Translation Review - Center for Translation Studies

Translation Review
Number Seventy-two • 2006
Translation Review
No. 72, 2006
The University of Texas at Dallas
Translation Review
The University of Texas at Dallas
International
Editorial Board
John Biguenet
Ronald Christ
Samuel Hazo
Edmund Keeley
Elizabeth Gamble Miller
Margaret Sayers Peden
Marilyn Gaddis Rose
James P. White
Miller Williams
A. Leslie Willson
Editors
Rainer Schulte
Dennis Kratz
Graphic Designer
Michelle Long
Copy Editor
Sandra Smith
Art Director
Ann Broadaway
Production Staff
Charlotte Karam
Sue Jackson
Keith Heckathorn
All correspondence and inquiries should be directed to
Translation Review
The University of Texas at Dallas
Box 830688 - JO51
Richardson, TX 75083-0688
COVER IMAGE TITLE: Violación
AUTHOR: Nela Rio
MEDIUM: Digital Art
DESCRIPTION FROM THE AUTHOR: A “Visual Metaphor” for the poem of the same title
VIOLACIÓN
RAPE
tropezando
caminando por la noche estrangulada
estrangulada la voz de resistencia
ella
la que oyó el susurro
y cayó a tierra empujada por detrás
ella
caminando por la noche estrangulada
violada
ella
la que cayó empujada por detrás
tropezando
caminando por la noche estrangulada
no sabe
que los jueces más tenaces
decretan
que ella
caminaba sola por la noche
y la condenan a la noche estrangulada.
stumbling
walking through the night strangled
strangled her voice of resistance
she
who heard the rustling noise
and fell to the ground pushed from behind
she
strangled walking through the night
raped
she
who fell pushed from behind
stumbling
walking through the night strangled
doesn't know
that the most severe judges
will decree
that she
was walking alone through the night
and they sentence her to the night strangled.
© Nela Rio. Violación
© Elizabeth Gamble Miller, translator: Rape
Telephone: (972) 883-2092 or 883-2093
Fax: (972) 883-6303, e-mail: [email protected]
Information about the author:
Translation Review is published twice yearly by the Center for Translation Studies and
the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Articles in Translation Review are refereed.
The publication of this issue of Translation Review is supported in
part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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ISSN 0737-4836
Copyright © 2006 by Translation Review
The University of Texas at Dallas is an equal opportunity/affirmative action university.
Nela Rio, a prize winner for her poetry, her short fiction, and her digital art metaphors, international lecturer on her research on
Sor Leonor and as an author and artist for readings and exhibits, bilingual editions in English by Hugh Hazelton and Elizabeth
Gamble Miller.
As an artist, her “Visual Metaphors”, Digital Art, have become an integral part of some of her poems and short stories. She has
created several Artist’s Books, some of them on her own hand-made paper; a number of them are bilingual in English by Hugh
Hazelton and Elizabeth Gamble Miller; others are trilingual with English translation by Elizabeth Gamble Miller, and French by
Edith Jonsson-Devillers and Jill Valéry. These books have been exhibited in international conferences.
Rio has directed and co-produced a multimedia DVD, “Francisca”, English by Elizabeth Gamble Miller, French by Edith
Jonsson-Devillers. Readers: Spanish, Nela Rio; English, Marcela Hidalgo; French Edith Jonsson-Devillers; it also features Rio’s
Digital Art, 28 “Visual Metaphors”. The DVD was produced by Nela Rio and Mary Margison, and was presented at the
International Conference on Art and Technology, Prince Edward Island, Canada, 2004. The DVD was a recipient of an Award by
Arts-Netlantic and the New Brunswick Arts Board, 2004. The DVD has been presented at several universities in USA, Spain,
Honduras and Canada.
TRANSLATION REVIEW
No. 72, 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial: “In Other Words:” The Interpretive Dialogue With the Text ........................................................ 1
Rainer Schulte
In Translation: A Sampler ................................................................................................................................. 3
John Felstiner
“A Whole New Style Seemed to be Seeking Expression Here” ...................................................................... 9
Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark in Spanish
Michael Scott Doyle
The Disparities of Two Anglophone Renditions of “The Survivor” by Primo Levi ................................... 27
Philip Balma
Friedrich Schiller’s Skull and Bones? The Reception of a European Poet in 2005..................................... 33
Don Anderson
La Malinche, Laura Esquivel, and Translation ............................................................................................. 41
Harry Aveling
Endangered Places: Translating Toponyms in María Mercedes Carranza’s ............................................ 49
“El Canto de la Moscas” (The Song of the Flies)
Michael Sisson
The Vision of Zephyr Press: A Profile............................................................................................................ 57
Erica Mena
Book Reviews
The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry................................................................................................ 61
Translated and Edited by J.P. Seaton
Reviewed by Mike Farman
Love Hound: Poems by Oliver Welden .......................................................................................................... 62
Translated by Dave Oliphant
Reviewed by James Hoggard
Contributors ................................................................................................................................................... 65
EDITORIAL:
“IN OTHER WORDS:” THE INTERPRETIVE DIALOGUE WITH
THE TEXT
By Rainer Schulte
I am becoming more and more fascinated with the
questions: What specific interpretation does the
translator carry from a fictional or poetic text into a
new language? What do actors and directors translate
from a dramatic text onto the stage? What does a
musician read from a score to bring it to life through
the appropriate instruments? I am keenly aware of the
reality that interpretations and translations differ often
drastically from one person to the next and that there is
no such thing as the only definite interpretation of a
work regardless of the medium within which it was
created. The diversity of possible interpretations
confirms the existence of a text from which all
interpretive perspectives are generated. In that sense,
the act of interpretation follows the creation of the
work of art and does not precede it, as some critics and
scholars would like us to believe, those scholars who
pursue theories of theories that are no longer
connected to a work. May that tendency be on the
declining branch in the academic world! I often
wonder why books and articles written on famous
writers fill entire rooms whereas the actual original
works created by a writer can be placed on one
bookshelf.
The fascination with interpretation must be a basic
human desire and drive. We like to organize the
universe within which we live, we like to place the
past into its chronological frame, and we feel
comfortable when we arrive at a satisfying
interpretation. A kind of equilibrium has been
reestablished. The mystery and uncertainty of
interpretation and the challenge of translation continue
with each new work. Perhaps new texts that have not
yet received the imprimatur of scholarly affirmation
might be more challenging to the interpreter.
The curiosity of discovery excites the interpretive
mind that needs to place the work into some kind of
context, since the translator as interpreter will initiate
an intense process of thinking through the text for
which new linguistic patterns have to be found in the
receptor language.
When a text comes from a past century, I wonder
whether I actually have a reliable version in front of
me, a text that has been accurately transmitted from
Translation Review
the past, from the original writer or composer. Have
editors modified the original manuscripts or adjusted
to the taste of the present? Musical history tells us a
great deal of how scores have become of the victims of
cultural and aesthetic prejudices. Scores of J.S. Bach
edited by romantic composers and performers of the
19th century horrify contemporary musicians.
Directors of plays from the past often abridge the
scenes or even take the dramatic text as a springboard
for elaborate performances on the stage that frequently
are removed from the actual words on the page. Many
retranslations of 17th-century French plays more likely
fall into the category of adaptations rather than literary
translations. Moreover, editors at publishing houses
occasionally change original works as well as their
translations. The question must be repeated: What is it
that the translator as reader and performer can take for
granted when confronted with a verbal, dramatic, or
musical text?
Let me begin with the musical score, which more
clearly illuminates the nature of diverse
interpretations. Five pianists transfer their reading of
J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto onto the keyboard. Each
one of them is playing the exact same notes, yet five
totally different sound sequences reach the listener’s
ears. Even the musically untrained person can easily
detect the diversity of interpretations in terms of sound
clarity, phrasing of melodic lines, rhythmic variations,
and tempo variations, to name only a few. The notes
on the page appear first of all as isolated points that the
performer has to link to each following note and at the
same time imaginatively fill out the innumerable
spaces of rests placed by the composer into the score.
The way the performer translates the spaces between
the notes will determine the multifaceted possibilities
of interpretation and delineate the vast differences that
occur between one pianist and the next. Each one of
them lives through the spaces guided by the aesthetic,
cultural, historical, and social conditioning of the
performer. The greater the intensity with which these
spaces are filled with the life experience of the
musician, the more intense will be the power of the
interpretation.
1
Multiple interpretations keep a work alive, since
each one of them opens up a new way of seeing and
understanding. From that point of view, repeated
listening to the same recording reduces the
unexpectedness of the interpretive act. Sameness
replaces the unpredictability and excitement of the live
performance. Each performer “says” the score in a
new and different way by exploring the ambiguities of
the spaces between notes.
Literal translations — the correspondence of word
to word from one language to another — do not create
a readable text for the reader in the receptor language.
The internal space between words in the new language
is not the same as the word connections in the original
language, and an understanding of the delicate thought
progressions inherent in a complex literary work
becomes questionable. The translator is keenly aware
of the inadequacy of establishing trot-like
correspondences from language to language. Words
radiate the sound and rhythm, the sense and ambiance,
and the traditions of a cultural environment. Many
habits and emotional expressions of a foreign text
cannot immediately find equivalent situations in the
new language. Even though human beings experience
the same emotions in their respective cultures, the
interpretive approaches to the verbal expression of
these emotions vary greatly. The properties of one
language lend themselves more easily to articulate
2
certain emotional situations in one language rather
than in another. The sonorous qualities of Italian can
create a dynamic interaction among people, the
intensity of which might not be the same in English.
Ultimately, the translator is faced with the reality
of having to carry situations of one language across the
river into the atmosphere and language possibilities of
the corresponding foreign language. Whatever is
written in the source language cannot be transplanted
through exact lexical equivalents. Therefore,
translators have to free themselves from the clearly
defined boundaries of words in the original and think
in terms of interpreting and transplanting the complex
emotional layers constructed by the writer. Whatever
the nature of that complexity in work might be,
translators are challenged to “say” a text “in other
words” in the receptor language. That task puts a
tremendous responsibility on the shoulders of the
translator. Each translator will “say” the situation in a
different way, since no two translators will ever
produce the same final version of a text. “To say it in
other words” challenges translators to become creative
and imaginative in making their interpretive
perspectives transparent in the new language, which
ultimately is responsible for the intensity and success
of a translation.
Translation Review
IN TRANSLATION: A SAMPLER
By John Felstiner
Several decades of translating poetry, while also
teaching and writing about that process, have turned
up a good few instances of what our ancient art and
practice can and sometimes cannot achieve. Here are
some samples — aphorism, poem, auto-translation,
axiom, cognate, couplet, prayer — from Spanish,
French, German, English, Hebrew, and Yokuts, for
whatever use they serve: object lesson, cautionary tale,
warm-up, energy bar. We need all the help we can get,
so it matters to see how others have fared, faltered,
seen the light, missed the boat. Literary translation —
an ongoing task, and often thankless. Yet it’s a tide
that tosses up startling finds.
Poetry, like these United States, would seem
to have its own Declaration of Independence claiming
certain unalienable rights, among these the right not to
be alienated. At the same time, an alien, an other, a
foreign voicing may arrive at some fresh vital sense of
things, enriching its own language as it goes: the King
James Bible, Chapman’s Homer, Beckett’s Beckett.
On reading himself in French, James Thurber
remarked, “I lose something in the original!” Short of
that, the full process of translation can still turn into
fullest understanding.
Besides, monolingual America cannot do without
hearing the world’s writers in English. Woody Allen
tells a joke that goes something like this:
“You know, my brother, it’s sad, he thinks
he’s a chicken.”
“So why don’t you have him committed?”
“Because … we need the eggs!”
In the following samples, moving into and also out of
English, I trace translation’s to and fro, its ups and
downs, bringing whatever helps — biography, history,
sundry lore, forebears, drafts, other versions in any
language — to bear on the first-and-last search for an
equivalent rhythm, shape, sound, word.
1. Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Clearly this holds for blazing a trail and
bushwhacking and walking cross-country where
there’s no path, you make your own way. Whether this
holds for poetry, for translation, for life itself — well,
we’ll have to see as we go. Antonio Machado having
had his say, we’re bound to bring these lines into
Translation Review
decent English, or else learn Spanish, or marry a native
speaker, or settle in Spain or Latin America.
Deeper than the eye, the ear senses rhythmic
repetition: Caminante … camino … camino. But
Caminante (walker) and camino (road, way) don’t
seem to yield cognate terms in English, if that’s of the
essence here. To begin with, then:
Walker, there is no way,
A way is made by/in walking.
Two beats on w, twice over, provide a bonus, like
“walk” varying from one line to the next, a sign of
thought dividing. Yet doesn’t that doubled “walk”
miss the point? Since the walker’s already walking, a
way must be made by something else. “Traveler, there
is no trail …”? No, camino’s not “trail.” “Pathfinder,
there is no path ….” Interesting, but pathfinders
already do more than just walk, and they’re mostly lost
to us now, with their leather stockings.
Is there a way to carry “way” through this maxim?
Taoist and Christian overtones alone would justify it,
even though Machado’s moment points toward
experience before and beneath religion or philosophy.
The word that comes to mind has a hackneyed ring,
but I (for one) would go with it: “Wayfarer, there is no
way ….” What happens next depends on how we hear
se hace: “is made,” “gets made,” “gets to be,” “you
make”? Since a speaker is addressing us, and more is
at stake than walking, we could try this:
Wayfarer, there is no way,
A way gets made as you go.
The Spanish verses, in equal syllables, take three
stresses each that change place from one moment to
the next, so it helps to get that pacing in English too.
And sure enough, just as poets find a way as they
go, so do translators, so do we all.
2. Te interrogo, sal de los caminos,
muéstrame la cuchara, déjame, arquitectura,
roer con un palito los estambres de piedra,
subir todos los escalones del aire hacia el vacío,
rascar la entraña hasta tocar el hombre.
The way to these lines took Pablo Neruda from
Chile’s rain-soaked wooded southern “frontier” and
his mother’s death hard upon his own birth, through
fervent loves and lyrics in Santiago, lonely diplomatic
postings to Southeast Asia, republican Spain and
3
García Lorca’s assassination, the Mexico of Rivera
and Siqueiros, and risky socialist politics back home.
Took him, finally, hasta ti, Machu Picchu, on
horseback up to Peru’s not-yet-refurbished Inca
mountain stronghold, and in 1945, to his epic poem.
A generation later, my own way to all that led
straight through Alturas de Machu Picchu — through
translating, in effect:
I question you, salt of the paths,
show me the trowel. Architecture, let me
grind stone stamens with a stick,
climb every step of air up to the void,
scrape in the gut till I touch man.
Getting there wasn’t simple — certainly not for the
poet, and not for a translator either. Before this
passage occurs, in Canto Ten, Neruda has had to make
his way “into the genital quick of the earth,” back to
“the jasmine / of the exhausted human spring,” la
gastada primavera humana, a season whose chance
pun on “spring” in English uncovers a fountainhead or
source, a lost Eden — as does Neruda’s earliest
recording of this poem, when he misspeaks jazmín as
jardín, garden.
Once within this stone-forged splendor, the
poet finds instead its working poor and Hambre, coral
del hombre, where hambre (hunger) feeding on
hombre (man) is only dimly suggested by my
“Hunger, coral of humankind.” Questioning Machu
Picchu’s human cost brings him to “scrape the gut till I
touch man,” rascar la entraña hasta tocar el hombre.
For entraña (entrails), “gut” does well enough, yet
something deeper is stirring in Neruda’s cadence. He’d
earlier translated William Blake’s Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, so tracking that alongside
Neruda’s version, I found an English word of Blake’s
that had evoked entraña: “womb”!
This time-capsule, this permission from the
horse’s mouth, turns up the lost son’s search for origin
in mother earth, letting him “scrape in the womb till I
touch man.” Now and then translation, bad-mouthed
on all sides, may with pluck and luck release glints of
truth.
3. Il y aura quelque chose, plus tard,
qui se remplit (se remplira) de toi
et se hisse(ra)
à (la hauteur d’) une bouche
Here we see a rare French translation by Paul
Celan, but not of Rilke or Mandelshtam, his guiding
spirits. These lines, with their alternative possibilities,
4
render a late poem of his for his wife, Es wird etwas
sein, später, “There will be something, later.”
After the catastrophe that had taken everything —
family, homeland, culture — everything except his
mother tongue, Celan finally settled in Paris. On
marrying Gisèle de Lestrange, a French artist with no
German, he wrote to her in 1952: “I shall translate all
my poems for you: already, while I’m walking around,
I auscultate them a little, to see which way they’ll
resonate in French — they’re less stubborn than I
would have thought.” Gisèle picked up something of
her husband’s native German, but not enough to
absorb his fraught verse. He would send new poems to
her, the German plus a careful French rendering — a
gift as well from the translator’s point of view, a sort
of Rosetta Stone.
In March 1970, Celan was living near the Pont
Mirabeau, apart from his wife, to shield her from his
manic-depressive mental agony. One day he sent a
birthday letter: “What can I offer you, my dear Gisèle?
Here is a poem written while thinking of you.”
Es wird etwas sein, später,
das füllt sich mit dir
und hebt sich
an einen Mund
There will be something, later,
that brims full with you
and lifts up
toward a mouth
Because time is of the essence here, I take just as
many syllables to carry across this near-messianic
promise. Celan’s rendering for Gisèle caringly
indicates that a German present tense, unlike French
(and English), can at the same time imply a future: se
remplira, se hissera, will brim full, will lift up.
Alas and Hélas, little future remained. This hopespurred lyric goes on:
Out of a shardstrewn
craze
I stand up
and look upon my hand,
how it draws the one
and only
circle
By 1970, Celan’s meridian could only circle back to
“that which happened,” as he called what we call
Holocaust. A month after Il y aura quelque chose, he
drowned unnoticed in the Seine.
Translation Review
4. In einem Gedicht, ereignet sich Wirkliches
“In a poem, what’s real happens!” Not much
trouble here, except the venerable question: What does
the native speaker hear inwardly, essentially, when
German habitually reverses subject-verb order, saying
ereignet sich Wirkliches instead of Wirkliches sich
ereignet? But that’s not why Celan underlined the
verb. He was answering a Bremen high-school teacher
who wrote saying the students had trouble grasping his
poetry — should they just be skimming it for the
meaning?
“In a poem, what’s real happens!” Otherwise
Celan’s writing had no claim to truth. That which
happened between 1933 and 1945 could never be
described, secondhand, skimmed for meaning then
discarded. He had to make what happened happen
again in poems. Or as in Franz Kafka’s journal:
Schreiben als Form des Gebetes, “Writing as a form of
prayer.” And if writing, why not translating?
But if what’s real happens in a poem’s unique,
onetime rhythm and shape and sound, how can just
that happen in another tongue? Celan has one answer
within his own poetry, speaking of the ram’s horn
shofar blown at the gates to Jerusalem: Hör dich ein /
mit dem Mund. Literally, “Hear yourself in / with the
mouth” — or closer, echoing dich with “deep”: “Hear
deep in / with your mouth.”
5. Thine is the stillest night
Although Emily Dickinson again and again bears
out Celan’s axiom, “In a poem, what’s real happens!,”
that didn’t deter him from translating her.
Let down the bars, Oh Death —
The tired Flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat
Whose wandering is done —
Having boosted her demand into rough command, he
makes syntactic tours de force activate the flocks
coming in:
Fort mit der Schranke, Tod!
Die Herde kommt, es kommt,
wer blökte und nun nimmer blökt,
wer nicht mehr wandert, kommt.
[Away with the Bars, Death!
The Herd comes in, they come
who bleated and now never bleat,
who no more wander, come.]
Celan’s verb kommt keeps coming in, while he turns
the keenness of “bleating ceases to repeat” into
repeated bleats, past and now never present.
Translation Review
Then as Dickinson’s second stanza opens tenderly,
addressing Death, her translator finds the perfect
equivalent:
Thine is the stillest night
Dein ist die stillste Nacht
No call now for re-inventing what happens in the
original. Here every syllable is cognate, even the
superlative suffix, “stillest” / stillste. We should be so
lucky!
