to use every cognate like "inaccessible" or "inaudible." The reason they exist in Spanish is because of Latin, but we have many more words from which to choose.
Is it possible that the cat is not hers? I think vecina could mean right next to her, or in the next house.
Could be.
I think the cat is not hers and that that adds a great deal to the poem.
I used to really believe in near-literal translations, in sticking close to the original, but I've changed my mind. I think what I had meant was, I believe in respecting the original and in being capable of sticking to it -- there are these translators who don't appear really to have full skills in the language they are translating. But much of the time you can't really give the poem full life if you translate it in that static way.
Then if cat is not hers, then I can maintain that in the translation.
You can tell translation errors that are cause by someone not knowing the language, versus those that are choices.
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