Some of the first poems I read in Spanish were by Machado. It was Spanish ???, at UCD. The professor was Roberto Scari. I remember reading "Daba el reloj las doce." "Las ascuas de un crepúsculo morado," and "Desde el umbral de un sueño me llamaron." Also, "Tal vez, la mano, en sueños." A girl from my class came over to study with me one night. She called my house asking for me or my sister, because the professor used late names in class, and she didn't have the text to study from. She knew either my sister or I was in the class.
I still know these poems.
[UPDATE]
I could not understand the line "con su alado y desnudo Amor de piedra." My father, who didn't even know Spanish, surmised that Amor was a statue of Cupid. How the fuck do I remember that? It was 1978!
Showing posts with label Machado. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Machado. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Another brilliant idea
Borges says that
a] a translation, logically, can be superior to the original in verbal terms. The example he give is
"when all my house was hushed" as a translation of "estando ya mi casa sosegada" [Roy Campbell translating SJ of the Cross]. JLB says that this line is better than the original.
Another example is "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne" which is certainly more poignant than the Latin tag "ars longa, vita brevis" the Chaucer was translating in this line of his poetry.
In many cases, if not almost always, the translation is not superior.
But the superiority of the original is not verbal, in essence, but a function of the value we place on its being the original. This is the second part of this idea that is even more brilliant, and which I missed the first dozen times I reflected on the first part of the idea.
So a translation can be as good as it wants to be. There is no limit, and it can surpass the original, but it will never have that ontological status.
a] a translation, logically, can be superior to the original in verbal terms. The example he give is
"when all my house was hushed" as a translation of "estando ya mi casa sosegada" [Roy Campbell translating SJ of the Cross]. JLB says that this line is better than the original.
Another example is "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne" which is certainly more poignant than the Latin tag "ars longa, vita brevis" the Chaucer was translating in this line of his poetry.
In many cases, if not almost always, the translation is not superior.
But the superiority of the original is not verbal, in essence, but a function of the value we place on its being the original. This is the second part of this idea that is even more brilliant, and which I missed the first dozen times I reflected on the first part of the idea.
So a translation can be as good as it wants to be. There is no limit, and it can surpass the original, but it will never have that ontological status.
Machado Himself
If you are thinking about translation, you should have an idea about the poetics of the poet, not merely the words of the poems. I used to have a list of 5 things I knew about Machado, but I cannot reproduce those exactly. I am relying here on Gullón's Una poética para Antonio Machado as well as on my own reading of this poet.
1. Meter and rhyme are important for him. Did he write many poems (or any?) without rhyme? One reason is that he saw poetry as an art of time (palabra en el tiempo). The movement of the verse and the way the poem unfolds in time is crucial. He creates structures of surprise. He uses verse for various effects: sing-song monotony, when he wants to, or the slow revelation of surprising ideas.
2. Language is important for him. His language seems austere compared to the modernista poets, but it is still quite literary, and even playful in the way it deploys registers and rhetorical figures. There is an illusion of the plainspoken, sometimes because he tells you he is being plain-spoken. He uses particularly well-crafted stanza with an elaborate four-part simile to tell us that he doesn't care about craft: "dejar quisiera / mi verso, como deja el capitán su espada / famosa por la mano viril que la blandiera / no por el docto oficio del forjador preciada." Notice the chiasmic word order and the allusion to DQ and the discourse on arms and letters. Gullón notes his modernist condensation in two chapters at the end of the book. Machado does not waste words.
3. He is a pre-avant-garde poet. He doesn't do any "modern" stuff resulting from poets after 1912, except in that condensation of language. He doesn't like surrealism. He doesn't like baroque, so you won't find him celebrating Góngora. What he does share with the younger poets is the interest in popular forms of poetry like the romance. He has phases in his work, culminating in the aphorisms of the late work and the apocryphal poets.
4. He has elaborate modes of self-presentation that critics tend to misrepresent as simplistic sincerity.
5. In Spain he is considered the best and most influential ever, by many as superior to Lorca.
That's all I've got today.
1. Meter and rhyme are important for him. Did he write many poems (or any?) without rhyme? One reason is that he saw poetry as an art of time (palabra en el tiempo). The movement of the verse and the way the poem unfolds in time is crucial. He creates structures of surprise. He uses verse for various effects: sing-song monotony, when he wants to, or the slow revelation of surprising ideas.