Besides Dickinson, Celan lent his hand to
Shakespeare, Frost, Yeats, Housman, Mandelshtam,
Esenin, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Valéry, and many
others. At times his hand, moved by psycho-linguistic
memories of 1939–1945, pressed harder than we’d
expect. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,”
the only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
doch, dies noch: leichten Wind, die Flocken,
erdwärts, dicht.
[yet, this too: easy wind, the snowflakes,
earthward, dense.]
With six fragments hacked out of Frost’s smooth line,
something more’s at stake than an urge to make it new.
Celan’s mother was murdered in the coldest Ukrainian
winter for decades. That alone charged these
snowflakes overmuch. And while knowing that
“downy” is no cute adverb, he let the European
downfall wrest a dark German pun out of soft
snowflakes falling erdwärts, earthwards.
It’s sometimes said that Frost and others have been
celanisiert, “celanified.” I’d call such translation
“strong,” penetrating. Osip Mandelshtam, hounded to
death by Stalin, Celan adopted as a blood-brother and
gave the better part of a year to. “I consider translating
Mandelshtam into German to be as important a task as
my own verses.” Often these versions might as well be
his own verse.
Inevitably, Mandelshtam’s 1916 elegy for his
mother traverses the charged medium of his
translator’s loss. Where the Russian poem’s closing
stanza begins (plainly rendered),
And over my mother rang out
voices of the Israelites,
Celan in the first line’s first stress makes the Israelites
Jews as he knows them, and adds news:
Judenstimmen, die nicht schwiegen,
Mutter, wie es schallt.
[Jewish voices, not gone silent,
Mother, they resound.]
It’s the translator who resists their silencing and
directly addresses his mother. Reciting these German
5
lines, Celan’s voice slows and then almost chokes on
Mutter.
With poets closer to his own time he seldom dealt
this way. Among the thousands of books he left, I
found on his shelves late one night an offprint of René
Char’s wartime Résistance notebooks, which he’d
translated. Char has inscribed it À Paul Celan, à qui je
pensais, “To Paul Celan, whom I was thinking of.”
Impossible, of course, and an uncanny tribute!
6.
‫את הילד החי צריכים‬
‫לנקות בשובו ממשחק‬
et hayeled hachai tsrichim
lenakot b’shuvo mimischak
Cognates do not exist between Hebrew and
English, though “alphabet” stems back through Greek
to the letters aleph and beth. Nor have many nations a
history cognate with the one whose people speak
Hebrew. And more often than not, history presses hard
upon the process of translation.
Taken literally:
the child (acc.) living (adj.) we need
to clean on his return from play
Or plainly, “We need to clean the living child on his
return from play.” To begin with, something this
mundane — except for “living” — needs locating. The
couplet occurs in Seven Laments for the War Dead, by
Yehuda Amichai, who came from Deutschland to
Palestine at twelve, in 1936, and died in 2000 as the
20th century’s leading Hebrew poet, a humorous lover,
parent, and man of peace who fought in all Israel’s
wars.
Near the end of a year spent teaching in Jerusalem,
1974–1975, I woke one morning to hear on the 7 a.m.
English news that my neighbor and excellent Hebrew
teacher’s 19-year-old son Moshe, named for his uncle
who died in the war of independence, had been killed
on the Lebanese border. Distraught, I wonder what I
can do for Drora and her husband. Against all better
judgment, given a rudimentary command of the
language, I try my hand at these lines — as if my
neighbors needed an English version!
Thankfully, in grief the poetry mind still kicks in,
to see what’s happening here. At bottom, as ever, runs
a rhythm: et hayéled hachái tsrichím / lenakót b’shuvó
mimischák, DIDDYDUM DIDDYDUM DEEDUM /
DIDDYDUM DIDDYDUM DIDDYDUM. Now one vital
question follows: how to balance supple three-beat
cadences across Amichai’s break after tsrichim,
“need” — a pause or fulcrum that lets the first line
6
stand alone for a moment, saying we need the living
child. Of course we do, but this is not quite news.
Yet it is, I discover. Amichai has drawn “the living
child” in its accusative case from King Solomon’s
ruling between two women claiming a single infant. Et
hayeled hachai, Solomon says, “Cut the living child in
two,” whereupon the true mother cedes her child. Opt
for life: the Hebrew Bible’s premier wisdom.
“It is difficult / to get the news from poems,”
William Carlos Williams tells us, “yet men die
miserably every day / for lack / of what is found
there.” In their prose sense, Amichai’s lines stay inert,
“We need to clean the living child on his return from
play.” Only when we hear his verse, his voice, at once
staying and moving, when tsrichim mutates across the
line break from main verb to auxiliary, “we need / to
clean” only then does utter loss strike home, recalling
Solomon and the war dead. A fresh word order and
cadence, in colloquial idiom balancing seven with
seven syllables, can do justice to the Hebrew line
break. Truism turns into everyday human truth:
It’s the living child we need
to scrub when he’s back from play.
Every young soldier was once someone’s child, and
now he may not come back alive.
7. nim yèt·au t·ikexo texal
maiayiu lomto
maiayiu silelhaliu
maiayiu witsetaliu
yèt·au polut-nim
ucuk-nim
Around 1900, a tribal shaman chanted this prayer
to the Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who
transcribed and translated it. Since we glean nothing
from its strange locutions, ignoring as we do the
Yokuts people’s language, culture, and history, we’ll
let it remain obscure for a few paragraphs.
Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California
also recounts a smaller people’s story. Up through the
Civil War, the Yahi dwelt in rough ridge and canyon
country. About 1865, some settler vigilantes surprised,
surrounded, and exterminated “practically the whole
remnant.” In later years, a cattleman “would report
meeting a wild and naked Indian who fled like a deer.”
Hunters came across four adults and a child, who
escaped. In 1908, surveyors found a hidden camp of
four “aboriginal” Indians, who fled. For 43 years these
people, this people, had survived, “smothering their
camp smoke, crawling under the brush to leave no
trail, obliterating their very footsteps ….” In August
Translation Review
1911, one last man, his hair singed short in mourning,
staggered exhausted into a clearing and was given into
Kroeber’s care. He knew no English, and a few
Spanish words “considered by him part of his native
tongue.”
Considered by him part of his native tongue: what
an irony on the fate of human languages! This was
Ishi, meaning “man” (strange that the Hebrew for
“man” is Ish). The “last wild Indian in the United
States,” as his worthy guardian called him, died in
1916.
Naturally the language died with him, though
Kroeber had immediately brought Edward Sapir to
California to record as much as possible. So we ask
what gets lost, week in week out, when languages
become endangered, then extinct? W.S. Merwin’s
“Losing a Language” reminds us that
many of the things the words were about
no longer exist
the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I
A verb for “I”! Can the Anglo-European mind bend
itself around such a possibility?
English and French settlers do crop up in early
American history, making grammars and dictionaries
— John Eliot with the Massachuset Indians, Jonathan
Edwards with the Mohegan — usually for evangelic
purposes. In another vein, some people would and
some wouldn’t literally apply the “translator-traitor”
epithet to Malinche interpreting for Cortés, Sacagawea
for Lewis and Clark. Since the late 19th century,
valiant anthropologists such as Kroeber have sat
opposite vanishing keepers of a native tongue. Just
what is happening when the last speaker does what she
can at such a moment, and when she too eventually
dies?
Now back to our prayer. The Yokuts people, with
their oral culture and no written language, had dwelt in
California’s San Joaquin Valley for “only 2000 years,”
says Kroeber. In the late 18th century, they numbered
18,000. About 3000 remained a century later. Now
few if any native speakers exist, and the faith
breathing life into that prayer, the trust that decent
words bind us to nature, is also vanishing. Kroeber’s
Yokuts Language of South Central California
transcribes the prayer this way:
nim
yèt·au
t·ikexo
texal
my
together
is-tied
talk
maiayiu
lomto
with-the-large mountain
Translation Review
maiayiu
silelhaliu
with-the-large rocks
maiayiu
witsetaliu
with-the-large trees (woods)
yèt·au
polut-nim
together
body my
ucuk-nim
heart my
Though this appears word-for-word literal, much must
escape (like the Yahi survivors) when sacred utterance
from an oral culture goes phonetically roman, then
English. Still, a root truth shines through.
About the slightly longer prayer whose core this
is, Kroeber notes: “Spoken rapidly, rhythmically, and
monotonously, with motions of the arms … to the
heart and out again. Seven deities are addressed.”
Do you see me!
See me, Tüüshiut!
See me, Pamashiut!
See me, Yuhahait!
See me, Echepat!
See me, Pitsuriut!
See me, Tsukit!
See me, Ukat!
Do you all help me!
My words are tied in one
With the great mountains,
With the great rocks,
With the great trees,
In one with my body
And my heart.
Do you all help me
With supernatural power,
And you, day,
And you, night!
All of you see me
One with this world!
“My words are tied in one / With the great mountains,
/ … with my body / And my heart.” In other words
(translating one translation with another), “In a poem,
what’s real happens!” But are our words tied this way
today, in the mother tongue, translated or not?
When it comes to literary translation, especially
poetry, the sky seems dark with question, admonition,
polyglot analogy. In Spanish, Don Quixote: It’s like
the wrong side of a Flemish carpet — the design is
there, but all blurred by extra threads. Roy Campbell
was provoked to write “On the Martyrdom of Federico
García Lorca”:
Not only did he lose his life
7
by shots assassinated,
but with a hatchet and a knife
was after that — translated!
In French: Les belles infidèles, comely thus faithless
women (with a sideswipe at homely ones who have to
be faithful). Chaim Nachman Bialik in Yiddish: Like
kissing a bride … through her veil. Italian: TraduttoreTraditore — i.e., “translator-traitor,” but why not try
to refute this proverbial wisdom by the act of aptly
rendering it: “Render-Bender”? Also proverbially,
Robert Frost: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
Yes, perhaps, but sometimes lost and found, maybe
even gained.
In Hebraic tradition the Targumist, translating the
Torah live, the five books of Moses, into vernacular
Aramaic in front of the people, is enjoined not to stand
too near the Torah, not to look into the Torah for the
translation’s not there, not to recite in a louder or
higher pitched voice than the Torah reader. It’s a
wonder that translation gets any billing at all, never
mind equal! We might as well — and why not? — call
it “The Art of Loss.”
Yet tradition still has a few good words to say.
When biblical Esther’s cousin Mordechai tells her of
plotters planning to kill Ahasuerus, her husband, she
passes this along to the King, saving his life. Upon
which the Babylonian Talmud comments: Kol omer
davar b’shem omro mevia geula l’olam, “Whoever
speaks a word in the name of its speaker, brings
8
redemption to the world.” Walter Benjamin, in Die
Aufgabe des Übersetzers (“The Task of the
Translator,” though Aufgabe can also mean “giving
up”), says this: “Translation kindles from the endless
renewal of languages as they grow to the messianic
end of their history.” These are brave thoughts, and
we’d better believe them.
In perennial throes of rend(er)ing poems and
exposing this process so as to bring out their fullest
sense, I’ve thought of literary translation as a form of
stress electrocardiogram. Although a body in question
undergoes unusual strain, much can be learned from
the procedure.
Oftentimes, however, when asked on a plane or at
a party, “Translating poetry — isn’t that just
impossible?,” I summon up the motto of our
Construction Battalions in World War II, the CB’s or
Seabees I grew up admiring. Asked how they managed
to build pontoon bridges over the Rhine under enemy
fire, and such tasks, they said: “The difficult we do
immediately, the impossible takes a bit longer.”
Well, by definition, translations don’t happen
immediately, and what we desire can’t always be
achieved. But as the Hebrew Pirke Avot says, the
Sayings of the Fathers: “It is not incumbent upon you
to complete the task. Neither are you free to desist
from it.”
Translation Review
“A WHOLE NEW STYLE SEEMED TO BE SEEKING EXPRESSION
HERE”1: CORMAC MCCARTHY’S OUTER DARK IN SPANISH
By Michael Scott Doyle
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious (…) The struggle itself toward the heights is
enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
— The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
The good utopian promises himself to be, primarily, an inexorable realist. Only when he is certain of not
having acceded to the least illusion, thus having gained the total view of a reality stripped stark naked, may
he, fully arrayed, turn against that reality and strive to reform it, yet acknowledging the impossibility of the
task, which is the only sensible approach (…) To declare its impossibility is not an argument against the
possible splendor of the translator’s task.
— The Misery and Splendor of Translation, José Ortega y Gasset
I
Whereas the native-language reader of Cormac
McCarthy is always faced with a daunting challenge,
his translator into another language faces what is
ultimately an impossible task. McCarthy writes in a
quintessential American English, in a stylized idiom
idiosyncratic to the wordsmith yet deeply rooted either
in the landscape and laconic talk of the southern
Appalachian foothill- and mountainfolk (East
Tennessee and thereabouts) or the ranchers, ranch
hands, and cowboys of the Texas-Mexico border.2 To
begin with, it is an English that often requires reEnglishing by the reader, a Jakobsonian exercise in
intralingual translation,3 so that even the literate
native-language reader himself can embark on an
understanding of what McCarthy has written, or at
least the lexicon he has used or coined.4 In his
Appalachian novels, it is a familiar, rural and folksy
American English — “the raw essence of the area’s
uniquely guttural dialect” (Gibson)5 — with
substandard dialectal literary roots in the tradition of
Twain and Faulkner. It is marked by landscape- and
object-specific words, an “unparalleled cataloging of
physical and natural details” (Gibson), erudition on
display through lexical acuteness. It requires the
honest reader to consult a good English-language
dictionary (and other hermeneutic resources) as an aid
to fuller understanding — vocabulary glossed in the
margins, incongruous in the genre of the novel, would
certainly prove useful — in effect demanding that s/he
too become a translator. Or the English-language
novel itself could be accompanied by equally
Translation Review
incongruent Nabokovian skyscrapers of footnotes to
service the reader’s understanding.6 In the end,
McCarthy’s English — which pulls the reader into and
along its pages of narrative description and dialogue
while overwhelming him with the undertow of the
alloyed strangeness of the language and style
themselves and the heretofore unknown characters and
worlds created — is also alien for the native-language
reader. In his novel Suttree, McCarthy sums up what
any reader of his fiction will recall upon reading one
of his novels: “The words of the book swam off the
page eerily and he thought he’d never read a stranger
tale” (294).
If it is all so alien for the native-language reader
and speaker7 what must it be like to translate, or try to
translate, McCarthy’s literary worlds into a foreign
language, Spanish, with a completely different
linguistic and cultural tradition and fabric? The task is
truly Ortegian.8 What does a translator do when a
novel such as Outer Dark wedges itself mulishly
between Schleiermacher’s options — refusing to be
budged toward the new cultural readership while
refusing also to be approached?9,10 What happens
when Venuti’s compelling case for foreignization in
translation is trumped — and is apparently made easier
while actually becoming more challenging — by the
writer who, to begin with, is alien and has already
foreignized in the extreme intralingually and
intraculturally? How does a translator of Cormac
McCarthy strive for Nida’s and Taber’s lucid
prescription of dynamic equivalence11 when there is no
9
cross-cultural organism to be found, for the narrative
DNA of Outer Dark, and its aural fingerprint, are
absolutely unique to the setting and idio-socio-dialect
of the characters and therefore resist being shared
through translatorial import-export? A map of the
difficult translatorial terrain to be traversed is the
following:
How do you translate McCarthy’s lyrical prose, a
flowing riot of words in Appalachian English
cascading one upon another, into Spanish? How can
you possibly do it? (The alternative, that a foreignlanguage reader learn American English well enough
to read McCarthy in McCarthy’s English, provides no
feasible solution because even for the native-language
reader, McCarthy requires reading skills honed over
years, and still what is written in the native language
remains alien.) Age-old issues of what and how,
content and form, message and manner, sender and
receiver — the nature, limits, and possibilities of
translation — rise phoenix-like in the task of
translating McCarthy, for his unique voice in
American English should somehow remain just so as it
is carried into other languages, if only this were
possible.
The reader enters the cryptic and foreboding world
of Outer Dark through the following four sentences,
italicized in the novel:
THEY CRESTED OUT on the bluff in the late
afternoon sun with their shadows long on the
sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and
slowly high above the river and with something of
its own implacability, pausing and grouping for a
moment and going on again strung out in
silhouette against the sun and then dropping under
the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with
light touching them about the head in spurious
sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as
saw the sun down altogether and they moved in
shadows altogether which suited them very well.
When they reached the river it was full dark and
they made camp and a small fire across which
their shapes moved in a nameless black ballet.
They cooked whatever it was they had with them in
whatever crude vessels and turned in to sleep,
sprawled on the packed mud full clothed with their
mouths gaped to the stars. They were about with
the first light, the bearded one rising and kicking
out the other two and still with no word among
them rekindling the fire and setting their battered
pannikins about it, squatting on their haunches,
eating again wordlessly with beltknives, until the
bearded one rose and stood spraddlelegged before
the fire and closed the other two in a foul white
plume of smoke out of and through which they
fought suddenly and unannounced and mute and
as suddenly ceased, picking up their ragged duffel
and moving west along the river once again.
The native-language reader of English — whose
exegesis makes him the first of McCarthy’s translators
— is immediately challenged intralingually, as he will
be throughout the novel (and is so throughout
McCarthy’s books), to make clear sense of what is
transpiring. Nida and Taber, who privilege meaning
over form and manner, remind us that “translating
must aim primarily at ‘reproducing the message.’ To
do anything else is essentially false to one’s task as a
translator” (12).12 To recast their prescription for doing
translation, “the translator is bound to ask himself:
What was it that [McCarthy], writing in his day [or in
his American cultural idiolect and the southern
Appalachian socio-dialect of the mid 20th century]
understood by the [English] he used? If we are to
make a faithful translation of [McCarthy’s novel] this
is what must be our viewpoint” (8). The translator into
Spanish must first be an informed, at-home, and
perfect reader who fully understands the English, no
mean feat because the average or even strong native
reader of English must often struggle mightily to
follow and understand McCarthy’s words, syntax,
10
Translation Review
absence of punctuation, and layering of meanings. So
the task of translating is doubled from the onset,
requiring first an exegetic exercise, an intralingual
kerneling or back-transformation within or from
English to English, before moving the work across
languages from English to Spanish. Such an exercise
in preliminary lexical intralingual translation might
look something like the following, the extent of which
would, of course, vary from reader to reader:
THEY CRESTED OUT [reached the top] on
the bluff [cliff, headland, or hill with a broad
steep face] in the late afternoon sun with their
shadows long on the sawgrass [Cladium (fensedge, sawgrass, or twig-sedge) is a genus of
large sedges, with a world-wide distribution in
tropical and temperate regions. These are
plants characterized by long, narrow (grasslike) leaves having sharp, often serrated
(sawtooth-like) margins, and flowering stems 1–
3 m tall bearing a much-branched inflorescence
… Because of the sharp, saw-like serrulations
on the blades, dense beds of saw-grass can be
dangerous to attempt to navigate through (the
blades easily cut flesh)]13 and burnt sedge [the
family Cyperaceae, or the sedge family, a taxon
of monocot flowering plants that superficially
resemble grasses or rushes … associated with
wet places and poor soils.], moving single file
and slowly high above the river and with
something of its own [the river’s own]
implacability [steady flow], pausing and grouping
for a moment and going on again strung out in
silhouette against the sun and then dropping under
the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with
light touching them about the head in spurious
[not genuine, authentic, or true] sanctity
[holiness, saintliness, or godliness] until they had
gone on for such a time as saw the sun down
altogether [until the sun set completely] and they
moved in shadows altogether [completely in the
shadows] which suited them very well. When they
reached the river it was full [completely] dark and
they made camp and a small fire across [behind
or above] which their shapes moved in a nameless
black ballet. They cooked whatever it was they had
with them in whatever [various] crude vessels
[pots and pans] and turned in to sleep, sprawled
on the packed mud full clothed [with all their
clothes on] with their mouths gaped [open] to the
stars. They were about [woke up and were
moving] with the first light [when the sun rose],
Translation Review
the bearded one rising [getting/waking up, or
standing up] and kicking out [rousing] the other
two and still with no word among them rekindling
[lighting again] the fire and setting their battered
pannikins [small pans or metal cups] about it,
squatting on their haunches [the fleshy part of
the body about the hip], eating again wordlessly
with beltknives [large knives worn on their
belts], until the bearded one rose and stood
spraddlelegged [moving with or having the legs
wide apart] before [in front of] the fire and
closed [by so doing covered] the other two in a
foul white plume of smoke out of and through
which they fought suddenly and unannounced
[with stealth, like a sneak attack or assault] and
mute [in silence] and as suddenly ceased, picking
up their ragged duffel [camper’s clothing and
equipment] and moving [moved, headed out]
west along the river once again.
