In and Out of Translation: Things I Discovered Through the Process

The task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention 

toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original. 

—Walter Benjamin

I believe in fate. I know that this may be a polemical sentence for a writer to say but I do. It usually means that things happen for a reason, so I must believe that even though I wanted to write about nature and how a landscape can shape the way we see life and mold our own literature; for some reason I am supposed to write about translation.

When we went to the art exhibition at the Stanley Museum, the Korean artist Jiha Moon emphasized: Not to be too comfortable in what you are doing well. So maybe Nature is an old topic for my writing. It’s been one year since my novel was published and I have a new novel in my head. It’s about a woman who is emptying her dead mother´s house and I am not yet sure about the shape it will take; or if it is going to be an auto fictional novel or not. When I started writing it, I decided the main character will work as a translator and that I will combine autobiographical facts with some translation theory. Because what usually happens when you are in mourning, is that you lose your own language and the way you used to name things is no longer possible. And at the same time you are reconstructing yourself, you need to find a new way of naming things. 

I will share two experiences about translation: one about being translated and another about being a translator.

It is a fact that translation complicates the authorial position usurping it and dislocating it. For me, the book, the end result once translated into another language, belongs to the translator. As a poet whose work is being translated, one can only intervene when one feels their original intention is not being respected. Surprisingly, the translator will often opt for an unexpected linguistic turn of phrase, or for a word that is part of a determined idiolect. They will have their reasons, and a poet must trust their translator. I recall a short essay by Anne Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” in which she says, “Every translator knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another.” For Carson, this proves that “languages are not sciences of one another, you cannot match them item for item.” Once we can rule out that the intention behind translating a poem is its communicability, once we can agree in advance that the poem will never be the same as the original, this is when sonority can take on more significance than meaning, or vice versa.

Perhaps it is only by translating from one language to another that untranslatable expressions appear, and this reveals the specificity of poetic language. As the poet Circe Maia says, “the word ‘translation’ itself is misleading, by assuming the notion of transferring something from one side to another, for example the poem itself, from one language to another, and naturally this doesn’t make any sense.” Ultimately, the key is not understanding that some things will not be transferred, but rather accepting that, in the end, nothing is actually transferred.

In my case, being translated gave me the chance to realize the importance of the image in the poems I write. In the poem, “Love Might Arrive, Later,” I was faced with a question by Maureen, my translator, about whether “sueño interrumpido” referred to a couple whose future project together was ending. I did have that in mind, but what was really more important to me was the physical image of disrupted sleep in the poem, not the intangible idea. I wanted to show the image of a couple in bed together, and her waking up several times throughout the night because she can’t sleep. This meaning of “sueño” is something concrete, like the English word “sleep” as opposed to the other meaning, “dream.” I decided it was more important for the reader to visualize the image of someone tossing and turning during the night, and if that meant losing the idea that the couple’s project was ending, I was okay with giving that up.

Carson said, “There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable.” Personally, translating and thinking about translation problems remind me of solving mathematical equations. I am reminded of when Hölderlin called translation “a salutary gymnastics of the mind.” I think translation is one of the most immersive works to which the self is committed. Thinking back to our collaboration, we drove ourselves nuts looking for a “solution” to the English word “crave.” “Crave” is one of those English words that doesn’t have such a straightforward translation, like “saudade” in Portuguese. For me, words like these have a physical connotation.

Translating also means embracing the fact that one is going to lose. In addition to the transmissible, all languages possess something impossible to transmit, something that bobs around in your head with no resolution in sight. “The translator must first focus on creating a similar effect in our language, taking great care to maintain the architecture of the stanzas, despite the extreme complexity of the images,” says Circe Maia. But translating also means trusting in language, trusting that the translation will help us to open up our senses. In the poem “All Leakage is an Illusion,” we tried to find the right translation for “fuga,” so that in addition to an electrical leakage, it would also reference the idea of escape that comes from nominalizing the verb fugarse, to escape. We were both highly aware that these double meanings (or lack thereof) are always lurking about. In English there is no single word that can suggest both meanings at the same time, there is no way to allude to this semantic ambiguity. We finally accepted this defeat: in English we could not find the ambiguity that this verb has in Spanish and we decided to respect image rather than idea, that is, only the electrical sense of the word fuga remains, not the idea of escape. Again, image in my poems takes on more importance over the ideas.

When one translates, the mind enters into a different state in which the common impressions of reality become deformed. Translating, like dancing, enables one to purely inhabit the moment, a here and now in which only exist the original poem and the poem that will become the end result. 

The first time I decided to translate a living author was when I heard Asiya Wadud in a rooftop Poetry Reading in Brooklyn. There were four poets, but when she read, something happened to me; I was drowned by the musicality of her words. Maybe it was one of those times when poetry hits you in the gut, and within a minute I felt like I wanted to translate her.  Later, I sent her a few versions. I use the word versions on purpose, because I think it is impossible to put an end to a translation. Translating is also making decisions all the time: if we want to save one thing, we lose another. Following not so much what the poem says but what the poem does with language. I chose a series of poems from a book called Crosslight for a Youngbird. It was quite difficult to do, as there are neologisms, phrases in other languages, and references that I didn’t know about at all. For example, “newbird” refers to a girl, Nana, from a Syrian documentary that I didn’t have access to. But at the same time, it also refers to a young and innocent bird. Her poetry is full of ambiguities that enrich the text but make it difficult to translate. There is a very strong political undertone in the poems, like an urgency, which comes through in the language used. It is as if the language were broken, because plain language would not be enough to explore the edge, the border, the crisis of political refugees and the problems of migration. The use of repetition in the poem is a kind of insistence, of repeating names as if not to forget them. As if the anaphora of the voices were inscribed in the lineage of poems of denunciation. Throughout the book, ekphrases appear interspersed with questions about language, about the mother tongue, about the language we carry with us and the one we speak socially. In translation, the fact that the poems are governed by the principle of rhythm is somewhat lost. But, even though if we fail, even though if language would never be the same, it´s worthy.

Perhaps the ultimate example of how translating is impossible could be illustrated by London-based poet Caroline Bergvall´s experimental performance poem Via, which includes forty-eight versions of the translation of the first three lines of “Inferno,” from Dante’s The Divine Comedy; none is exactly the same as any other. Translation could be an infinite exercise. Having access to a living author when we are translating is perhaps one of the many ways to help us reduce the endless possibilities.

A small portion of this essay (which was translated by Maureen Shaughnessy) originally appeared in Latin American Literature Today, February 2020.