2. Language is important for him. His language seems austere compared to the modernista poets, but it is still quite literary, and even playful in the way it deploys registers and rhetorical figures. There is an illusion of the plainspoken, sometimes because he tells you he is being plain-spoken. He uses particularly well-crafted stanza with an elaborate four-part simile to tell us that he doesn't care about craft: "dejar quisiera / mi verso, como deja el capitán su espada / famosa por la mano viril que la blandiera / no por el docto oficio del forjador preciada." Notice the chiasmic word order and the allusion to DQ and the discourse on arms and letters. Gullón notes his modernist condensation in two chapters at the end of the book. Machado does not waste words.
3. He is a pre-avant-garde poet. He doesn't do any "modern" stuff resulting from poets after 1912, except in that condensation of language. He doesn't like surrealism. He doesn't like baroque, so you won't find him celebrating Góngora. What he does share with the younger poets is the interest in popular forms of poetry like the romance. He has phases in his work, culminating in the aphorisms of the late work and the apocryphal poets.
4. He has elaborate modes of self-presentation that critics tend to misrepresent as simplistic sincerity.
5. In Spain he is considered the best and most influential ever, by many as superior to Lorca.
That's all I've got today.
Friday, May 12, 2017
Captain Obvious
Before 1900, maybe before 1912, virtually all verse translation of metrical verse was also metrical, and usually rhymed for short lyric poems, especially when the original rhymed. This is mind-numbingly obvious, and the reasons are not hard to find:
*There was such a thing as the prose translation of verse, so translators who did not want to aspire to verse translation could translated verse into prose.
*Very few people were writing their own poetry in free verse, so verse meant, essentially, metrical verse.
*Very few of the works being translated were in non-metrical or free verse either.
This obvious fact also has several secondary implications. Before going into those, I should also point out that:
Usually, translation was into the prevailing metrical norms of the target language. So rhymed couplets or blank verse for longer poems, the ballad stanza for ballads, iambic pentameter for Italian and Spanish 11-syllables lines and French 12 syllable Alexandrines, etc... There were attempts to write hexameters to translate Homer, but they weren't as frequent. Thus metrical / cultural equivalence was usually the norm.
And a third fact:
After a certain date (19??), metrical and especially rhymed translations became much less frequent. Almost all translators today take this for granted, or at most have a perfunctory statement to the effect that "I have not tried to rhyme..." The reasons are also not too hard to find.
*Readers have a different standard for how literal they want their translations. They are no longer willing to tolerate a lot of latitude in interpretation for the sake of a rhyme or metrical pattern.
*The translator is not likely to be writing her own poems in metrical verse in the first place, and might not have any skill in doing so. The idea of translating into a prosodical norm thus prevails in this period, (19??-2017), only now the prosodical norm is free verse or extremely relaxed blank verse.
*The originals are less likely to have strict metrical patterns than before, if translators are mainly interested in poetry written in the past 100 years.
The consequence of these three obvious facts is that there is a before and and after, and that verse translation fundamentally shifted its ethos at a certain historical juncture, probably about the time I was born.
It was one thing, and now is something else.
It is hard to prove a negative, but a lot of verse translation does not have a clear prosodic impulse behind it. It is essentially prose translation (remember our old friend, prose translation?) but broken into lines to match the original.
If a translator has to strain to make a verse fit a metrical pattern in the new language, wouldn't he also have to make some effort to make a line sound good as free verse, not to mention the entire poem? Would we expect that the poem would automatically have a rhythmic flow to it just because it follows the phrases and lines of the original? Now we are moving from the stunningly obvious to an analysis that needs to be extremely nuanced.
*There was such a thing as the prose translation of verse, so translators who did not want to aspire to verse translation could translated verse into prose.
*Very few people were writing their own poetry in free verse, so verse meant, essentially, metrical verse.
*Very few of the works being translated were in non-metrical or free verse either.
This obvious fact also has several secondary implications. Before going into those, I should also point out that:
Usually, translation was into the prevailing metrical norms of the target language. So rhymed couplets or blank verse for longer poems, the ballad stanza for ballads, iambic pentameter for Italian and Spanish 11-syllables lines and French 12 syllable Alexandrines, etc... There were attempts to write hexameters to translate Homer, but they weren't as frequent. Thus metrical / cultural equivalence was usually the norm.