For the sake of reading and full comprehension,
these four opening sentences might be fragmented into
smaller units, such as the eighteen shorter sentences
that follow (a type of mental remapping that often
occurs similarly on the part of the reader qua
translator, during the reading, once a lexical unpacking
is completed, so that a fuller understanding of words,
syntax, punctuation, and verbal context is achieved):
THEY reached the top of the cliff. In the late
afternoon sun with their shadows long on the
sawgrass and burnt sedge, they were slowly and
steadily moving single file high above the river
and with something of the river’s steady flow.
They paused and came together in a group for a
moment and went on again. They were strung out
in silhouette against the sun. Then they dropped
under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue
shadow with light touching them about the head in
false holiness until they had gone on until the sun
set completely. They moved about completely in
the shadows, which suited them very well. When
they reached the river it was completely dark.
They made camp and a small fire behind or over
which their shapes moved in a nameless black
ballet. They cooked whatever it was they had with
them in various crude pots and pans. They turned
in to sleep, sprawled on the packed mud with all
their clothes on with their mouths open to the
stars. They woke up and were moving when the
sun rose. The bearded one stood up and roused the
other two. They did not speak while they lit the
fire again and set their small battered pans or
11
metal cups about it. They squatted on their
haunches. They ate wordlessly with the large
knives they wore on their belts. The bearded one
rose and stood with his legs wide apart in front of
the fire which covered the other two in a foul
white plume of smoke. They fought suddenly and
with stealth and in silence and just as suddenly
ceased. They picked up their ragged camper’s
clothing and equipment and headed out west along
the river once again.
But, of course, McCarthy unpacked in this manner
is no longer McCarthy because it is not so much the
story being told as the telling of the story — how it is
told, a whole new style seeking expression — that
makes McCarthy McCarthy. The telling of the story is
at the heart of the story.14 Such semantic and syntactic
unpacking serves merely as an illustration; it is a
heuristic device, a metaphor for how translation
proceeds as an endeavor based first and foremost on as
complete a comprehension of meaning as possible.
The old law imposes itself: to begin with, one cannot
adequately or correctly translate what one does not
fully understand.
In 2002, Outer Dark was translated into Spanish
as La oscuridad exterior by Luis Murillo Fort, an
accomplished translator with an extensive
bibliography of books translated.15 The novel’s
opening four sentences reappear in Spanish as:
Coronaron el peñasco al sol de la media tarde con
sus sombras largas sobre la masiega y las juncias
quemadas, avanzando en fila india muy despacio
con el río allá abajo y algo de su misma
implacabilidad, parando para agruparse un
momento y poniéndose de nuevo en marcha
silueteados a contraluz uno detrás de otro para
luego descender de la cresta hacia un pliegue de
sombra azul con las cabezas iluminadas por un
halo de espuria santidad y tanto tiempo
caminaron que el sol se había puesto del todo y
avanzaban ya entre tinieblas, cosa que les
convenía mucho. Cuando ganaron el río era de
noche cerrada y acamparon y encendieron una
pequeña lumbre más allá de la cual sus figuras se
movían en un anónimo ballet negro. Cocinaron en
toscos recipientes lo poco que llevaban consigo y
se echaron a dormir sobre el fango endurecido
vestidos como iban y contemplando boquiabiertos
las estrellas. Al alba estaban en pie, el barbudo
despertando a puntapiés a los otros dos, y siempre
sin cruzar palabras entre ellos avivaron el fuego y
dispusieron a su alrededor las abolladas
12
cazoletas, sentados en cuclillas y comiendo en
absoluto silencio con sus cuchillos de cinto, hasta
que el barbudo se levantó y se plantó abierto de
piernas ante la lumbre y encerró a los otros dos en
un penacho de pestilente humo blanco a través del
cual se batieron de súbito para resurgir sin previo
aviso y mudos y quedar inmóviles tan
repentinamente como antes, recogiendo sus raídos
pertrechos y reanudando la marcha hacia el oeste
siguiendo el río (7).
It is immediately apparent that a key element of
what makes McCarthy McCarthy in English — the
surface structure itself, conduit of style, tone, and
narrative voice — is transmuted as he is reborn before
the reader’s eyes in Spanish. This, of course, is
inevitable, given that the genius of each language is
different.16 As we proceed to examine aspects of the
challenges posed to the translator by the four opening
sentences of Outer Dark, and representative
difficulties elsewhere in the novel, the intent is
certainly not to morph into a Rabassaian “Professor
Horrendo,”17 searching out in bad faith minute errors
in the translator’s final product or areas in which one
might argue discrepancy with the translator’s choices;
rather, it is to look closely at some of what happens to
McCarthy, or any accomplished dialectal writer, in
translation — at what happens when McCarthy’s sui
generis English is transplanted or mutated into
Spanish. Be it said now that, by and large, Luis
Murillo Fort has done a very good translation of a very
difficult novel, and his courage is to be commended
for taking on the challenges of Outer Dark. It is a very
good read in Spanish, still powerful and strange, just
not the same read, never as powerful and strange, as
with the original.
The opening clause of the first sentence, “They
crested out on the bluff in the late afternoon,” is
rendered by Murillo as “Coronaron el peñasco al sol
de la media tarde,” a literal backtranslation (BT)18 of
which is “They crowned/reached the top of the crag
(or rocky outcrop) in the mid afternoon sun.” A
mapping of difference in translation, as measured via
BT, allows us to isolate what is difficult to translate,
untranslatable, and what is lost in translation. In this
phrase, it is difficult to carry over into Spanish the
precise image of cresting out, the motion of rising up
to the top conveyed by the verb and adverbial particle
together (crested out), as the word “crest” itself is a
synonym for the summit or top of the bluff that has
been reached, heightening the reader’s sense of place
and motion; “bluff” (a cliff, headland, or hill with a
Translation Review
broad steep face) is rendered in backtranslated Spanish
as “crag” or “rocky outcrop,” when it might also be
“risco” (crag) or “acantilado” (cliff) in Spanish, but the
word “bluff” seems to evade a one-for-one lexical
match-up in Spanish, whereas the English word alone
accommodates all three Spanish words, peñasco, risco,
and acantilado; and late afternoon is translated as “la
media tarde,” which backtranslates as “mid
afternoon,” as there is no idiomatic phrasal equivalent
in Spanish to “late afternoon,” which can be rendered
more precisely but less naturally as “tarde en la tarde”
or “la última hora de la tarde,” or something similar.
So Murillo is immediately wrestling with frustrating
difficulties: the changes in surface structure produce
nuanced changes in meaning, and both types of change
together begin to show how English and Spanish differ
in their expressive and evocative capabilities.
Continuing with the first sentence, Murillo must
find rigorous lexical equivalents for “sawgrass” and
“sedge,” which he does with “masiega” and “juncias.”
Neither word, however, is provided in a standard
general bilingual dictionary such as The Oxford
Spanish Dictionary, and “masiega” is not given in the
online Diccionario de la lengua española
(www.rae.es), which shows that the professional
translator at work is mining a more extensive
inventory of resources (among them, one assumes,
various search engines such as Google and Yahoo en
Español), illustrating a requisite love of the verbal
chase and the will to problem-solve that characterize
good translators. The phrase “moving single file and
slowly high above the river” is translated as
“avanzando en fila india muy despacio con el río allá
abajo” (BT: advancing Indian file very slowly with the
river down far below), which is idiomatic and fully
recasts the kernel meaning in Spanish, with “muy
despacio” capturing nicely the “very slow” slowness
that in English is emphasized through syntactic
placement; but “high above the river” has been flipped
over to “the river down far below,” shifting the
emphasis from the three men high above to the water
flowing far below them. The “pausing and grouping
for a moment” becomes “parando para agruparse un
momento” (BT: pausing [in order] to regroup for a
moment), which loses McCarthy’s doubling of the
gerund form (Spanish does not use gerunds in the
manner of English) in order to privilege a greater sense
of simultaneity rather than the purpose of the pause.
Murillo does a nice job of translating “going on again
strung out in silhouette against the sun” as
“poniéndose de nuevo en marcha silueteados a
Translation Review
contraluz uno detrás de otro” (BT: going on again
silhouetted against the light one behind the other),
which, if translated formally, would lead to something
understandable but odd, as “siguiendo de nuevo uno
tras otro en silueta contra el sol.” Interestingly,
however, a more formal translation such as this would
foreignize the translation and thereby capture more of
the distinctiveness of McCarthy’s style, which is
already foreignized within the English original.
The next part of the first sentence, “and then
dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue
shadow” is regenerated in Murillo’s Spanish as “para
luego descender de la cresta hacia un pliegue de
sombra azul” (BT: [in order] to descend from the crest
toward a fold of blue shadow), again losing the
ongoing movement implied by McCarthy’s use of yet
another gerund while also dispensing with the original
doubling of “crest” and “crested out,” which in
English paints a greater consistency of landscape and
narrative cohesion for the reader. The next syntactic
string of words, “with light touching them about the
head with spurious sanctity,” is translated as “con las
cabezas iluminadas por un halo de espuria santidad”
(BT: with their heads illuminated by a halo of spurious
sanctity), with the implied “halo” in English being
made explicit in the Spanish text, and again losing the
gerund upon gerund construction that marks
McCarthy’s original. The word “sanctity” can be
translated as either “santidad” or “inviolabilidad”
(inviolability), and Murillo does well to choose the
noun that foreshadows the unholiness that is to be
unleashed throughout the novel by these three
footsoldiers of evil. The sentence concludes with
“until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun
down altogether and they moved in shadows altogether
which suited them very well,” expressed in Spanish as
“y tanto tiempo caminaron que el sol se había puesto
del todo y avanzaban ya entre tinieblas, cosa que les
convenía mucho” (BT: and they walked for such a
long time that the sun had completely set and they
were now making their way in the shadows,
[something] which suited them very well”). Here the
alliterative image of “seeing the sun down,”
phonetically reinforced by the “s” in “shadows” and
“suited,” is translated away into an idiomatic Spanish
that grasps hard to the kernel meaning rather than to its
evocative form. However, Murillo compensates nicely
for this loss of the “s” alliteration in English when he
provides an alliterative “t” sound elsewhere with
“tanto, tiempo, puesto, todo, tinieblas.” McCarthy’s
parallel deployment of the word “altogether,” with the
13
second one playing on “altogether” (completely in
shadows) and “all together” (three men in a group),
vanishes in the explicitness of the Spanish rendition,
which locks meaning into the notion of “completely in
shadows.” Similarly lost is the double duty pulled by
the word “suited,” alluding both to being “convenient”
(the shadows were convenient for the shadowy
activities being foreshadowed) and to being concealed
or clothed in a “suit” of shadows (e.g., as in a suit of
armor).
In the second sentence, the Spanish translation
“cuando ganaron el río” captures nicely the alliteration
of the “r” in “when they reached the river,” with
“ganaron” being even more suggestive as in “when
they made the river,” and the phrase “full dark” is
consummately rendered as “noche cerrada” (literally
“night closed”), which in Spanish comes off as a
perfect idiomatic match. The “small fire across which
their shapes moved” is translated as “pequeña lumbre
más allá de la cual sus figuras se movían” (BT: small
fire beyond which their figures moved), in which the
word “across” is locked into meaning simply “beyond”
or “on the other side of,” thereby losing the
connotation of the three men also moving (stepping,
dancing, crisscrossing) across the top of their fire “in a
nameless black ballet,” which in Spanish becomes “en
un anónimo ballet negro” (BT: in an anonymous black
ballet), when “ballet negro sin nombre,” a more literal
yet idiomatic translation, would be more suggestive
and McCarthyish than the word “anonymous.”
Among the changes in Spanish in the third
sentence, the doubling of the word “whatever” in
“They cooked whatever they had with them in
whatever crude vessels” is lost with “Cocinaron en
toscos recipientes lo poco que llevaban consigo” (BT:
They cooked in crude containers/receptacles what little
they had with them), which again arrests meaning
where such stabilization does not occur in the English
original. The word “poco” (little, small amount) tinges
with quantification that which is more random in the
English phrasing of “whatever they had with them,”
which can include yet mean more than “what little
they had with them.” “Full clothed” is well translated
idiomatically as “como iban” (BT: just as they were)
and “with their mouths gaped to the stars” is rendered
as “contemplando boquiabiertos las estrellas” (BT:
contemplating the stars open-mouthed). In the latter
phrase, the addition of “contemplando” again pins the
meaning down somewhat more than the English
original: “mouths gaped to the stars” certainly implies
a gaping in astonishment or wonder, a wondrous
14
contemplation, but it could also be mouths open in the
act of three men exhausted and snoring. What so often
happens in the Spanish translation of Outer Dark, and
in translation in general, is that the quest for full
understanding by the reader qua translator leads to
explicitation where and when the original text is richer
in connotation and ambiguity — and McCarthy’s
words play on intentional richness and ambiguity.
In the fourth sentence, it is difficult to carry into a
matching Spanish the rustic tone and surface structure
of “They were about,” translated as “estaban en pie”
(BT: they were on foot/they were standing); of “the
bearded one rising and kicking out the other two,”
rendered as “el barbudo despertando a puntapiés a los
otros dos” (BT: the bearded one waking the other two
up with kicks), which loses the action of his
rising/standing up in order to kick the other two out
bed (a non-bed on the hard ground); and of the coined
compound word “beltknives,” given in Spanish as
“cuchillos de cinto” (BT: belt knives). With
“beltknives,” Murillo might have himself created a
neologism such as “cintocuchillos,” which would risk
the ire of some purists and critics but which would
mirror what McCarthy was doing in and with English.
Had Murillo resorted to coining a similar word in
Spanish, he would have been working within the
Romantic hermeneutic tradition wherein the translator
strives to write in the target language (TL) what the
original author might have written had the TL been the
language of the original writing. Coining in translation
would have pushed the Spanish language just as
McCarthy was pushing the limits of the English
language — a new style seeking expression. Although
risky, a translator is fully justified in doing to the
target language what the author was doing to the
source language.
Next, the compound word “spraddlelegged,”
unusual in English but a legitimate dictionary entry, is
rendered as “abierto de piernas” (legs open/with his
legs wide open), which misses the opportunity to use a
matching legitimate compound word in Spanish,
“perniabierto.” Although Spanish is not characterized
by the English-language tradition of readily combining
different parts of speech — verb and adjective, noun
and adjective, or noun built upon noun to create a new
noun — a good opportunity was missed here to
translate compound for compound.
To conclude with this fourth sentence, McCarthy’s
“out of and through which they fought suddenly and
unannounced and mute and as suddenly ceased” is
retransmitted in Spanish as “a través del cual se
Translation Review
batieron de súbito para resurgir sin previo aviso y
mudos y quedar inmóviles tan repentinamente como
antes” (BT: out of/through which they beat one
another suddenly [in order/only] to reappear without
prior warning and mute and [to] remain still/immobile
as suddenly as before). Here the Spanish language
works more efficiently to express via a single phrasal
construction, “a través,” the sense of “out of and
through,” which must be expressed as two separate
movements in English, but lost is the reader’s mental
picturing of three men simultaneously emerging
(stepping) from and coming (perhaps waving their
hands to clear the air) through the smoke. “Fought”
becomes overly specific with “se batieron” (they beat
one another), as McCarthy does not indicate how they
fought, whether by beating with the fists, punching,
pushing and pulling, stomping, tripping, striking with
an object, etc. And the quickened ebb-and-flow
rhythm of the fighting, conveyed by the stringing
together of the conjunction “and,” used four times in
English, is slowed to two instances in Spanish, while
the strategic syntactic placement of the adverb
“suddenly” and, of course, its alliteration, “as suddenly
ceased,” are all lost in the translation across the two
different languages.
The opening page of Outer Dark is but a prelude
to the difficulties that will beset Murillo as he
struggles to rework McCarthy’s prose into Spanish.
The novel interweaves a high art of vivid, finely
wrought description with varying degrees of
substandard discourse of mountainfolk in what
amounts to a southern Appalachia hillbilly baroque
style, as polished and complex as it is plain and earthy.
Examples abound of descriptive passages that
cumulatively pose insurmountable problems for the
translator, who has no choice but to compensate,
compensate, compensate within the TL. We read the
following: “Night fell upon them dark and starblown
and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew”
(77), translated as “La noche cayó sobre ellos oscura y
estrellada y el carro pareció dilatarse, mudo bajo el
rocío” (70). The coined compound “starblown” cannot
be similarly recreated in idiomatic-sounding Spanish
— it is idiomatic-sounding in English, as in
windblown — and is rendered simply as “starry” (BT).
The image of a wagon grown “swollen near mute with
dew” is difficult to grasp in English, and the Spanish
transforms it via the translator’s interpretation into a
wagon that “seemed to expand [in size], mute beneath
the dew” (BT). If we add punctuation to McCarthy’s
sentence, marks and signs that he eschews in his
Translation Review
novels, in order to foist greater clarity of meaning into
our reading, we might begin to decipher the passage as
follows: “and the wagon grew, swollen, near mute,
with dew.” So does this mean that the moisture of the
dew drops made the wood of the wagon actually swell
in size, or appear to do so? Does it mean that the
wagon began to somehow fill up with dew, and that
the moisture seeping into its nooks and crannies
silenced the creaking or the jangling of the tinker’s
wares? The Spanish translation supplies possible
answers for the reader, eases the reading by adding
punctuation, while in English we are left more to feel
or sense the meaning through the densely packed
language that has been stripped bone-clean of
punctuation.
Further along, we encounter following: “The sun
stood directly over them. It seemed hung there in
glaring immobility, as if perhaps arrested with surprise
to see above the earth again these odds of morkin once
commended there” (87), translated as “El sol estaba
justo encima de ellos. Parecía flotar allí en una
inmovibilidad deslumbrante, como pasmado de ver de
nuevo aquellos despojos sobre la capa a la que habían
sido entregados una vez” (79). Murillo’s translation of
“above the earth again these odds of morkin once
commended there” as “de nuevo aquellos despojos
sobre la capa a la que habían sido entregados una vez”
(BT: again those goods/remains/scraps/spoils above
the crust [surface of the earth] to which they had once
been delivered) recreates nicely a rhythm similar to the
English and demonstrates either his learned
background or his capacity for researching and
surmising what “odds of morkin” might be.19
“Morkin” is “a beast that has died of disease or by
mischance” (www.dictionary.com); “odds” might best
be understood as a manner of referring to “odds and
ends” or to a pluralized something peculiar, “odds” for
“odd,” which can also mean remaining, unmatched, or
unpaired (the possibility of mathematical or gambling
odds or probabilities seems farfetched for the
circumstances, but not beyond McCarthy); and in the
context of the full scene being described, that of a
wagon bearing wooden caskets with decaying bodies
(remains/scraps/spoils of the earth) dug up by perverse
“grave thiefs” from a church cemetery, Murillo’s
translation into Spanish makes explicit what
McCarthy’s bizarre wording in English conveys only
obliquely, that “odds of morkin” are an instance of
McCarthy’s human roadkill in the novel. This is an
excellent example of the exegetic byproduct of
translation whereby the text in the target language
15
clarifies for the bilingual reader what he might not
have fully apprehended in the exocentric sourcelanguage text. It also shows that the interlingual
translation is very similar to the intralingual exercise
with which we began.
