Translator's Note

When I first read Mexican poet David Huerta’s recent book of prose poetry, El ovillo y la brisa, I laughed out loud. Huerta’s book, as described by the author, is a collection of stories, musings, fables, false myths, and “observations based on an extremely suspicious, flimsy, and borderland philology, that is to say: bordering on theater of the absurd. A philology for Buster Keaton; better yet: a philology of Buster Keaton.”

A philology of Buster Keaton, written in Spanish, presents the English-language translator with several challenges. The overall challenge is that translating into English what Huerta says in Spanish would be absurd, for the texts, the language he writes them in, and much of their contents border on the absurd. To render borderline absurdity literally is either to kill or to irredeemably flatten this sharp and sophisticated use of language—or both! Rather, one must translate what Huerta does. And what he does is a poetic theater of the absurd played out on the stage of the historiography of literature, particularly—though in no way exclusively—the literature of the Spanish-speaking world of the last six centuries.

A related but more specific challenge is the style and tone of Huerta’s prose poems within the context of a philology of Buster Keaton. When I talked with Huerta about this particular challenge for the translator, he said that the best reference in English for what he was doing in Spanish were the stories of Vladimir Nabokov. I read many; but before I could follow up and ask him what about Nabokov’s stories he was referring to, he up and died on me (and so many other.) Without knowing whether Huerta was referring to Dmitri Nabokov’s masterful translations of his father’s stories or to the Spanish-language translations (which I haven’t read), I sought clues in the English. I’m still pondering what he meant, but several qualities that I find there, which I’ve attempted to incorporate in my translations of Huerta’s prose poetry, are the Nabokovs’ assonant musicality, their striking and hyper-specific word choice. For example, in Nabokov, one finds phrases such as “a yellow-curled boy works lickety-split”, “With helical jabs the boy makes spirals representing smoke”, and “from dull distrust to morbid trepidation”. In my translation of Huerta, are phrases such as “A fern, for example, unfurls on the sternum”, “the rude backbone of my banishment”, and “Flowers singing in the confusion of a stifling geography”.

Having translated a collection of Huerta’s poetry, written over 34 years, I ought to have a pretty good handle on or strategy for translating his poetic language in Spanish into English. Indeed, the poet’s intertextual and metalinguistic references, his essential poetic vocabulary, and his underlying sadness, humor, and wry self-consciousness are all present in this book. Yet, as Huerta puts it, El ovillo y la brisa is “different from all the other books I had written, at least at the formal level.” So, in these translations I attempt, as Huerta does himself, to reproduce the “losses and gains, intermittences and breaks, cuts, interruptions…, its strange coherence…, its music in that broken rhythm… to simulate [his] style, for [the author] knows, perhaps, that style is, or ought to be, a cornucopia of acuity, pure, sharp brilliance, without bluff or disguise.”

I hope that I’ve done in English enough of what Huerta did in Spanish that the reader will laugh to themselves as they read these prose poems—and perhaps even out loud.

Mark Schafer

In the Classroom