And a third fact:
After a certain date (19??), metrical and especially rhymed translations became much less frequent. Almost all translators today take this for granted, or at most have a perfunctory statement to the effect that "I have not tried to rhyme..." The reasons are also not too hard to find.
*Readers have a different standard for how literal they want their translations. They are no longer willing to tolerate a lot of latitude in interpretation for the sake of a rhyme or metrical pattern.
*The translator is not likely to be writing her own poems in metrical verse in the first place, and might not have any skill in doing so. The idea of translating into a prosodical norm thus prevails in this period, (19??-2017), only now the prosodical norm is free verse or extremely relaxed blank verse.
*The originals are less likely to have strict metrical patterns than before, if translators are mainly interested in poetry written in the past 100 years.
The consequence of these three obvious facts is that there is a before and and after, and that verse translation fundamentally shifted its ethos at a certain historical juncture, probably about the time I was born.
It was one thing, and now is something else.
It is hard to prove a negative, but a lot of verse translation does not have a clear prosodic impulse behind it. It is essentially prose translation (remember our old friend, prose translation?) but broken into lines to match the original.
If a translator has to strain to make a verse fit a metrical pattern in the new language, wouldn't he also have to make some effort to make a line sound good as free verse, not to mention the entire poem? Would we expect that the poem would automatically have a rhythmic flow to it just because it follows the phrases and lines of the original? Now we are moving from the stunningly obvious to an analysis that needs to be extremely nuanced.
Mayhew's Law of Poetic Diction
For any poet reputed to use ordinary, or in any way less elaborate or more colloquial language, readers will misjudge the poet's language as more colloquial than it actually is, adjusting their perception to the prevailing view.
The reasons are these:
Readers will read as they are taught. So if they are taught that Machado rejects ornate poetic language, they will not notice when he happens to use this language, even if he does it a lot.
Readers will read contrastively. So if there is a more ornate tradition, they will correctly notice that Wordsworth or Bécquer is turning his back on that, without noticing what the poet might have retained.
Readers are ideological. They think that less ornate language is better, so they are invested in thinking that Gil de Biedma or Cernuda are colloquial.
They will generalize from a few key instances of colloquialism, thinking that the entire poetic work is in conformity with the few textbook examples.
There is no such thing as ordinary language anyway. There is only language in various registers. Thus when reading a poem the conversational norm is rather diffuse in their perception. To see the poem's language as conversational they just have to not think very hard about what actual conversations are like.
Readers' perceptions of language are not very fine-tuned. Even trained critics and other poets who should know better make these misjudgments.
The reasons are these:
Readers will read as they are taught. So if they are taught that Machado rejects ornate poetic language, they will not notice when he happens to use this language, even if he does it a lot.
Readers will read contrastively. So if there is a more ornate tradition, they will correctly notice that Wordsworth or Bécquer is turning his back on that, without noticing what the poet might have retained.
Readers are ideological. They think that less ornate language is better, so they are invested in thinking that Gil de Biedma or Cernuda are colloquial.
They will generalize from a few key instances of colloquialism, thinking that the entire poetic work is in conformity with the few textbook examples.
There is no such thing as ordinary language anyway. There is only language in various registers. Thus when reading a poem the conversational norm is rather diffuse in their perception. To see the poem's language as conversational they just have to not think very hard about what actual conversations are like.
Readers' perceptions of language are not very fine-tuned. Even trained critics and other poets who should know better make these misjudgments.
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Everything comes together
Title?
Preface
Intro: Borges & Pound as translation theorists.
Chap. 1: Examination of the fate of a renaissance poem in translation as illustrative of Borges's ideas.
Chap. 2: Translation in the age of Longfellow.
Chap. 3: The Myth of the Poet-Translator
Chap 4: Machado
Chap 5: Logopoeia and Rhetorica: Quevedo and Vallejo.
Preface
Intro: Borges & Pound as translation theorists.
Chap. 1: Examination of the fate of a renaissance poem in translation as illustrative of Borges's ideas.
Chap. 2: Translation in the age of Longfellow.
Chap. 3: The Myth of the Poet-Translator
Chap 4: Machado
Chap 5: Logopoeia and Rhetorica: Quevedo and Vallejo.
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