In the following descriptive passage, “Emaciate
and blinking and with the wind among her rags she
looked like something replevied by grim miracle from
the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt
corporeality into the agony of sunlight” (97), the
average reader is stopped in his tracks by the
appearance of a legal term, replevy, “to regain
possession of by a writ of replevin” (“writ of replevin”
being a procedure or “action to recover personal
property said or claimed to be unlawfully taken,”
www.dictionary.com). Murillo’s translation of the
passage reads as “Demacrada y pestañeando y sus
harapos agitados por el viento parecía un ser devuelto
a la tierra por un milagro siniestro y enviado al
suplicio del sol en su astrosa mortaja y su claudicante
corporeidad” (89) (BT: Emaciated and blinking and
her rags shaken/rustled by the wind she appeared [to
be] a being returned to the earth by a sinister miracle
and sent to [into] the torture of the sun in her shabby
shroud and her abandoned corporeality). The image of
the woman’s meagerness and misery comes across
clearly, but the language is loaded differently. The
word “replevied” is an example of specific, specialized
vocabulary, lost in the Spanish rendition as the
commonplace “devuelto” (simply “returned”), which
is not strikingly charged, within the narrative context,
with the legality of a claim for restitution. “Grim
miracle” might be rendered more accurately as
“milagro nefasto” (or “sombrío” or “lúgubre”) rather
than “milagro siniestro,” but it is never easy for the
translator who has so many choices, so little time. And
the other phrasing that gives pause to the reader of
English, “tattered windings and halt corporeality,” is
likewise translated into a less distinctive choice of
words in Spanish. “Windings” is an unusual word
choice in English to evoke the image of the woman
wrapped in her tattered clothing, and “halt” suggests
that the corporeality of the woman is incomplete or
that, following the archaic meaning of the word, she is
walking as if crippled or lame. The point is that the
Spanish translations do not bring the reader to a halt
like the English lexicon, syntax, and punctuation do;
the need to revisit and reread is not nearly as great in
the Spanish version. McCarthy’s startling imagination
can be demonstrated through a brief cloze exercise,20
16
in which the reader is invited to imagine what words to
best use in the blank spaces below:
Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among
her rags she looked like something _____ by
_____ miracle from the ground and sent with
tattered _____ and _____ corporeality into the
_____ of sunlight.
Only McCarthy would and could have chosen the
words “replevied,” “grim,” “windings,” “halt,” and
“agony,” and their eccentricity is difficult to match in
the language of the translation, although attempting to
do so is a crucial to the task of the translator. Readers
and translators always anticipate meaning because
what they are reading in a text builds upon what they
have read previously in the text, such that an
understanding of what follows is determined not only
by the words being read but also by what came before.
But McCarthy startles and mocks his reader with
semantic surprises.21
II
Although McCarthy’s descriptive passages teem
with difficulties, it is the dialectal discourse between
his characters that most confronts us with the limits of
translation. Dialect is full of the “noise”22 created by
its very surface structure because what for some is an
ordinary situational discourse becomes exotic and
unknown, a distortion, for those who are outsiders.
The characters in Outer Dark, “set in an unspecified
place in Appalachia” (from the book jacket), “most
likely East Tennessee” (from the Cormac McCarthy
Society website), speak in an idiolect that unfolds
within a socio-dialect. That is, the socio-dialect comes
from the foothills and mountains of East Tennessee23
(Knoxville and east into the mountains), an exotic
setting for those unfamiliar with this part of the United
States, and the idiolect is McCarthy’s creation of a
literary dialect based on the socio-dialect of that
geographic location, which itself now is also a literary
creation for him.24 The Appalachian Mountains are an
old range that runs “from Newfoundland and
Labrador, Canada, 1500 miles south-westward to
central Alabama.” The term Appalachia, however, “is
often used more restrictively to refer to regions in the
central and southern Appalachian Mountains, usually
including areas in the states of Kentucky, Tennessee,
Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina”
(Wikipedia). For most Americans, the word
Appalachia is associated with a rustic, poor, and
backward region and people who speak substandard
English — hardscrabble southern hicks and hillbillies.
Translation Review
The geographic location of the dialect and sociolect in Outer Dark is indicated in the following maps:
http://www.knoxville-tn.com/maps/
Culla Holme, one of the main characters of the
novel (with his sister Rinthy, who has borne their child
of incest, taken away and abandoned by Culla
immediately after its birth), is addressed by a
landowner in the following East Tennessee English:
“All right Holme, the squire said. I ain’t goin to ast
Translation Review
you no more of your business (…) You can wash up
now if you’ve a mind to” (48). The American English
used by the squire is regional, but only slightly
substandard in the context of the novel, as it is uttered
by a person of some rank in its social hierarchy. The
socio-dialectal quality is apparent in the grammar,
17
“ain’t” and “no more of,” orthography, “ast,” and
lexical mode of expression characteristic of parts of
Appalachia, “wash up” and “you’ve a mind to.” This is
indeed how common folk speak in this part of the
United States. It is as if McCarthy has transcribed
from recorded speech, which lends his characters an
authenticity that is rooted firmly in the place where the
speaking occurs. The Spanish translation of this
snippet of conversation is: “Muy bien, Holme, dijo el
patrón. No voy a hacerle más preguntas (…) Puede
lavarse ahora si le apetece” (44) (BT: All right, Holme,
said the boss. I’m not going to ask you any more
questions […] You can wash yourself now if you feel
like it). What happens in the translation is that it
standardizes in Spanish that which is not standard in
the English-language source text; the Spanish text
turns the squire’s words into a six-o’clock-eveningnews expression of Spanish, a Spanish that is universal
rather than marked by regional usage. The problem
here for the translator is enormous because language
usage that is completely place- and people-bound is
incapable of being exported to a different people in a
different location. The kind of speech that McCarthy
has his characters use can only be used by them in the
setting in which he has placed them. There is no
southern Appalachia other than in the mountains of
Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina
(and a small portion of South Carolina and Georgia);
there is no East Tennessee other than in the Bristol to
Knoxville area; and there is no other setting for Outer
Dark. There is no adequate system substitution, no
viable change in identity. This renders fruitless any
notion of transferring the regionalism of the American
English text into a parallel regionalism elsewhere —
there is no Spanish parallelism, no dynamic
equivalence of speech beyond McCarthy’s
Appalachian Mountains.25 If one did try to
transculturate and find a suitable dialectal “parallel” in
Spanish, so as not to translate away the fact that the
reader of the ST is confronted with an English that is
already regionally “foreignized,” within which of the
twenty Spanish-speaking countries would it be
located? Whose Spanish would be selected as the
parallel dialectal vehicle: would it be the Spanish used
in Spain, Mexico, a Central American country, an
Andean country, one of the Southern Cone dialects, or
perhaps one from the Caribbean? How does one avoid
incongruity?26 Murillo’s strategy has been to avoid
such entanglements by translating the speech of
McCarthy’s characters into standard modern Spanish,
allowing the setting and descriptive passages to
18
“earmark” for the reader the fact that these characters
will have, must have, a regional way of speaking.
Rather than translate what is impossible to translate
adequately, he leaves this aspect of the job to his
readers in Spanish, now co-workers and collaborators,
whose act of reading complements, compensates for,
and completes the translation. The reader of La
oscuridad exterior becomes an unwitting accomplice
to the commission of translation, or at least an
unwitting accessory after the fact.
In the short passage above, another interesting
challenge for the translator is how to translate the word
“you” into Spanish. It is a single, simple,
multifunctional word in English, whereas in Spanish,
“you” must indicate either the formal form of address
(usted) or the familiar form (tú),27 it must indicate
number (singular “tú” or “usted” vs. plural “vosotros”
or “ustedes”), and in the plural it will indicate gender
(“vosotros” for all male or male and female together,
“vosotras” for all female). The familiar form of
address, “tú,” is conventionally used by people who
are on a first-name basis with one another; the formal
form is conventionally used when they would use the
last name, usually accompanied by a title such as Mr.,
Mrs., Dr., etc. The formal usage also denotes respect,
deference, as in a younger person addressing
somebody who is considerably older or a subordinate
or person of lesser status addressing a superior. It is
often used between strangers upon first meeting, as
they do not yet know one another well enough to use
the familiar form of address. By convention, then, a
character who is called by his first name would be
addressed as “tú” in Spanish, and if by last name, as
“usted.” The squire addresses Culla Holme by his last
name, “All right Holme…” Perhaps this is out of some
consideration for the stranger he has just met, despite
the squire’s older age and higher socioeconomic
status, which by convention (also in English) would
allow him to just as easily call him by his first name,
Culla.28 The issue of Culla Holme’s name (which the
Spanish reader will pronounce mentally as Cooja or
Cooya Olmay) had been broached with humor a few
pages earlier:
What’s your name?
Holme.
You ain’t got but one name?
Culla Holme.
What?
Culla.
All right, Holme. I like to know a man’s name
when I hire him. (42–43)
Translation Review
Murillo has the squire address Culla Holme using the
formal form of address, “usted,” from the first of the
encounter between the two men. But the decision to do
so should not have been an easy one, an automatic
response to a simple equation of “last name = formal
address” according to traditional norms of usage in
Spanish. An interesting feature of the familiar vs.
formal form of address in English is that in the
southeast of the United States, people may often be
called simply by their last names, without the use of a
title, as if the last name were merely a substitute for
the first name. So “Holme” can be used by the squire
the same as if he called him “Culla,” “John,” “Buddy,”
or “Mac.” “Culla” and “Holme” can be synonyms
without differentiation in terms of formal vs. familiar
form of address. Murillo just as easily (and
appropriately) could have used the familiar “tú”
instead of the formal “usted,” for reasons tied to
language usage in the American South and not to
conventions of usage in Spanish.29
The dialogue throughout Outer Dark is daunting
for the translator. A conversation between Rinthy and
a woman who is providing her shelter for the night
goes as follows:
Here honey, give me them and set down and rest.
She held the plates stacked against her breast.
It’s all right, she said. I don’t care to help.
Well mind the step yander.
All right. I got to get on directly anyhow.
You ain’t goin nowheres tonight. (61)
Murillo’s translation (p. 56) reads as follows:
Dame eso, querida. Siéntate y descansa. (BT:
Hand me that, dear. Sit down and rest.)
Ella entregó la pila de platos que llevaba en
los brazos. No se preocupe, dijo, me gusta
ayudar. (BT: She handed [her] the stack of
dishes she carried in her arms. Don’t worry,
she said, I like to help.)
Pues ojo con ese escalón. (BT: Well, watch
out for that step.)
Bien. De todos modos he de irme enseguida.
(BT: Okay/Well. In any event I need to leave
right away.)
Esta noche no vas a ninguna parte. (BT:
Tonight you’re not going anywhere.)
The message is conveyed in its entirety, but where
the English is a socio-dialectal substandard discourse
— “set down,” “I don’t care to help,” “yander,” “got to
get on,” “ain’t goin nowheres” — the Spanish is
standard, devoid of the orthographic and phonetic
elements that make the speaking voices pleasurably
distinctive in English. There is no way to hear in the
Spanish translation the dialect that the native-language
reader hears during his reading of the English. The
Appalachian hillbilly slang has been cleaned up.
Vocabulary, spelling, and word order are the
means by which McCarthy affixes his regional
signature on page after page of Outer Dark. “They
Lord” (102) (short for “The Lord be praised/Praise the
Lord/Thank the Lord”) is translated as “Por Dios”
(103) (By God/For God’s sake/Good Lord); although
Spain’s Catholic history has provided the Spanish
language with a rich repository of exclamations and
expletives, it is not at all the same as the influence of
the protestant church (southern Baptist, etc.) in
Appalachia. “Goddam it to hell” (70), an expletive
heard frequently enough in southern Appalachia and
environs, is transculturated as “La madre que me
parió” (63) (BT: the mother who bore me, short for
“Me cago en la puta madre que me parió,” “I shit on
the whore mother who gave me birth”). The following
brief list shows how McCarthy’s regional
distinctiveness is translated away into a properly
spelled generic Spanish:
When ye get done and get abed (62)
Cuando hayas terminado y estés acostada (56–57). (BT:
When you have finished and are in bed)
Hidy, he said. (63)
Hola, dijo. (58) (BT: Hello, he said.)
Thisn’s right pretty, she said. (67)
Yo esta la veo muy bonita, dijo ella. (60) (BT: I see this
one as very pretty, she said.)
don’t black it to where nobody won’t have it (67)
no me la ensucies, que luego nadie querrá comprarla (60)
(BT: don’t get it dirty on me, because later nobody will
want to buy it)
Translation Review
19
Well, I hope ye luck.
I thank ye. (75)
Pues le deseo suerte. (BT: Well I wish you luck.)
Gracias. (68) (BT: Thank you.)
Where’s your family at?
I ain’t got nary’n. Ceptin just a brother and he run off.
(102)
¿Dónde está su familia? (BT: Where is your family?)
No tengo familia. Bueno, un hermano pero se marchó.
(93) (BT: I don’t have any. Well, a brother but he left)
You ort to have knowed one’d do ye dirt (102)
Debió imaginar que ese hombre le jugaría una mala
pasada (93) (BT: You should have imagined that that man
would play a dirty trick on you.)
It’s faired off to be a right nice day ain’t it? (105)
Al final parece que hará buen día, ¿verdad? (96) (BT: In
the end it looks like it’s going to be a nice day, doesn’t it?)
Used to be a spring just back of here but it dried up or
sunk under the ground or something. Sunk, I reckon.
Year of the harrykin. Blowed my chimley down.” (118)
Antes había un manantial ahí detrás pero se secó o se
hundió bajo la tierra, no lo sé. Supongo que se hundió. El
año del huracán. El viento me voló la chimenea. (108)
(BT: Before there was a spring back there but it dried up
or sank/sunk below the ground, I’m not sure. I supposed it
sank. The year of the hurricane. The wind blew my
chimney down.)
In an attempt to confirm more objectively a
mapping of the difference between Murillo’s Spanish
and McCarthy’s English — so as to see more clearly
what is difficult to translate, untranslatable, and what
is lost in translation — three bilingual and bicultural
colleagues backtranslated into English several of the
Spanish renditions above.30 They were not given the
context of the passages (a McCarthy novel that had
been translated into Spanish, the text of preceding
pages or the full page in which the short selection
appears, etc.); they were simply asked to translate
face-value into English what they read in Spanish. The
results are the following, with the difficulties of
McCarthy’s original text highlighted:
La noche cayó sobre ellos oscura y estrellada y
el carro pareció dilatarse, mudo bajo el rocío.
The dark and starry night fell upon them and the car,
silent under the dew, seemed to slow down. (Batista)
The night closed in upon them, dark and covered with
stars, and the wagon/bandwagon/car [more context
needed to decide on the right word] seemed to stretch,
silent under a cover of dew. (De Godev)
The dark and starry night fell upon them and the car,
quiet under the dew, seemed to dilate. (Pujol)
Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon
grew swollen near mute with dew. (McCarthy)
El sol estaba justo encima de ellos. Parecía
flotar allí en una inmovibilidad deslumbrante,
como pasmado de ver de nuevo aquellos
20
despojos sobre la capa a la que habían sido
entregados una vez.
The sun was squarely on top of them. It seemed to hover
there in a brilliant stasis, as if in a state of shock to see
once again those corpses on the place/sheet where they
had once surrendered into each other’s arms. (Batista)
The sun was exactly above them
[people/animals/things?]. It seemed to be floating there
in a blinding motionlessness, as if stunned to see again
those remains [people/animals/things?] on top of the
layer/coating/crust [more context needed] to which they
had been turned in once. (De Godev)
The sun was just upon them. It seemed to float up there
in a shining stillness, as if surprised to see again those
remains on the same surface on which they had been
surrendered once. (Pujol)
The sun stood directly over them. It seemed hung there
in glaring immobility, as if perhaps arrested with surprise
to see above the earth again these odds of morkin once
commended there. (McCarthy)
Hola, dijo.
Hello, s/he said. (Batista)
Hello, s/he said. (De Godev)
Hello, (the sun ????) said. (Pujol, trying to follow the
context from the previous sentence)
Hidy, he said. (McCarthy)
Yo esta la veo muy bonita, dijo ella.
I find this one very nice, she said. (Batista)
This one, I find it very nice, said she. (De Godev)
I think this one is very pretty, she said. (Pujol)
Thisn’s right pretty, she said. (McCarthy)
No tengo familia. Bueno, un hermano pero se
marchó.
Translation Review
I do not have a family. Well, a brother who is gone.
(Batista)
I don’t have family. Well, a brother but he left. (De
Godev)
I do not have any family. Well, just one brother, but he
went away. (Pujol)
I ain’t got nary’n. Ceptin just a brother and he run off.
(McCarthy)
Debió imaginar que ese hombre le jugaría una
mala pasada.
S/he should have imagined that the man would play a
dirty trick. (Batista)
S/he must have imagined that that man would play a
dirty trick on him/her. (De Godev)
(S/he) should have guessed that that man would play a
dirty trick on her. (Pujol)
You ort to have knowed one’d do ye dirt. (McCarthy)
Al final parece que hará buen día, ¿verdad?
It seems it will be a good day after all, right? (Batista)
After all, it looks like will have good weather, won’t we?
(De Godev)
It seems that at the end it will be a nice day, right?
(Pujol)
It’s faired off to be a right nice day ain’t it? (McCarthy)
These backtranslations into English confirm that it is
impossible to trace McCarthy’s textual footprints back
to Appalachia East Tennessee via Murillo’s
translation. In the end, the Spanish translation leads us
full circle back to the intralingual translation exercise
we began with — the Englishing of the English for the
sake of comprehension — only Murillo’s words are in
Spanish instead of English. To translate counter to the
convention of moving substandard dialect into
standard discourse is a much more ambitious, Gordian,
and risky proposition, yet it would provide that
difficult Steinerian restitution to the enterprise.31
One way the Spanish translation could have
retained some of what McCarthy does with his English
would have been to “eyemark” (and thereby
“earmark”) it with occasional substandard spellings of
words, such that “ye”32 might become “uté” or “uhté,”
“hidy” (variant of “howdy”) might be written as “jula”
or “quiubo” (or something similar), and “harrykin”
might take on a new form as “uracán” or “harucán.”
Such misspellings would be artificial but in a generic
way, not as a transculturation that would tie to a
specific region in a Spanish-speaking country.33 And
misspellings could be combined with the strategic
planting of ungrammaticalities, such that “thisn’s right
pretty” might be expressed as “yo ehta la beo mú
bonita”; “to where nobody won’t have it” as “que
luego naide querrá la comprá”; or “I ain’t got nary’n”
as “No teingo ningú familia.” Or a certain mountain
Spanish dialect could have been adopted.34 Attempting
to do so would require a very good ear, a kind of
Translation Review
dialectal perfect pitch systematically applied. The
question is: Does a translator try to turn McCarthy’s
rotgut moonshine into Spanish wine or Mexican
tequila? Can s/he? Should s/he? How and to what
extent?35 Murillo’s translation strategy of transforming
McCormac’s East Tennessee Appalachian dialect into
standard Spanish, also because of the different
parameters of the genius of the Spanish language and
what it will and will not allow, means that the reader
in Spanish misses out on so much of what the nativelanguage reader of English is able to enjoy. Yet
reading McCarthy in Spanish, La oscuridad exterior,
is also enjoyable, just not in the same way. What is
missing in Spanish is the seamless suturing of speech
to landscape, of discourse to narrative description. To
translate is to enter a contest of words and usage
between source and target texts, each writer — the
original author and the translator — responsible to his
own readers. But in the end, McCarthy in his own
English is a far greater writer than he is in Spanish
translation, or could be in translation into any other
language. The effort itself to have it be otherwise
would push the translation endeavor beyond science or
craft toward a matching and impossibly high art.
McCarthy’s writing in Outer Dark allows us to
intuit the deeper, greater potentialities of the English
language — its Appalachian genius. Our encounter
with his “whole new style seeking expression” forces
us to confront how little we really know about our own
English language and how much we take it for
granted. The prestigious literary and cultural arbiter El
País has recognized McCarthy in Spanish as
“sinónimo de grandeza literaria” (synonymous with
literary greatness).36 As such, he is a writer who must
be translated even while defying translation, the
paradox of the craft. Outer Dark (1968) is indeed
corporeal in Spanish as La oscuridad exterior (2002).
