Froid de limites

 I have this edition of Frío de límites, signed to me by Gamoneda. It is the first edition, with some art work by Tapies, but also the first French edition, since it has a translation by Jacques Ancet, who is French translator / poet / Hispanist. 

Anyway, the French version sounds kind of cool. It is not demonstrably worse than the original. What strikes me about it, though, is that the search for the mot juste is made easier by the fact that translation between two romance languages is going to depend a lot on cognates: 

Gritan las serpientes en las celdas del aire. / Les serpents crient dans les cellules de l'air. 

La ebriedad sube desde las piernas femeninas y tú pones tus labios en los líquidos. / L'ebriété monte des jambes féminines et toi tu tu poses tes lèvres sur les liquides. 

This how is it should be.  A Spanish and French word derived from the same Latin root, and synonymous, like labios / levres (lips), are almost the same word. Not only is the translation virtually word-for-word, but the lexicon is pre-determined. Of course there will be differences. Compare mujer,  femme, donna, words for woman derived from three separate Latin words. But, I must say, this kind of translation is not particularly interesting and can feel almost mechanical. 

Now English has at least three strata: Anglo-Saxon words; French words, entering the language after Norman times; and latinate words taken directly from Latin (without French intervention). So inebriation would be a cognate to ebriedad / ebrieté, but the Anglo-Saxon lexicon is considered more basic and direct: drunkenness.  

The English-language translator, then, often loses the etymological resonance, since the basic directness is more effective. When translating Manuel Alvarez Ortega, I feel that the etymological resonance is important, since his tone is a bit portentous. He is not trying to be colloquial or imaging a speaker actually saying these lines as some kind of dramatic utterance. 

An example. He is fond of the word "oficio." In normal Spanish, this means a trade or craft. In English, it means an office (despacho / oficina), but MAO means it in the sense of ritual. I remember a phrase from a poem by Robert Hayden: "love's austere and lonely offices." That the is mot juste in this poem, a common word used uncommonly. To get to these definitions of words derived from officium, you have to go to the end of the list of definitions in both English and Spanish dictionaries.