Spanish with the translated McCarthy is certainly all
the better for it than with no McCarthy at all. But the
Spanish Cormac McCarthy is never the Cormac
McCarthy he is in Appalachian English. He is not
himself, nor can he be, by definition, nor should we
expect him to be. Because his “grandeza literaria” is
not nearly as palpable in Spanish, the impact that
McCarthy could and should have in Spanish is
diminished, his place within Spanish literature is not as
influential as it should be. La oscuridad exterior is an
offspring, immediate family; it bears a striking
likeness to Outer Dark, but it can never be a clone.37
The reader of both languages, when reading McCarthy
in Spanish, feels nostalgic for his English. Emanating
21
from within the genius of his dialectal American
English, the genius of McCarthy lies inevitably
beyond what any other language is capable of doing
for him. McCarthy is what he truly is only in the idiosocio-dialect of his fictional East Tennessee
Appalachian landscape and characters. Luis Murillo
Fort, engaged in doing the impossible, the hard labor
of the good utopian, helps us to better understand the
Sisyphean nature, possibilities, and limits of
translation, such that we proclaim with Ortega:
“Translation is dead! Long live translation!”
Works Cited
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.
Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York.
Vintage Books. 1955. 89 and 91.
Dictionary.com. www.dictionary.com.
Gibson, Mike. “He Felt at Home Here: Knoxville gave
Cormac McCarthy the raw material of his
art. And he gave it back.” Metro Pulse [Knoxville] 1 March
, Vol. 11, No. 9, as it appears in the Official Website of
the Cormac McCarthy Society,
http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/.
Hervey, Sandór, Ian Higgins, and Louise M. Haywood.
Thinking Spanish Translation: A Course
in Translation Method, Spanish to English. London.
Routledge. rpt 1998.
Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.”
Theories of Translation. Ed. Rainer
Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago and London. The
University of Chicago Press. 1992. 144–151.
Knoxville-Tn.Com. http://www.knoxville-tn.com/maps/.
Maps.com. http://www.maps.com/.
McCarthy, Cormac. La oscuridad exterior. Trans. Luis
Murillo Fort. Barcelona. Random House Mondadori, S.A.
2002.
McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark. New York. Vintage
International. 1993.
_____ Suttree. New York. Vintage International. 1992.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Problems in Translation: Onegin in
English.” Theories of Translation. Ed.
Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago and London.
The University of Chicago Press. 1992. 127–143.
Nida, Eugene A. and Charles R. Taber. The Theory and
Practice of Translation. Leiden/Boston. Brill. 2003.
Official Website of the Cormac McCarthy Society.
http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/.
Ortega y Gasset, José. “The Misery and the Splendor of
Translation.” Trans. Elizabeth Gamble
Miller. Theories of Translation. Ed. Rainer Schulte and
John Biguenet. Chicago and London. The University of
Chicago Press. 1992. 93–112.
22
Rabassa, Gregory. If This Be Treason. New York. New
Directions. 2005.
_____. “If This Be Treason: Translation and Its
Possibilities.” Translation: Literary,
Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. William
Frawley. London and Toronto. U. of Delaware Press. 1984.
24.
Raffel, Burton. The Art of Translating Poetry. University
Park, PA. The Pennsylvania State
University Press. 1988.
Robinson, Douglas. “Hermeneutic Motion.” Routledge
Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Ed.
Mona Baker. London and New York. Routledge. 1998. 97–99.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. From “On the Different Methods
of Translating.” Trans. Waltraud
Bartscht. Theories of Translation. Ed. Rainer Schulte and
John Biguenet. Chicago and London. The University of
Chicago Press. 1992. 36–54.
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and
Translation. New York and London. Oxford University
Press. 1975.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
(Second Edition Unabridged). New York. Random
House, Inc. 1987.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History
of Translation. London and New
York. Routledge. 1995.
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.
http://www.wikipedia.org/
Footnotes
1
From McCarthy's novel Suttree (339), hailed by critics as a
masterpiece. This line aptly describes McCarthy's writing
from the very beginning.
2
His first four novels are set in or near the Appalachian
mountains: The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968),
Child of God (1974), and Suttree (1979). His last five novels
are set in the desert southwest of the Texas-Mexico border:
Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West
(1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994),
Cities of the Plain (1998), and No Country for Old Men
(2005). For more on McCarthy and his works, visit the
excellent Official Website of the Cormac McCarthy Society
at http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/.
3
In his essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,”
Russian linguist Roman Jakobson identifies the first of
“three ways of interpreting a verbal sign” as “intralingual
translation or rewording (. . .) an interpretation of verbal
signs by means of other signs of the same language” (145).
4
The Official Website of the Cormac McCarthy Society
contains a “Translations” section in the “Resources” link
which provides translations into English of the Spanishlanguage passages that McCarthy incorporates in his novels
Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and
Cities of the Plain. In this article I am interested in the
Translation Review
problems of translation proper, Jakobson's interlinguistic
translation, of McCarthy's American English into Spanish.
5
This image of a “guttural dialect” is given by Mike
Gibson: “In an article that seems destined to become
something of a classic, Knoxville Metro Pulse writer Mike
Gibson looks at McCarthy's non-Western canon as well as
his life in and around Knoxville; the article includes
interviews with several people who knew McCarthy during
his East Tennessee days.”
6
In his essay “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,”
Vladimir Nabokov, an advocate of fidelity as literalism in
translation, prescribes “translations with copious footnotes,
footnotes reaching like skyscrapers to the top of this or that
page,” as compensation for the translator's (reader's)
ignorance.
7
For example, even to an American such as me, who was
raised and has lived, worked, and traveled in the
Appalachian piedmont and mountains of Virginia and North
Carolina, and who has visited neighboring East Tennessee.
8
In his essay “The Misery and Splendor of Translation,” the
Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset writes that “it is
utopian to believe that two words belonging to different
languages, and which the dictionary gives us as translations
of each other, refer to exactly the same objects” (96). The
essay discusses translators as either good or bad utopians:
“The bad utopian thinks that because it [translation] is
desirable, it is possible,” while “the good utopian, on the
other hand, thinks that because it would be desirable to free
men from the divisions imposed by languages, there is little
probability that it can be attained; therefore it can only be
achieved to an approximate measure” (96, 98-99). By
Ortegian, I refer to the “good utopian” translator who
recognizes the impossibility of translation while at the same
time proceeding to translate with this full awareness, the
Sisyphean consciousness of Camus.
9
Friedrich Schleiermacher: “Either the translator leaves the
writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader
toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as
possible and moves the writer toward the reader” (42).
10
Rabassa writes in his essay “If This Be Treason:
Translation and Its Possibilities,” that “Some books are very
mulish about being 'led across'” (24). But moving the reader
toward a mulish source text that is alien to begin with is also
very problematic.
11
Dynamic equivalence is the “quality of a translation in
which the message of the original text has been so
transported into the receptor language that the response of
the receptor is essentially like that of the original receptors.”
The focus is on message and meaning transfer, as opposed
to formal correspondence or literalness (200-201).
12 In their seminal book, The Theory and Practice of
Translation (1969), Nida and Taber describe “the set of
processes that are actually employed in translating,” stating
that “in the first place a translation must make sense” (vii).
Their “new” approach to translation is one in which
“techniques of translation are always secondary to the
Translation Review
understanding of the source text” because the aim of correct
translation is “to make certain that [the average reader for
which a translation is intended] is very unlikely to
misunderstand it” (viii and 1). The focus of this classic work
on translation theory and practice is the Bible “because this
has been a major concern for interlingual communication
for an exceptionally long period of time, (2) involved more
than 2,000 diverse languages, (3) is concerned with a range
of cultures, and (4) represents a broader range of literary
structures than any other type of translating” (vii).
13
The word “sawgrass” is itself a challenge to find in
English-language dictionaries, and does not appear in tomes
such as The Random House Dictionary of the English
Language (Second Edition Unabridged) or in sites such as
www.dictionary.com, although through the latter's link to
Encyclopedia, “sawgrass” is defined and illustrated by
Wikipedia.
14
One can think of a humorous anecdote or joke told by a
good raconteur or comedian; put the same words in the
mouth of another, and there is no longer anything funny
about it.
15
An internet search shows that his numerous translations
range from literature (e.g., McCarthy's Outer Dark and
Blood Meridian, Nicholson Baker, etc.) to contemporary
world affairs (Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command: The
Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib trans. as Del 11 de
septiembre a las torturas de Abu Ghraib).
16
Nida and Taber state that “each language has its own
genius. That is to say, each language possesses certain
distinctive characteristics which give it a special character
(. . .) To communicate effectively one must respect the
genius of each language” (3-4). Raffel, in his book The Art
of Translating Poetry, expresses this same notion in the
following manner:
1. No two languages having the same phonology, it is
impossible to re-create the sounds of a work
composed in one language in another language.
2. No two languages having the same syntactic
structures, it is impossible to re-create the syntax of
a work composed in one language in another
language.
3. No two languages having the same vocabulary, it is
impossible to re-create the vocabulary of a work
composed in one language in another language. (12)
17
Renowned translator Gregory Rabassa takes “Professor
Horrendo” to task in his article “If This Be Treason:
Translation and Its Possibilities,” in which he writes:
The bane of the translator more often than not is the
critic who does know the other language; he is usually
an academician who has done his homework and
checked out the English against the original. If there is
a mistake or slip, he will surely find it, and he is not
above suggesting alternate possibilities, some of which
are as cogent as that exasperating last entry on multiplechoice exams, 'None of these.' Sarah Blackburn has
dubbed this fellow Professor Horrendo, and he is too
23
much with us as he brings the nastiness of the academic
ninguneo (Mexican for put-down) into literary
criticism. But it is his mood that offends, for in truth he
is often right: there have been mistakes, they should be
corrected, which is why it is impossible for a translation
ever to be final. (27)
18
Backtranslation, or translating the Spanish translation
back into the English language from which is was originally
translated, will be abbreviated as BT. The backtranslations I
provide are communicative translations, that is, translations
that strive for natural communicative expression in English of
the message first, then somewhat the form, of the Spanish text.
19
In a 4-5-07 email to me, Murillo confirmed that although
he does not know Cormac McCarhty personally, or
communicate with him directly, he does send queries to
Cormac McCarthy's editor, Gary Fisketjon, in order to seek
clarification of problematic passages. If Fisketjon is unable
to provide an answer, he will occasionally forward
Murillo's queries to McCarthy.
20
Cloze technique is defined by Nida and Taber as “a
technique for testing the degree of difficulty of a text by
deleting every fifth word and inviting persons to guess at the
missing words; the fewer the errors, the easier the text”
(198). In this cloze exercise for McCarthy, I am deleting
five words to illustrate the eccentricity of his lexical
imagination.
21
A longer cloze example helps us to see the unrelenting
difficulty of anticipating and keeping up with McCarthy's
descriptive imagination:
What _____ vespers do the tinker's goods _____
through the long twilight and over the _____ forest
road, him stooped and _____ through the windy _____
of day like those old exiles who _____ of _____ and
enjoined _____ of heaven or hell wander forever the
middle _____ _____ _____ and _____. Hounded by
grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor _____ at
_____ through wood and _____ by his own _____ and
_____ wares in perennial ____ malediction (229).
Answer key: discordant, chime, brindled, hounded,
recrements, divorced, corporeality, ingress, warren,
spoorless, increate, anathema, clamored, heel, fen,
querulous, inconsolable, tin. Two interesting reading
exercises, always useful for the translator, would then be to
fill in the spaces, as in a matching quiz, or to take the list of
words and try to create a sentence with coherence and sense.
22
Nida and Taber define “noise” as “any factor (. . .) which
hinders effective understanding” (203-204).
23
The state of Tennessee is traditionally divided into East
Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, and West Tennessee.
24
Born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933, McCarthy moved
to Knoxville in 1937, where his father was employed as a
lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority until 1967. For
more on his life, see The Official Website of the Cormac
McCarthy Society at http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/.
25
Rabassa, in his essay “If This Be Treason: Translation and
Its Possibilities,” writes that “Rustics are rustics the world
24
over, but it is absurd and outlandish to have a Brazilian
sertanejo talking like an Appalachian mountain man” (24),
which would also obtain for an Appalachian mountain man
being made to sound like any other thing but what he is.
Rabassa concludes that “The transfer of local or regional
idiom into another language, therefore, must be listed as
another of the impossibilities of translation” (24). In
Thinking Spanish Translation, Hervey, Higgins and
Haywood write that “the further down one goes on the
social scale, the more necessary it is to take social and
regional considerations together” (114), which is what
Outer Dark then requires by definition.
26
Hervey et. al. write that “rendering ST dialect with TL
dialect is a form of cultural transplantation. Like all cultural
transplantations, it runs the risk of incongruity in the TT” (113).
27
Also possibly “vos” in the Southern Cone region
(Argentina, Uruguay) and in parts of Central America.
28
From the Gaelic name Cullach, meaning “boar,” which in
Spanish would be “cerdo,” “macho,” “verraco,” or “jabalí”
for wild boar. Rabassa writes that “Names are one of the
bugbears of translation and usually illustrate its
impossibility (. . .) By not translating names we can at least
maintain a certain aura of the original tongue and its
culture” (14). In the novel Culla Holme is a boar, a pig, a
macho who has had intercourse with his sister, and he is a
wild product of his Appalachian mountain environment.
29
In informal Spanish discourse somebody may also be
called by their last name, e.g., García or Gómez, and be
addressed by the familiar “tú” form (e.g., between friends,
or as in “Hey, García”), but this usage differs from the
culturally more generalized southern usage of southeastern
American English that I am describing above.
30
Accomplished colleagues in the Department of Languages
and Culture Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte: Dr. José Manuel Batista (from the Dominican
Republic), professor of Latin American Literature; Dr.
Concepción Godev (Barcelona), professor of Spanish
Linguistics; and Dr. Anton Pujol (Barcelona), professor of
Translating and Translation Studies and Spanish Literature.
Pujol's interesting email comment to me afterward was that
“para leer a este autor tienes que haber nacido aquí” (in
order to read this author [McCarthy] you have to have been
born here [in the United States, in the South, in
Appalachia]).
31
In his fourfold hermeneutic motion for translation - trust,
aggression, incorporation, and restitution - the latter, a
compensatory “enactment of reciprocity” (300), refers to a
restoration of balance between the source text and the target
text: “Where it falls short of the original, the authentic
translation makes the autonomous virtues of the original
more precisely visible” (302). As Douglas Robinson says,
“The translator, for Steiner, must be willing to give back to
the SL as much as s/he has taken - for example, by
transforming the TL through pressure from the SL
phrasings” (98).
Translation Review
32
Being from the foothills of Blue Ridge Mountains of
Virginia, part of the same Appalachian range in which Outer
Dark is set, I have thought long and hard about the spelling
“ye” for “you,” and spent much time reading McCarthy
aloud, mouthing the pronunciation of his characters.
McCarthy's spelling does accurately reflect the
pronunciation of “you” in these general parts of Appalachia
(east Tennessee might be more distinctive), which might
also be spelled “ya” or “cha” (as in “How ya doin?” or
“Whatcha doin?”), but “ye” does seem more appropriate.
The problem is that in reading we tend to over-pronounce
mentally, turning “ye” into a “yee” rather than a “y_h”
(“How yee doin,” “Whatchee doing,” as opposed to “How
y_h doing?” and “Whatch_h doing?”).
33
Hervey et al write that “the safest decision may after all
be to make relatively sparing use of TL features that are
recognizably dialectal without being clearly recognizable as
belonging to a specific dialect.” Further, “it would be even
safer, with a ST containing direct speech, to translate
dialogue into fairly neutral English, and, if necessary, to add
after an appropriate piece of direct speech some such phrase
as 'she said, in a broad Andalusian accent” (113).
34
Certain well known writers in Spain - the Miguel Delibes
of Las ratas and the Ana María Matute of Historias de la
Artámila - come to mind as somewhat parallel possibilities
of narrative discourse in their portrayal of rural and
mountain settings and characters, and their regional way of
speaking in Spanish, but the mountain regions of Castile are
not those of southern Appalachia - they don't look the same
and they don't feel the same, and Spanish hillbillies are not
Appalachian hillbillies.
35
Rabassa warns that “Nowhere is translation more dubious
than here as we try to translate into our own language and
culture something that the author is translating into words
Translation Review
within his culture and still make it our own” (7-8). Hervey
et. al. write about this difficulties and possible solutions in
chapters 9 and 10 of Thinking Spanish Translation:
“Language Variety in texts: dialect, sociolect, codeswitching” (110-117) and “Language variety in texts: social
register and tonal register” (118-126).
36
El País is Spain's equivalent of The New York Times. The
quote appears on the back jacket of La oscuridad exterior.
Similar praise abounds in English: e.g., from the jacket and
inside flap of Blood Meridian, “Blood Meridian. . . seems
clearly to me the major esthetic achievement of any living
American writer” (Harold Bloom, The New York Observer);
“without parallel in American writing today” (Alan Cheuse,
USA Today); “McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be
admired, and quite honestly - envied” (Ralph Ellison);
“MCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by
line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay” (Robert Penn
Warren); or from the jacket of No Country for Old Men,
“Like the novelists he admires - Melville, Dostoyevsky,
Faulkner - Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative
œvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers
wrestle with the gods themselves” (Michael Dirda, The
Washington Post Book World); “With each book he expands
the territory of American fiction” (Malcolm Jones,
Newsweek).
37
Rabassa, in his musings on the kinds of treason always at
work in translation (traduttore, traditore), specifies that
“even if a thing can be cloned the word that designates it
cannot and any attempt to reproduce it in another tongue is
betrayal” (6). He goes on to say that “In even the best
examples a translation cannot get to the marrow of what has
been said in the original. A piece of writing cannot be
cloned in another language, only imitated” (20).
25
26
Translation Review
THE DISPARITIES OF TWO ANGLOPHONE RENDITIONS OF
“THE SURVIVOR” BY PRIMO LEVI
By Philip Balma
It is thanks to authors like Primo Levi, Edith
Bruck, Giorgio Pressburger, and Paul Celan that the
effects of the genocide sanctioned by the Nazi rule in
Europe have been, in part, historically documented.
Primo Levi, a chemist by trade, was a meticulous and
precise contributor to this fundamental process of
remembering, recording, and analyzing the facts of the
Holocaust. A novelist, poet, and author of essays, short
stories, and books of non-fiction, Levi left an indelible
mark on the history of Italian literature. For many
years, he corresponded with translators and took a
personal interest in getting his writing translated into a
variety of languages. In an endnote to Levi’s collected
works published in 1997, editor Marco Belpoliti cites
evidence of a fruitful and lengthy professional
relationship between the author and Ruth Feldman, a
well-known translator and scholar of Italian literature
(1596). In fact, after publishing a translation of
L’Osteria di Brema in 1976 with the title Shemà:
Collected Poems, Feldman went on to translate the
collection Ad ora incerta, which appeared in English
for the first time in 1988. Her efforts have been
instrumental in making the works of Primo Levi more
available to the general public and the academic
community around the world.
Her rendition of the poem “Il Superstite” (“The
Survivor”) raises some questions about the process of
transforming and interpreting this text for an
Anglophone audience. It also offers key examples of
successful and creative solutions to the unique
linguistic and poetic puzzle that the poem presents:
Primo Levi. From: Opere II. Torino: Einaudi, 1997. (576).
Ruth Feldman, translator. From: Primo Levi, Collected Poems. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1988 (64).
IL SUPERSTITE
a B.V.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta,
Quella pena ritorna,
E se non trova chi lo ascolti
Gli brucia in petto il cuore.
(5)
Rivede i visi dei suoi compagni
Lividi nella prima luce,
Grigi di polvere di cemento,
Indistinti per nebbia,
Tinti di morte nei sonni inquieti:
(10)
A notte menano le mascelle
Sotto la mora greve dei sogni
Masticando una rapa che non c’è.
«Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa,
Andate. Non ho soppiantato nessuno, (15)
non ho usurpato il pane di nessuno,
Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno.
Ritornate alla vostra nebbia.
Non è colpa mia se vivo e respiro
E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni». (20)
4 febbraio 1984.
Translation Review
The Survivor
Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta,
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
to B.V.
(5)
Once more he sees his companions’ faces
Livid in the first faint light,
Gray with cement dust,
Nebulous in the mist,
Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep. (10)
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, their jaws move,
Chewing a nonexistent turnip.
‘Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone, (15)
Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread.
No one died in my place. No one.
Go back into your mist.
It’s not my fault if I live and breathe,
Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.’ (20)
4 February 1984
27
The difference in layout between the original and the
English text is immediately apparent, and the choice to
separate the first five lines from the rest of the poem
needs to be addressed. In the second volume of Primo
Levi’s complete works, editor Marco Belpoliti wrote a
footnote urging the reader to compare the text of this
poem with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T.
Coleridge (v. 582) and Dante’s Divina Commedia1
(Levi)
Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta,
Quella pena ritorna,
E se non trova chi lo ascolti
Gli brucia in petto il cuore.
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
The fourth and fifth lines of Levi’s poem bear a
striking resemblance to the next two lines from
Coleridge’s text, as they seem to adhere to a similar
context, but they are in fact quite different in meaning.
Feldman’s choice to cite lines 582–585 from The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner as part of her translation of
“The Survivor” complicates the position of an
Anglophone reader in this case. While she correctly
identified Levi’s citation, her rendition of the poem is
actually more influenced by Coleridge than the
original. This would certainly explain the addition of a
stanza break after line 5 of the translation, as it allows
(Levi)
Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta,
Quella pena ritorna,
E se non trova chi lo ascolti
Gli brucia in petto il cuore.
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(Coleridge)
Since then, at an uncertain hour, (582)
That agony returns:
(583)
And till my ghastly tale is told, (584)
This heart within me burns
(585)
the reader to visually separate Coleridge’s
“contribution.” To explore the specific differences
between lines 4 and 5 from Levi’s poem and
Feldman’s interpretation of them, one need only
examine Beppe Fenoglio’s Italian translation of The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. A contemporary of
Primo Levi, Fenoglio published said translation in
1955 in the journal “Itinerari.” Eventually, it was
reprinted by Einaudi in 1964, and it now appears in the
volume Quaderno di traduzioni, edited by Mark
Pietralunga, under the title La ballata del vecchio
marinaio (Torino: Einaudi, 2000. 204–257).
(Fenoglio)3
Da quel momento, an un’ora imprecisa,
Quell’agonia mi torna;
E fino a che non ho detto la mia storia
Di morti, dentro mi brucia il cuore.
Lines 4 and 5 of Levi’s text refer to a “pain” (or
“agony”) that must find an audience upon its return.
The author’s use of personification allows for this
agony to have a “heart,” one that will burst in flames
unless this pain can be shared with someone.
Furthermore, Levi’s poem describes an agony that can
actively seek out an interlocutor, a pain that is itself
capable of suffering if it does not succeed in its search.
The most significant detail that was mistranslated is
the following: Levi refers to the notion that the “heart”
of “agony” could burn, while Coleridge, Fenoglio, and
Feldman’s versions clearly state that the burning heart
belongs to the speaker (“This heart within me burns” /
“dentro mi brucia il cuore”).
28
(Inf. XXXIII, 141). Levi chose to pay homage to both
poets in “Il Superstite.” In fact, the poem opens by
quoting Coleridge in English, while the second and
third lines are Levi’s translations of a couplet from The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner2 (vv. 582–583). This
correspondence does not, however, extend beyond the
two lines in question:
(Coleridge / Feldman)
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
Another translation of Levi’s poem appeared in
1999, this time as a citation in a book by Giorgio
Agamben. The reference to “Il Superstite” in this case
lies at the heart of a larger discussion of the issue of
survival in Auschwitz, so some specifics of the poem
are weighed heavily as factual information used to
build and support a rhetorical strategy:
Daniel Heller-Roazen, translator
From: Giorgio Agamben. Remnants of Auschwitz.
The Witness and the Archive. Zone Books. New
York, 1999. (90).
Translation Review
Since then, at an uncertain hour, that punishment
comes back. And if it doesn’t find someone who
will listen to it, it burns his heart in his chest. Once
again he sees the faces of the other inmates,
blueish in the light of dawn, gray with cement
dust, shrouded in mist, painted with death in their
restless sleep. At night their jaws grind away, in
the absence of dreams, chewing on a stone that
isn’t there. “Get away from here, drowned people,
go away. I didn’t usurp anyone’s place. I didn’t
steal anyone’s bread. No one died in my stead. No
one. Go back to your mist. It isn’t my fault if I live
and breathe, eat and drink and sleep and wear
clothes.”
The choice to ignore the original layout of the
poem can easily be explained away by examining the
identical prose paragraph format applied to all the
translated passages in this volume. Even though this
makes it difficult for the reader to ascertain any
variation in the line breaks and punctuation, the
original version of “The Survivor” is cited in its
entirety, allowing the reader the examine Primo Levi’s
intended visual poetics as well as the message behind
this work of poetry (89–90).
Daniel Heller-Roazen’s translation of Giorgio
Agamben’s book titled Quel che resta di Auschwitz:
l’archivio e il testimone (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri,
(Heller-Roazen)4
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
that punishment come back.
And if it doesn’t find someone who will listen to it,
it burns his heart in his chest.
Once again he sees the faces of the other inmates, (5)
blueish in the light of dawn,
gray with cement dust,
shrouded in mist,
painted with death in their restless sleep.
At night their jaws grind away,
(10)
in the absence of dreams,
chewing on a stone that isn’t there.
“Get away from here, drowned people,
go away. I didn’t usurp anyone’s place,
I didn’t steal anyone’s bread.
(15)
No one died in my stead. No one.
Go back to your mist.
It isn’t my fault if I live and breathe,
eat and drink and sleep and wear clothes”
(20)
Translation Review
1998) deserves recognition for many reasons. This
important text was made available to an Englishspeaking audience just one year after its original
release, and it has changed the way many scholars
approach the difficult questions raised by a society that
lives with the memory of the Nazi concentration
camps in Europe. Agamben’s prose offers insightful
sociological and philosophical considerations that
would pose a challenge to any translator. In a note
placed at the beginning of the bibliography, Daniel
Heller-Roazen stated that “in the case of foreign works
that have not appeared in English, [he] translated all
passages from the original languages for this book”
(172). The complex nature of Agamben’s volume
made it necessary to render the work of multiple
authors in another language, drawing from a wide
variety of sources and a significant array of literary
genres.
Specifically, this text includes 23 different sources
consulted in Italian, French, and German, a selection
that requires a field of knowledge and a level of
linguistic expertise beyond that of most literary
translators. Heller-Roazen has undoubtedly produced
an excellent translation of Quel che resta di Auschwitz;
yet it does present one example of ill-advised word
choice that could significantly alter one’s
understanding of the poem “Il Superstite” by Primo
Levi:
(Levi)
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta,
Quella pena ritorna,
E se non trova chi lo ascolti
Gli brucia in petto il cuore.
Rivede i visi dei suoi compagni
Lividi nella prima luce,
Grigi di polvere di cemento,
Indistinti per nebbia,
Tinti di morte nei sonni inquieti:
A notte menano le mascelle
Sotto la mora greve dei sogni
Masticando una rapa che non c’è.
«Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa,
Andate. Non ho soppiantato nessuno,
Non ho usurpato il pane di nessuno,
Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno.
Ritornate alla vostra nebbia.
Non è colpa mia se vivo e respiro
E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni.
29
Heller-Roazen’s rendition of “The Survivor”
mistranslates the word “rapa” as “stone” instead of
“turnip.” This small, yet significant detail is central to
Levi’s text, as it provides the first of three allusions to
the issue of nourishment and hunger in the poem.5
Aside from this specific instance of inaccurate word
choice, the translation in question shows evidence of
great skill and attention to detail. In some respects, it is
a more literal rendition than the one offered by Ruth
Feldman in 1988. Nevertheless, this text bears no
reference of any kind to the bilingual repetition of the
first line of “Il Superstite,” choosing to excise it from
both the original text and the translation. If Daniel
Heller-Roazen had consulted Ruth Feldman’s
translations of Levi’s poetry while preparing the
volume Remnants of Auschwitz for publication, it is
reasonable to assume that the mistranslation of the
word “rapa” might not have appeared in print.
Furthermore, it would have given him the chance to
opt for the same creative solution that Feldman applied
to the first two lines. By composing a poem that begins
with a repetition of the same line, first in English, and
then in Italian, Levi reminded critics and scholars
worldwide of his own passion for English literature,
underlining the notion that the translation of literary
texts is an essential process for the author as well as
the reader. In fact, one could even speculate that Levi
wanted to jumpstart the process of translating “Il
Superstite” himself, by offering up a couplet that can
be effectively conveyed to an Anglophone audience by
simply inverting the order of the two lines in question.
It is hard to believe that soon twenty years will
have passed since Primo Levi’s death. His books
appear in the reading lists for MA and PhD exams
administered by most Italian programs in the United
States, but their appeal is such that hundreds if not
thousands of college-level courses in the humanities
include Levi’s writings. As this study has tried to
demonstrate, the available English translations of his
poetry in particular deserve to be acknowledged and
thoroughly examined by academics with the same
attention that his prose receives.
The two versions of “Il Superstite” analyzed thus
far have a very specific quality in common: they both
offer specific examples of word choice designed to
produce a text that sounds more poetic than a literal
translation. This is a very common strategy among
literary translators, one that often makes seemingly
untranslatable passages come to life in another
language. This tendency does, however, create the risk
30
of altering an original work of poetry to a degree that
makes it unrecognizable. While this is certainly not the
case with Feldman and Heller-Roazen’s translations, a
bilingual reader of their work might hypothesize a
different interpretation. Perhaps it would be advisable
for scholarly presses to begin publishing both literal
and interpretive translations of poetry side by side,
allowing the readers to choose which one suits their
needs.
My greatest hope is that the 20th anniversary of
Levi’s death will be remembered by scholars from all
disciplines with a renewed interest in his writings and
their impact on an Anglophone audience, and with the
publication of numerous new or revisited translations
of his work. In an effort to personally contribute to this
undertaking, I have produced my own translation of “Il
Superstite” after carefully studying those written by
Feldman and Heller-Roazen:
(Balma)
Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta,
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That pain returns,
And if it doesn’t find someone who listens to it
It burns his heart in his chest.
(5)
He sees the faces of his companions
Livid in the first light,
Gray with cement dust,
Blurred by fog,
Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep:
(10)
At night they grind their jaws
Under the heavy respite of dreams
Chewing on a turnip that isn’t there.
“Back away, out of here, drowned people,
Go. I didn’t supplant anyone,
(15)
I didn’t usurp anyone’s bread,
No one died in my stead. No one.
Return to your fog.
It’s not my fault if I live and breathe
And eat and drink and sleep and wear clothes. (20)
I opted to translate “pena” with the word “pain”
(v. 3) so as to phonically adhere to Levi’s text. HellerRoazen used the word “punishment,” which
technically could be accurate but, according to the
Dizionario Garzanti di Italiano, represents a usage of
the word “pena” that is usually limited to the judicial
sphere (http://www.garzantilinguistica.it). Feldman’s
use of the word “agony” is dictated by her adherence
to Coleridge’s poem in this case. The word “nebbia”
Translation Review
(vv. 9 and 18) was translated as “mist” in both
versions, but the most likely translation would be
“fog.” I concur with Feldman’ decision to translate
“sonni inquieti” as “uneasy sleep” (v. 10), yet I prefer
Heller-Roazen’s rendition of the final line in the poem,
specifically the choice to translate the expression
“vesto panni” by saying “I wear clothes” instead of
“put on clothes.”
Lines 11–13 from “Il Superstite” present such
extreme variations in the two extant English versions
that, if taken out of context, they could be mistaken for
two different poems:
(Levi)
A notte menano le mascelle
Sotto la mora greve dei sogni
Masticando una rapa che non c’è.
(Feldman)
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, their jaws move,
Chewing on a nonexistent turnip.
(Heller-Roazen)
At night their jaws grind away
in the absence of dreams,
chewing on a stone that isn’t there.
(Balma)
At night they grind their jaws
Under the heavy respite of dreams,
Chewing on a turnip that isn’t there.
The most significant detail that jumps out to the
eye is Feldman’s choice to change the order in which
the reader receives information, moving the reference
to “mascelle” (“jaws,” v. 11) one line down. Both
translators assumed that the subject of the verb
“menano” were the jaws, but Levi’s sentence structure
(“menano le mascelle,” a verb followed by a direct
object) suggests otherwise. In fact, the subject of said
verb is the speaker’s “companions” (v. 6). My
rendition of line 12 translates “la mora greve dei
sogni” as “the heavy respite of dreams.” I find
Feldman’s version to be very beautifully crafted (“the
heavy burden of their dreams”), yet lacking the
specific connotation provided by the word respite: a
(Balma)
Go. I didn’t supplant anyone,
I didn’t usurp anyone’s bread,
No one died in my stead. No one.
(Feldman)
Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone,
Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread.
No one died in my place. No one.
Feldman’s use of the term “dispossessed” is effective.
It definitely conveys the meaning of the original poem,
but it is not an exact translation, as the verb
“soppiantare” means “to supplant” or “to oust”
(www.garzantilinguistica.it). Levi’s use of the
expression “in vece mia” (v. 17) can only be translated
as “in my stead.” In fact, this is a rare case in which a
precise literal rendition is the only acceptable choice.
If Levi had intended to say “in my place” as Feldman
suggests, he could have opted for a simpler and much
more common usage: “al posto mio.”
The last detail to be addressed has to do with
Feldman’s translation of the words “gente sommersa”
Translation Review
delay, a temporary postponement of the inevitable
suffering that awaits the speaker’s companions once
their slumber is over.
Feldman’s use of the adjective “nonexistent”
sufficiently renders the meaning of the original text,
yet I prefer Heller-Roazen’s version in this case, given
that Levi chose not to use the adjective “inesistente.”
Lines 15–17 of my translation present two
additional examples of word choice that aim to be
more literal than Heller-Roazen and Feldman’s
translations. The corresponding portion of HellerRoazen’s text (vv. 14–16) coincides with mine only in
part:
(Heller-Roazen)
go away. I didn’t usurp anyone’s place.
I didn’t steal anyone’s bread.
No one died in my stead. No one.
as “submerged people” (v. 14). Her translation was
published in 1988, presumably before a translation of
Levi’s essay I sommersi e i salvati became available.
The reference to “gente sommersa” (literally,
“submerged people”) in “Il Superstite” is certainly
analogous to the author’s particular use of this
adjective in his essay. In fact, the close relationship
between the poem and the essay is confirmed by a
passage that Levi cited on the first page of I sommersi
e i salvati6: lines 582–585 from S.T. Coleridge’s Rime
of the Ancient Mariner. Feldman’s version rightfully
opts for the literal translation “submerged people,” yet
Heller-Roazen was faced with ignoring or adhering to
31
the choice of another translator. The English version of
Levi’s essay, published in 1988, was translated by
Raymond Rosenthal for Summit Books (New York)
and bears the title The Drowned and the Saved. From
that moment on, any scholar or translator who
discussed Levi’s notion of “submerged people” was
made to choose between using precise word choice
and utilizing a specific term that had already taken
hold in the academic community. It is for this reason
alone that my translation of “Il Superstite” (and,
arguably, Heller-Roazen’s) refers to “drowned people”
(v. 14). In conclusion, it is important to remember that
Primo Levi chose to allow Ruth Feldman to translate
some of his works. One could even argue that
criticizing her translations also means questioning a
particular decision by the author. Nevertheless,
Anglophone readers worldwide should be provided
with information on the diction and the level of
language used by the author. If the majority of literary
translations continue to be published without footnotes
or a significant critical apparatus, monolingual
students and scholars will run the risk of
misinterpreting works of literature in their research.
Think of Heller-Roazen’s line “chewing on a stone
that isn’t there,” and imagine the implications of
sharing it with a room full of eager young minds who
are being taught Italian poetry in translation. The odd
nature of this mistranslated detail might inspire dozens
of essays exploring the potential significance of
chewing on a stone while starving in a concentration
camp. This is one of many reasons why I’ve tried to
produce a translation of “Il Superstite” that returns to
the words of the author. To some, it may not even
sound like a poem, but it is an honest attempt to
reexamine his use of poetic language and to convey
said language in his own words.
32
1
Notes
Compare line 20 from “Il Superstite” with Dante’s Inferno,
XXXIII, 141: “e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni.” In
this passage, Dante is refuting Alberigo’s claim that he is, in
fact, Branca Doria, a knight from Genova who can’t be in
hell, as he still lives, eats, sleeps, and wears clothes. [Dante
Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Milano. Mondadori. 1991.
(304).]
2
S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Cambridge. The Riverside Press. 1931. (23).
3
The selection cited appears on page 254 of Quaderno di
traduzioni.
4
This division of the poem according to the original line
breaks does not appear in Remnants of Auschwitz.
5
The three references are: (1) v. 13, rapa (turnip); (2) v. 16,
pane (bread); (3) v. 20, mangio (I eat).
6
Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati, in Opere II. Torino.
Einaudi. 1997. (995).
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnantz of Auschwitz: The Witness
and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York.
Zone Books. 1999. 89–172.
Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. Ed. Giuseppe
Villaroel. Milano. Mondadori. 1991. 303–304.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
and Other Poems. Ed. Virginia W. Kennedy. Cambridge.
The Riverside Press. 1931. 23.
Fenoglio, Beppe. Quaderno di traduzioni. Ed. Mark
Pietralunga. Torino. Einaudi. 2000. 254–255.
Levi, Primo. Collected Poems. Trans. Ruth Feldman and
Brian Swann. Boston. Faber & Faber. 1988. 64.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond
Rosenthal. New York. Summit Books. 1988.
Levi, Primo. Opere II. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Torino. Einaudi.
1997. 576–159
Translation Review
FRIEDRICH SCHILLER’S SKULL AND BONES?
THE RECEPTION OF A EUROPEAN POET IN 2005
By Don Anderson
It is a pitiful, small-minded ideal to write for a nation; this border is absolutely unbearable for a philosophic mind.
— Friedrich Schiller to Christian Gottfried Körner, 13 October, 1789.
Friedrich von Schiller died on May 9, 1805, in
Weimar, in the Duchy of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach,
at the age of 45. He was not a wealthy man. In the
middle of the night, his body was buried without pomp
and circumstance in a common grave for members of
the upper class.1 Twenty-one years later, Schiller had
attained such a degree of fame that officials deemed it
necessary to retrieve his bones from the burial vault.
The problem was that nobody could be sure which set
of skull and bones belonged to Schiller.2 No matter —
a poet of such fame and distinction deserved a proper
grave. Or, more likely, the Court in Weimar was
concerned with its own legacy as the center of German
Classicism. If literary pilgrims were going to come to
Weimar, they had to have a holy site to visit. Schiller
— or at least someone who passes for him — now lies
in the Vault of Princes in Weimar, near his friend and
collaborator Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The tomb
of Germany’s two great classical poets continues to
attract masses of visitors.
When Schiller died, Germany existed only as an
idea. A German national state would not become a
reality until 1871. In fact, there were more than 100
independent German-speaking states, principalities,
and city-states in 1805. When Goethe proclaimed in
1805 that “Schiller was ours,”3 he was speaking as a
citizen of the tiny city of Weimar. Nonetheless,
citizens in these many German states and territories
mourned Schiller’s early death.4 The circumstances in
German states after 1805 only increased his fame.
Napoleon’s armies occupied much of “Germany”
between 1806 and 1813. Along with the work of
numerous other poets, Schiller’s poetry — especially
the Reiterlied from Wallenstein’s Camp — served as
inspiration for the generation of young people
humiliated by this occupation when they took up arms
to fight their “War of Liberation” in 1813.5
After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the
Congress of Vienna dashed the hopes of Germany’s
liberal reformers for a constitution and a unified
Germany. The old European order was reestablished,
and some thirty German states served as a buffer
between Russia and Western European powers.
Translation Review
“Germany” remained a mere idea. Political authorities
viewed the reformers and German nationalists with
great suspicion and harassed them with secret
informants and censorship decrees. As a result, these
thinkers sought refuge in the idea of a German nation
unified by culture, an idea that should prepare the way
for a future political unification.6 As the 19th-century
historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus argued in his
enormously popular History of the National Literature
of the Germans, which he published between 1835 and
1842, Friedrich Schiller and his partner in literature
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe played an important role
in this respect as the German classical poets.7 They
represented the crowning cultural achievement of a
German nation that awaited only a political
realization.8 Many of these thinkers preferred Schiller
to Goethe. The Jungdeutschen and writers such as
Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Wolfgang Menzel
criticized Goethe’s detached aestheticism and his
political passivity. They preferred the poet of the
people, Friedrich Schiller.9 As Heinrich Heine
remarked paradigmatically in 1836 in the first book of
The Romantic School, “Goethe’s writings do not
generate action like those of Schiller.”10 In the mid1820s, Schiller societies came into fashion, as did
literary circles that met and read Schiller’s plays aloud.
These societies were the impetus behind the
institutionalization of Schiller veneration that would
last into the 1850s and beyond.11 The first massive
Schiller celebration, in which Wolfgang Menzel
played an active organizing role, took place in
Stuttgart in 1839.12 Thirty thousand people took part.
Organizers unveiled the first monument to Schiller,
and merchants marketed special Schiller products.13
During the 1830s and 1840s, Germany was
heading for a liberal revolution, and numerous Schiller
celebrations provided an opportunity to speak publicly
about politics, an opportunity that was not readily
available in the public sphere. In addition, as the
festivities in 1839 had shown, the name Friedrich
Schiller could mobilize thousands of Germans.
Celebrating Schiller proved to be something that
“Germans” in some thirty separate states could do
33
collectively in spite of the political fragmentation. As a
result, Schiller societies were constantly in danger of
being dissolved by the police.14 The Revolution finally
came in 1848. The force behind the so-called March
Revolution was the attempt to create a unified and
modern German national state with a constitution. In
Berlin, graffiti on the walls of the opera house called
for a production of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. When the
play was performed in response to this demand, a
spontaneous folk festival is said to have taken place.15
When the freely elected parliament met in Frankfurt
for the first time in May of 1848, representatives cited
numerous passages from Schiller’s work in their
speeches — most prominently, “Sire, give us freedom
of thought,” from his play Don Carlos.16 Schiller’s
Wilhelm Tell was also staged in Nuremberg to
celebrate the parliament’s passing of the basic rights
for Germans.17 And in 1850, the Schiller-Almanac for
all important events of 1848–49 was published.18 The
revolution, however, failed, and membership in
Schiller societies decreased drastically. In 1854, King
Wilhelm IV of Prussia forbade teachers in training to
read Goethe or Schiller, even privately.19
It was not until the late 1850s that restrictions
were eased. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary
of Schiller’s birth in 1859, German states organized
what one critic has called the largest celebration of a
poet in the history of mankind.20 Some 500 cities in
Germany, Europe, and the Americas celebrated the
Schiller centennial with three-day festivals.
Participants put on Schiller’s plays. They marched,
delivered speeches, wrote and read poems in his
honor, and dedicated monuments.21 Seventeen
thousand people in Hamburg and 10,000 in Leipzig
marched in processions honoring Schiller, and
between 60,000 and 80,000 gathered over three days
in Frankfurt.22
The speeches delivered in 1859 emphasized the
unifying role that Schiller played for Germany. The
celebrations took on a quasi-religious character, with
Schiller substituting in the role of the savior. The
ringing of church bells accompanied many
processions, and objects from Schiller’s apartment
were carried by marchers as relics. A number of
poems that were read in public characterized Schiller
as a prophet, a guardian angel, and even as a Messiah
and the new creator.23 The message, as it was
articulated in 1859, was that Schiller embodied the
promise of future unification. As one speaker
remarked: “The Schiller Festival is a great and a
noteworthy celebration because members of a noble
34
nation — separated by class, tribes, states, and other
obstacles — whose people fought a bloody battle
against each other only a few years earlier, step up to
the cradle of a great man and pronounce as Goethe
did: ‘He was ours!’”24 Not only did participants make
reference to the wars of liberation, but they also put
the 1859 celebration into the context of the revolution
of 1848. For the first time since they had been banned
in 1849, the colors of the 1848 revolution — and of
the German flag today — black, red and gold, were
publicly displayed as symbols of freedom and unity.25
However, the evocation of the noble ideals fought
for in 1813–14 and in 1848 was only one side of the
equation. In many ways, the celebration of 1859
pointed in two directions. On the one hand, the roots
of the Schiller veneration that manifested itself in 1859
drew on a long history of liberal strivings to defeat
Napoleon and to unify Germany as a constitutional
monarchy and a European nation under equals. On the
other hand, if one considers the rhetoric of 1859 in the
light of the unification of Germany under a Prussian
monarchy, which would follow in 1871 after three
wars of aggression, the festivities of 1859 served as
the prolog to the monopolization of Schiller by
nationalist and conservative forces.
If we look beyond the borders of Germany, we can
also pinpoint 1859 as the year after which Schiller
ceased to be a European figure who embodied the
struggle against absolutism. Schiller had been an
exceedingly popular writer in Europe when he was
still alive. His play The Robbers was a hit in Paris in
1792, and Schiller received honorary citizenship in
France.26 He was so popular in Denmark that the
Danish poet Jens Baggesen raised money to support
him when he became sick in 1791.27 After his death,
he remained popular in France and England where
writers such as Germaine de Staël and Thomas Carlyle
praised the moral strength of his character.28 Schiller
was also very popular in the United States. The
cultural organizations run by German immigrants in
more than 100 American cities saw it as their duty to
take part in the celebrations of 1859.29 As part of the
three-day festival in New York City, GermanAmerican citizens unveiled the first-ever sculpture in
central park: a bust of Friedrich Schiller.30 However,
as it became clear that Friedrich Schiller was
becoming the official poet of a chauvinistic and
militaristic German state, respect for him abroad
waned, to the point that today he is hardly known
outside of circles of specialists. After 1870,
remembering Schiller became a central task of the
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German state. Schiller was “nationalized,” and the
work of this “Great German” became required reading
in the schools.31 As Robert d’Harcourt, a French
professor of German, remarked in 1928 as nationalist
parties began to have success in Germany: “Goethe is
a European, Schiller is a German.”32
On the occasion of Schiller’s 175th birthday in
1934, the Nazis organized a series of events that was
intended to capture the enthusiasm and the magnitude
of the celebrations in 1859. In June, some 25,000
Hitler Youth marched to Marbach, the site of the
Schiller National Museum since 1922, to honor
Schiller as a “Godfather of the Third Reich.” Eighteen
thousand of them carried flowers and laid them at the
foot of the town’s Schiller statue. Another group came
bearing torches to ignite a bonfire as a “sign of the
resurrection of the heroic German spirit of Friedrich
Schiller in our time.”33 The most important event took
place in Weimar on Schiller’s birthday in November.
A speech by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph
Goebbels, attended by Hitler, highlighted a week of
festivities. Goebbels proclaimed that Schiller was
“blood of our blood, and flesh of our flesh” and
announced that if Schiller had lived in the 20th
century, he would have become “the greatest poetic
pioneer of our revolution.”34 And he claims Friedrich
Schiller’s life and work as an integral component of
German identity. “We acquire [from his life and work]
the immeasurable treasure of German Idealism which
distinguishes us before all other nations on earth and
which is the root of our national essence.”35 He
concludes his speech with a quote from Goethe’s
epilogue to Schiller’s “The Song of the Bell” that
contains the infamous claim: “For he was ours.”36 The
1934 Schiller festivities were important to the Nazis
for one particular reason. They offered an opportunity
to refute the image in Germany and abroad that the
Nazis were brutal and anti-intellectual. However, as
one columnist in Paris noted about the procession to
Marbach in June, they did not succeed: the Nazis
showed “the world that even those who have never
read or even want to read a line from the poet, can
march … to Schiller.”37 The number of productions of
Schiller’s plays jumped dramatically after the Nazis
took power in 1933, and Schiller was the most popular
classical poet on German stages between 1933–1934
and the end of the Second World War in 1945.
However, it is a testament to the symbolic
authority of Friedrich Schiller that he was also an
important figure for those who opposed the Nazis. The
White Rose, perhaps the most famous resistance
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movement in Nazi Germany, quoted Schiller at length
in their first flyer.38 And during the festivities in
Marbach on November 10, 1934, a member of the
German SA by the name of Hans Burrer walked up to
the microphone and announced: “To the Genius
Schiller: We need your spirit desperately! Help — that
the madness, the Nazi madness disappears from brains
…. For the holy German nation, the highest pledge of
Freedom, I light the torch of death.” He was arrested
on the spot.39
After the war, Schiller remained the embodiment
of classical theater, a classical theater that provided
respite from the rapid change of modernity. As such,
Schiller represented the survival of German culture in
the middle of completely destroyed cities. There were
23 Schiller productions during the 1945–1946 season
and 79 in 1946–1947. Second only to Shakespeare,
Schiller remained the most popular playwright for
German stages until he was overtaken by Bertolt
Brecht in 1966.40
By the time the 150th anniversary of Schiller’s
death rolled around in 1955, there were two German
states. In the celebrations of 1955 and 1959, both
capitalist West Germany and Communist East
Germany adopted Schiller as a warrantor of their
respective systems.41 However, Schiller became the
“official” poet of East Germany. Johannes Becher, the
influential East German Minister of Culture, delivered
a speech titled “For he is ours: Friedrich Schiller. The
Poet of Freedom” at the Weimar Nationaltheater in
1955.42 Becher’s title reformulates Goethe’s famous
phrase, “For he was ours.” The switch in tense
reclaims Schiller’s memory for the German
Democratic Republic, which fulfills, as Becher argues
in his speech, the vision Schiller had laid out for the
future of Germany. “For the first time in the history of
our nation, a German state has ‘risen from ruins’ and
created the foundation for the fulfillment of Schiller’s
legacy.”43 There were more than 1,000 productions of
Schiller plays in 1955 in the East.44 In 1959, East
German officials presented idyllic pictures of a
working class paying tribute to their poet: A state-run
newspaper reported “that workers … would take two
days off from work, rent a small bus with their wives,
and travel many kilometers to honor Schiller.”45 By
1960, three million copies of Schiller’s works were
available in East German bookstores, and nearly every
drama was filmed for television.46 In contrast, in the
wake of major educational reforms, Schiller ceased to
be required reading in West German schools in 1972.47
35
However, the end of the Cold War and German
reunification created a new political and cultural
context for the reception of Friedrich Schiller. There
can be no question that the 2005 Schiller Year took on
the character of a happening. Alone in the region
around Stuttgart, there were more than 400 official
programs, including a rock and rap festival.48 The
German government created a commemorative 10Euro coin and a stamp in honor of Friedrich Schiller.
Between late October and the end of 2005, at least 150
events took place across Germany, including 34
lectures, 31 performances of Schiller plays, 10
exhibitions, 24 readings from Schiller’s work, 10
opera performances, 9 concerts, 10 literary walking
tours, 7 symposia, 4 film screenings, 2 dinners with
characters from Schiller’s plays, 1 light parade, 1
birthday party, 1 art installation, a special awards
ceremony, a festival for schoolchildren, and a
sleepover in a Schiller exhibition.49 The city of
Mannheim plastered its street cars full of Schiller
quotes, and the shopkeepers in the city of Marbach
organized a day of readings and productions in their
shops. In addition to a multitude of specials on TV and
radio, German publishing houses printed more than 30
new books about Friedrich Schiller, his life, and his
work, including Schiller for Stressed Out People,
Schiller for Kids, The Schiller Cookbook, a Schiller
comic book, and more than a dozen biographies.50 The
most successful of these biographies spent 10 months
on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list and is already in its
fifth printing.51
Without a doubt, the media industry succeeded in
marketing Schiller to the general public, and countless
Euros were earned in his name. Such centenary
celebrations are important economic events: for the
tourism industry, for the media, and especially for
cultural institutions. Was 2005 simply a media event,
or were there ideological underpinnings to the 2005
Schiller Year? Was 2005 the year to rediscover
Friedrich Schiller, as many commentators remarked?
Or did the memory of Friedrich Schiller help to
contour contemporary discourse on German identity?
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of
Schiller’s death in 1955, the French ambassador to
Germany, André François-Poncet, spoke of the
European Friedrich Schiller. In a radio address titled
“Friedrich Schiller — Our Fellow Citizen,” he recalled
that Schiller had been an honorary citizen of France’s
First Republic.52 He also highlighted the cosmopolitan
dimension of Schiller’s thought and his influence in
Europe and emphasized Friedrich Schiller’s exemplary
36
status for future Europeans. “In addition, it seems to
me that Schiller is not only the poet of the past and the
present. This great humanist is the ideal of our future,
an image that we and the current generation are called
on to realize in Europe.”53 Fifty years later, several
German voices picked up on this message. One
commentator, who was writing for a journal sponsored
by the Federal Center for Political Education,
paraphrased François-Poncet’s arguments and
reminded readers that when Schiller was first listed in
the Weimar Court Calendar in 1803, he insisted that
the words “Citizen of France” be included by his
name.54 Why not, the author suggests, count him
among the European classical poets?55 When Christina
Weiss, the Federal Government’s Commissioner for
Culture and the Media, delivered the 2004 Schiller
Speech, she emphasized Friedrich Schiller as a
European. She cited Thomas Mann, who had remarked
in 1955 that Schiller always transferred patriotic
enthusiasm for freedom in his poetry onto other
European nations: the Netherlands in Don Carlos,
Switzerland in Wilhelm Tell, and France in the Maid of
Orleans.56 She also reminded listeners that the musical
version of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” has been the official
European Hymn since 1985. Three additional
constellations of the 2005 Schiller Year highlighted
this trend. First, the 2005 Schiller Year had a distinctly
international flavor. There were symposia at Yale and
at Princeton, and the German government organized
events in 23 cities around the world. The Goethe
Institut sponsored two notable colloquia: “Schiller —
The Reception of Schiller in European Countries” in
Brussels in March and “Friedrich Schiller as a Key
Figure of European Intellectual History” in Paris in
October. Second, the Schiller National Museum in
Marbach chose to emphasize the international import
of Schiller’s life and work. As the organizers state in
their brochure: “The events that accompany the
exhibition place the poet and thinker Friedrich Schiller
in a contemporary and international context.”57 Of
great symbolic importance was the lecture series
“Schiller International” that accompanied the opening
of their exhibit on Schiller’s life in April in Marbach.
Speakers from England, France, Russia, Italy,
Switzerland, and the United States came to Marbach to
speak about Schiller’s influence in Europe. Finally, the
Maid of Orleans, a piece about Joan of Arc and the
French struggle for freedom, was produced on 11
major German stages, more than any other Schiller
play.58
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In a recent article in Germany’s weekly
newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Volker Hage, one of
Germany’s most prominent literary critics, recalled
Schiller’s status as a European visionary.59 In his first
lecture as a professor of history at the University of
Jena only weeks before the storming of the Bastille,
Schiller had proclaimed that, “The European
community of states appears to have evolved into a
large family. The housemates can get mad at each
other, but they can’t mangle each other any more.”60
Looking back at the wars and destruction that have
characterized much of European history since 1789,
Schiller’s proclamation on the future of Europe was
certainly optimistic. Nonetheless, there is little
question that Schiller had a vision for Europe’s future
that was ahead of its time. The cultural industry and
the German state took the 2005 Schiller Year as an
opportunity to present Friedrich Schiller as a European
poet and thinker. As such, remembering Schiller in
2005 served to contribute to a project of European
identity construction and highlighted Germany’s
commitment to that undertaking.
In 2005, two prominent German politicians
delivered speeches in commemoration of the 2005
Schiller Year. On April 17, the current Federal
President of Germany, Horst Köhler, spoke at the
Berliner Ensemble, the theater made famous by Bertolt
Brecht. On November 12, the former Federal President
Richard von Weizsäcker delivered the annual Schiller
lecture at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum in Marbach.
Both speakers reflected at length on the importance of
Friedrich Schiller and his work for Germany and
Europe today and on Schiller’s potential to contribute
to contemporary identity formation. From this
perspective, both participated in the 2005 discourse on
the European Friedrich Schiller. However, the current
and former presidents spoke from within different
national frameworks. Whereas Köhler focused on the
importance of the legacy of German classical literature
for a German society that is undergoing major
demographic transformations, Weizsäcker spoke as a
European. For instance, when Köhler evoked the “selfevident internationalism” of Friedrich Schiller, he
encouraged Germans to look beyond their own
borders, much as Schiller did.61 In contrast,
Weizsäcker emulated the cosmopolitanism of
Schiller’s dramas and placed himself in an
international context. Because of this difference, it is
productive to read these two speeches against each
other. Most importantly, Weizsäcker constructed his
speech, which he delivered nearly eight months after
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Köhler had delivered his, as a dialogue with the
current Federal President. The dialogue that emerged
considered both the problems that arise when
discourses of national identity and classical literature
intersect and the implications of claiming Friedrich
Schiller as a European poet.
President Köhler placed his reflections on
Friedrich Schiller in the context of the semi-official
discourse of the 2005 Schiller Year. He opened his
talk with an emphasis on Schiller’s passion for
freedom, the motto for the Schiller Year celebrations.
And he accentuated the cosmopolitanism of Friedrich
Schiller’s work and proclaimed him to be “a true
European.”62 However, I would argue that there is a
tension between the content of his speech and his
evocation of Schiller as a European and world citizen.
Köhler framed his speech around the concept of
the Kulturnation, or “Cultural Nation,” a term that
came into use around 1900.63 The German historian
Friedrich Meinecke used the term Kulturnation in
1907 to characterize a supranational collection of
people who share the same origins, language, and
culture in contrast to a people defined by their
membership in a state.64 The idea of Germany as a
nation defined by language and culture was important
for 19th-century Germans who saw culture as unifying
concept in the absence of a politically unified state.
Clearly, the events of the 20th century have made the
idea of a German Kulturnation problematic.
Nonetheless, Köhler attempted to recover the term
“Kulturnation” and to re-appropriate it for
contemporary Germany. “We should, in fact,
reconsider this term ‘Kulturnation.’ We should reflect
on how we can productively tap into its potential
anew. I think it is still worth something.”65 In this
context, he evoked Friedrich Schiller. “Germany was
once proud to be a ‘Kulturnation.’ Schiller, together
with his friend Goethe, belongs to its founders. … We
know that the concept of the ‘Kulturnation’ … was so
important to Schiller….”66
For Köhler, the concept of the German
Kulturnation should remind modern-day Germany of
its cultural heritage. Germans should recover their
classical literature and make this cultural heritage
productive as they move into the future and reflect on
their identity as Germans. He maintained that Germans
must engage the German classics, above all, the work
of Friedrich Schiller, and consider how these works
can contribute to the development of a sense of
German identity. According to Köhler, the early 21st
century represents a fundamentally different challenge
37
to German society than did the 1960s. Forty years ago,
cultural critics, academics, and theaters across
Germany problematized the classical works and
critically reflected on their failure to prevent the
crimes of the National Socialists. It was in this context
that Schiller had ceased to be required reading in West
German schools. Faced with the challenges and the
upheaval posed by what Köhler called the “dramatic
shift in the demographic makeup of our population”67
today, the classics can play an important role in
providing the foundation for cultural “selfunderstanding” into the 21st century. Köhler posed the
following questions: “How does a theater of the future
attract a public in a city in which half of all young
people, who are all growing older, have a migrational
background? What does it mean in the face of these
new developments to pass on our cultural heritage?
How productive can the classics be for social
integration and for the determination of identity in a
culturally mixed society?”68
Köhler addressed the most intriguing questions in
the context of the reception of the German classics
today. How can Germany — and one can pose this
question from a European perspective — how can
Europe engage its classical literature and its cultural
legacy and make it meaningful, indeed even
instructive, for a contemporary society confronted by
questions of integration and in the process of a search
for a new identity? However, there is a tension
between these questions and Köhler’s problematic use
of terminology such as “legacy,” “culture,”
“Kulturnation,” “classics,” and “national selfconfidence.” How do you refunctionalize such
vocabulary and all of its historical and cultural
baggage to meet the needs of a contemporary society
whose demographic makeup, as Köhler rightly pointed
out, is changing so rapidly? And how do you create
distance from this tradition and open new discursive
and artistic spaces that would enable you to enter into
a true dialogue with those who do not feel that they
belong to this tradition or that it speaks to them?
In November 2005, former President Richard von
Weizsäcker delivered the 2005 Schiller lecture.69
Weizsäcker, who is the consummate diplomat, never
mentioned Köhler by name. However, in a very subtle
way, he rejected several tenets advanced by the current
Federal President. First, he alluded to the long and
contradictory history of the reception of Schiller and
pointed out that Schiller has been appropriated by both
liberal and nationalist movements. Most critically, he
reminded his audience that Schiller himself did not
38
propagate the notion of a German cultural nation.
“[Schiller] does not speak of a Kulturnation but rather
of a nation of citizens.”70 Schiller, as Weizsäcker
rightly argued, envisioned a nation of citizens guided
by universal principles of reason and morality.71 In
contrast, Köhler’s views on Schiller and the notion of
a German Kulturnation have their roots in 200 years of
Schiller reception, not in Schiller’s work.72
Second, Weizsäcker challenged the Europeans of
today to embrace the passion and freedom of Friedrich
Schiller as a guiding principle for the future
integration of Europe. “We, the Europeans of today,
have the opportunity and the challenge to take an
interest in our neighbors, to be open, to recognize old
borders as new bridges, to promote integration with
the passion and freedom of Friedrich Schiller.”73
Weizsäcker did not speak of Germany and the
Germans but rather of we the Europeans. And he did
not evoke Friedrich Schiller as a European poet.
Instead, he held him up as an example.
Finally, Weizsäcker questioned Köhler’s critique
of contemporary theater.74 A central component of
Köhler’s plan for the recovery of classical literature
included a call for the historization of the dramatist
Friedrich Schiller.75 In contrast, Weizsäcker
emphasized that each and every drama production
profits from the clash between the historical text and
the present. “[N]obody should too easily make a
general protest about lack of faithfulness to the
original text. Each play offers new interpretations and
points of emphasis at different times. Each production
emerges from an encounter between historical text and
present.”76
The official discourse on Friedrich Schiller during
the 2005 Schiller Year sought to place Schiller in a
European context and, I would argue, to claim him as
a European classical poet. Weizsäcker’s lecture
represented an important self-reflective intervention
into this debate. Most importantly, he warned against
appropriating Schiller as a static and historical cultural
icon who can be infused with a particular ideology.
Historical Schiller or dynamic Schiller? This is what is
at stake in his disagreements with Köhler, most clearly
in his critique of Köhler’s views on contemporary
theater. When Weizsäcker spoke as a European, he did
not claim Schiller as a European classical poet. Rather,
he encouraged Europeans to be inspired by Schiller’s
work as they participate in their own project of
European integration.
Over the course of the last 200 years, Friedrich
Schiller has been appropriated in the service of
Translation Review
numerous ideologies. In many cases, there has been a
divergence between Schiller’s work and his reception,
which points to the problems that arise when political
goals and discourses on national identity meet
literature. An analysis of the most recent Schiller Year
indicates that this trend continues in the 21st century,
although Richard von Weizsäcker clearly recognized
the problem. In any case, his speech in November
2005 was an important reminder of the need for
critical reflection on how Germans choose to venerate
Schiller’s skull and bones.
1
Notes
Albrecht Schöne, Schillers Schädel (München: C.H. Beck,
2001), 8–9.
2
Schöne, 14, 23–4.
3
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Epilog zu Schillers
‘Glocke.’ Widerholt und erneut bei der Vorstellung am 10.
Mai 1815,” Goethes Werke, vol. 1, 4th edition, Erich Trunz,
ed. (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1958), 256. Unless
otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
4
Christian Grawe, “Das Beispiel Schiller. Zur
Konstituierung eines Klassikers in der Öffentlichkeit des 19.
Jahrhunderts,” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im
19. Jahrhundert, Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Voßkamp
eds. (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1994), 641.
5
Grawe, “Das Beispiel Schillers,” 646. See especially the
accompanying footnote.
6
Klaus L. Berghahn, “Von Weimar nach Versailles. Zur
Entstehung der Klassiklegende im 19. Jahrhundert,” Die
Klassik-Legende. Second Wisconsin Workshop, Reinhold
Grimm and Jost Hermand eds. (Frankfurt a. M.: AthenäumVerlag, 1971), 51–2.
7
Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Geschichte der poetischen
National-Literatur der Deutschen (Leipzig, 1835–1842).
8
Berghahn, 63.
9
Berghahn, 55–60.
10
Heinrich Heine, Die romantische Schule, Heinrich Heines
Sämtliche Werke, ed. E. Elster (Leipzig, 1887/90), vol. 3,
265; quoted in Berghahn, 58.
11
Grawe, 657. Rainer Noltenius, “Die Nation und Schiller,”
Dichter und ihre Nation, Helmut Scheuer ed. (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 153.
12
Bruce Duncan, “Remembering Schiller: The Centenary of
1859,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 35 (1999): 3.
13
Duncan, 3.
14
Grawe, “Das Beispiel Schillers,” 657. Noltenius, 153.
15
Noltenius, 156.
16
U. Gerhard, “Schiller im 19. Jahrhundert,” SchillerHandbuch, Helmut Koopmann ed. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998), 768.
17
Noltenius, 156.
18
Schiller-Almanach auf alle denkwürdigen Ereignisse der
Jahre 1848 und 1849 (Berlin: Grieben, 1850).
19
Duncan, 6.
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20
Grawes, “Das Beispiel Schillers,” 643.
Duncan, 2.
22
Duncan, 2.
23
Noltenius, 160.
24
Karl Tropus. ed. Schiller-Denkmal, vol. 1 (Berlin: Riegel,
1860) 475, qtd in Duncan, 11.
25
Grawe, “Das Beispiel Schillers,” 643.
26
André François-Poncet, “Friedrich Schiller — Unser
Mitbürger,” Schiller. Reden im Gedenkjahr 1955, Bernhard
Zeller, ed. (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1955), 92.
27
Otto Dann, “Friedrich Schiller in Deutschland und
Europa,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 9–10 (28. Februar,
2005): 24.
28
Thomas Carlyle, The life of Friedrich
Schiller; comprehending an examination of his works
(London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825). Madame de Staël, De
l’Allemagne, vol. 2, Jean de Pange, ed. (Paris: Librairie
Hachette, 1958), 86–95.
29
Peter Boerner, “Schiller im Ausland,” Schiller-Handbuch,
Helmut Koopmann ed. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998), 805.
30
“Johann von Schiller Monument,” 7 March, 2002, New
York City Department of Parks and Recreation, 17 March,
2006
http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_sign
s/hs_historical_sign.php?id=13316.
31
Dann, “Friedrich Schiller,” 27–8.
32
Robert d’Harcourt, La jeunesse de Schiller (Paris: Plon,
1928), IV.
33
Völkische Beobachter, 21. June, 1934, qtd. in Georg
Ruppelt, Schiller im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland.
Der Versuch einer Gleichschaltung (Stuttgart: Metzer,
1979), 33.
34
Joseph Goebbels, “Rede des Herrn Reichsministers Dr.
Joseph Goebbels zur Schiller-Gedächtnisfeier in Weimar,”
Ruppert, 154.
35
Goebbels, 156.
36
Goebbels, 156.
37
Claudia Albert, “Schiller im 20. Jahrhundert,” SchillerHandbuch, Helmut Koopmann ed. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998), 782.
38
“Flugblätter der Weißen Rose. I,” 20 April, 2005,
Bundeszentral für politische Bildung, 17 March, 2006
http://www.bpb.de/themen/ZGSY8R,0,0,Flugblatt_I.html.
39
Dann, “Friedrich Schiller,” 28.
40
Albert, 786.
41
Albert, 783–4.
42
Johannes R. Becher, “Denn er ist unser: Friedrich Schiller.
Der Dichter der Freiheit,” Der Menschheit Würde.
Dokumente zum Schiller-Bild der deutschen Arbeiterklasse,
Günther Dahlke, ed. (Weimar: Arion Verlag, 1959), 298.
43
Becher, 298. “Risen from Ruins” [Auferstanden aus
Ruinen] is the opening of the East German national anthem
which was written by Johannes Becher.
44
George Steiner, “Um die Muse aufzumuntern. Das
klassische hat seine Glaubwürdigkeit verspielt. Warum es
im Jahr 2055 trotzdem eine Schiller-Feier geben sollte,” Die
21
39
Zeit, 28 April, 2005, Zeit online GMBH, 17 March, 2006
http://www.zeit.de/2005/18/Schiller_200.
45
Neues Deutschland, 7 November 1959, supplement, qtd. in
Maximilian Nutz, “The obstructed dialogue: a discourse
analysis of the Schiller celebrations in 1955 and 1959,”
German Writers and the Cold War, 1945–1961, Rhys W.
Williams, Stephen Parker and Colin Riordin, eds. (New
York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 77.
46
Steiner.
47
Dann, “Friedrich Schiller,” 30.
48
For a listing of events in the region of Stuttgart alone, see
the archives of friedrich-schiller.net. “Friedrich Schiller in
der KulturRegion Stuttgart. Archiv,” 17 March, 2006
http://www.friedrich-schiller.net/catalog/catalog_archiv.php.
49
This information was culled from the official website of
the 2005 Schiller Year. “ Freiheit! Schillerjahr 2005,” 15
October, 2005 http://www.schillerjahr2005.de/index.html.
50
For a partial list of books published, see the following
website: “Neuerscheinungen zu Schiller,” 17 March, 2005,
3Sat, 17 March, 2006
http://www.3sat.de/bookmark/sendung/77011/index.html.
Friedrich Schiller, Schiller für Gestresste. Poetischphilosophische Gedanken, Ursula Michels-Wenz, ed.
(Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 2005). Peter Härtling, Schiller
für Kinder (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 2004). Roswitha
Stemmer-Beer, Das Schiller-Kochbuch. Ein literarisches
Kochbuch (Warendorf: Schnell Verlag, 2004). Horus W.
Odenthal, Schiller! Eine Comic-Novelle (Köln: Ehapa
Comic Collection, 2005).
51
Sigrid Damm, Das Leben des Friedrich Schiller (Frankfurt
a.M.: Insel Verlag, 2004). “Besteller. Sachbücher,” Der
Spiegel, 6 September, 2004, 149. “Bestseller. Sachbücher,”
Der Spiegel, 18 July, 2005, 117.
52
François-Poncet , 90–98.
53
François-Poncet, 98.
54
Dann, “Friedrich Schiller,” 24.
55
Dann, “Friedrich Schiller,” 31.
56
Christina Weiss, “Schiller-Rede 2004 in Marbach,”
Freiheit! Schillerjahr 2005, 17 March, 2006
http://www.schillerjahr2005.de/materialien/schiller_rede/index.html.
57
Flyer of the Schiller-Nationalmuseum for exhibitions titled
“Die Wahrheit hält Gericht. Schillers Helden heute,” which
ran from May 9, 2005 until October 10, 2005 in the
Schiller-Museum in Weimar and from November 12, 2005
until February 5, 2006 in the Schiller-Nationalmuseum
Marbach am Neckar and “Götterpläne und Mäusegeschäfte.
Friedrich Schiller 1759–1905, which ran from April 23,
2005 until October 9, 2005 in the Schiller-Nationalmuseum
40
Marbach am Neckar and from October 30, 2005 until April
17, 2006 in the Schiller-Museum Weimar.
http://www.schiller-weimarmarbach.de/cms/media/pdf/flyer-schiller-mawe-2.pdf, 2.
58
“Die doppelte Johanna,” 18 April 2005, Cooperative
project of the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, e.V., SchillerNationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, and Klassik
Stiftung Weimar. 17 October, 2006 http://www.schillerweimar-marbach.de/cms/index.php?idcatside=
170&sid=f93143b95908aef50e064252ec344e3.
59
Volker Hage, “Die feurige Seele,” Der Spiegel, 4 October,
2004, 190.
60
Friedrich Schiller, “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende
studiert man Universalgeschichte,” Friedrich Schiller.
Historische Schriften und Erzählungen I, ed. Otto Dann,
Friedrich Schiller. Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden
(Frankfurt a.M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000), 420–1.
See Hage, 190.
61
Horst Köhler, “Grußwort von Bundespräsident Horst
Köhler anlässlich der Schillermatinee im Berliner Ensemble
am 17. April 2005,” 17 March, 2006
http://www.bundespraesident.de/Anlage/original_625082/Sc
hillermatinee-17.04.2005.pdf, 3.
62
Köhler, 3.
63
Otto Dann, Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland.
1770–1990 (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1994), 36–8.
64
Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat.
Studien zur Genese des deutschen Nationalstaates, (1907).
65
Köhler, 2.
66
Köhler, 2.
67
Köhler, 4.
68
Köhler, 4.
69
Richard von Weizsäcker, “Friedrich Schiller,” Deutsches
Literaturarchiv Marbach, 17 March, 2006, http://www.dlamarbach.de/fileadmin/redaktion/aktuelles/presse/2005/Texte
/weizs__cker-121106.pdf.
70
Weizsäcker, 6.
71
Weizsäcker, 5–6.
72
Christian Grawe, “Schillers Gedichtenetwurf ‘Deutsche
Größe’: ‘Ein Nationalhymnus im höchsten Stil’? Ein
Beispiel ideologischen Mißbrauchs in der Germanistik seit
1871,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 36
(1992): 167–96.
73
Weizsäcker, 7.
74
Weizsäcker, 17–20.
75
Köhler, 4.
76
Weizsäcker, 18.
Translation Review
LA MALINCHE, LAURA ESQUIVEL, AND TRANSLATION
By Harry Aveling
The woman variously known as Malinalli Tenepal
(a reconstruction of her Náhuatl, “Aztec,” name),
Doña Marina (her baptized Spanish name), and La
Malinche (a mixture of both names) is of great interest
to translators. She was Cortés’ local-born interpreter
during the Spanish invasion of Mexico that began in
1519 — and the mother of his son, Don Martín, often
considered the first Latin American mestizo. Most
recently, she has been the subject of Laura Esquivel’s
“novel,” Malinche, simultaneously published in both
Spanish and English.1 Esquivel is, of course, famous
for her best-selling novel and film Como aqua para
chocolate, in English Like Water for Chocolate (or
Like Water for Hot Chocolate, as it was first known),2
which has been translated into at least thirty-five
languages. What does Esquivel’s Malinche have to tell
us about translation?
Doña Marina in History
Historically, Doña Marina’s story is most fully
presented in the book written in his late seventies by
Bernal Díaz de Castillo (1492–c. 1580), Historia
verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The
True History of the Conquest of New Spain).3
Doña Marina appears soon after Hernando Cortés
(1485–1547) won an early victory on the Mexican
mainland. At a date given as 15 March 1519, Díaz
writes, “many Caciques [nobles] and important
persons came from Tabasco and the neighboring
towns, and paid us great respect.” The party offered
Cortés a small amount of gold and some rough cloaks.
“These gifts were nothing, however,” Díaz continues,
“compared to the twenty women whom they gave us,
among them a most excellent person who when she
became a Christian took the name of Doña Marina”
(80). In a few short sentences, Díaz soon notes that
“She was a truly great princess, the daughter of
Caciques and the mistress of vassals, as was very
evident in her appearance” (82). Cortés himself had
recently married “a lady named Catalina Suarez, La
Marcaida” (45). At any rate, “[he] gave one of [the
women] to each of his captains, and Doña Marina,
being good-looking, intelligent, and self-assured, went
to Alonso Hernandez Puertocarrero, who, as I have
already said, was a very grand gentleman, and a cousin
of the Count of Medellin. And when Puertocarrero
returned to Spain [a few months later, on Cortés’
Translation Review
orders], Doña Marina lived with Cortés, to whom she
bore a son named Don Martin Cortés” (82).
Díaz next devotes a whole chapter to Doña
Marina. He tells the story of her birth in “a town called
Paynala, which had other towns subject to it.” Her
parents were both Caciques, but her father died while
still young and the mother remarried “another
Cacique, a young man, to whom she bore a son.”
Desiring that the son should succeed to the
Caciqueship after their passing, “they gave Doña
Marina to some Indians from Xicalango,” and these
“gave the child to the people of Tabasco, and the
Tabascans gave her to Cortes” (85). Thanks to her
residence in these two places, Marina spoke both the
languages of Tabascan (“Mayan,” the language of the
Yucatan peninsula) and Mexico (Náhuatl) (86). She
served as one of Cortés’s interpreters, and it was Díaz’
opinion that “without Doña Marina we could not have
understood the language of New Spain and Mexico”
(87). Although Doña Marina bore Cortés a son, after
the Conquest was over, “she subsequently married a
gentleman named Juan Jaramillo at the town of
Orizaba” (86). Anna Lanyon estimates that Marina
was born about 1500, that she was sold into slavery
about 1510, was given to Cortés in 1519, gave birth to
Martin sometime early in 1522, married Jaramillo
about 20 October 1524, bore him a daughter in 1526,
and notes that she is last mentioned in the council
records in 1528.4
Bernal Díaz records over and over again how
Cortés spoke to various nobles, ambassadors, and
eventually Montezuma II “through our interpreters.”
“Doña Marina was always with [Cortés],” Díaz notes,
“especially when he was visited by ambassadors or
Caciques, and she always spoke to them in the
Mexican language” (172). Díaz praises Marina for her
“manly valor” and lack of fear, even though “she
heard every day that the Indians were going to kill us
and eat our flesh with chillis …” (153).
He describes in detail many instances of Doña
Marina’s quick-thinking and determined service
during Cortés’ campaign. At Cempoala, Cortés warned
the city officials that if they did not destroy their idols,
then his men would do it for them. Dona Marina not
only translated these words, being “quite capable of
explaining them in their language,” as Díaz says, but,
in addition “also threatened them with the power of
41
Montezuma, who might fall on them any day” (123).
On another occasion, when she was warned by a
kindly disposed old woman of a plot to kill Cortés and
his troops, she immediately passed the news on to
Cortés, who set his own trap for the Cholulan warriors
and “killed many of them” (199).
Later, when the Spanish had decided to capture
Montezuma and were beginning to threaten him in his
own palace, it was Marina who told him, in her own
words and in response to his question about the
Spanish intentions: “Lord Montezuma, I advise you to
accompany them immediately to their quarters and
make no protest. I know they will treat you very
honorably as the great prince you are. But if you stay
here, you will be a dead man. In their quarters the truth
will be discovered.” (247). After further cajoling by
Cortés and his captains, Montezuma did indeed accept
the initially benign imprisonment at the hands of the
Spanish that eventually led to his death.
The risks she took were considerable, as she was
often close to the violence of battle; one Aztec
miniature, in fact, shows her in the middle of a
conflict, carrying a shield. In particular, Díaz notes the
relief the Spaniards felt on finding Marina still alive
after “La Noche Triste,” the terrible night, of the
retreat from Mexico, 30 June 1520 (302, 307). She
accompanied Cortés on the return attack, which
eventually triumphed after a three-month siege of the
capital, on the thirteenth of August 1521. Finally,
Marina also followed him on the ill-fated journey to
the Honduras, 1524–1526. At the beginning of this
latter trip, she was married to Jaramillo; toward the
end of it, she bore her husband a daughter while still
aboard ship.
Malinche’s story has subsequently been told in
many different ways. For many Mexicans, she has
been seen as “an infamous emblem of female
transgression and treachery … a whore, the mother of
a bastard race of mestizos, and a traitress to her
country.”5 Octavio Paz has harshly characterized her in
terms of the title La Chingada, “the Mother forcibly
opened, violated, or deceived,”6 a figure “representing
the Indian women who were fascinated, violated, or
seduced by the Spaniards.” And, Paz continues, “as a
small boy will not forgive his mother if she abandons
him to search for his father, the Mexican people have
not forgiven Malinche for her betrayal.”7
In recent years there have been scholarly
attempts to restore her reputation. Mirandé and
Enríquez, for example, note that Malinalli Tenepal had
little control over her sexual relationships or her social
42
position (“she was only eight years old when she was
thrust into an alien environment among the Tabascans
and barely fourteen when Cortés acquired her”), that
she nevertheless maintained her noble dignity even
while she was a slave; that many other Indian women
had also given children to Spanish men; and that
Mexico was highly divided and constantly at war well
before the arrival of the Spanish.8 Mirandé and
Enríquez see her as “an active, intelligent, and
sympathetic mediating force in the conquest … an
almost organic entity in which two languages, two
cultures, and two races met and merged.”9
Tzvetan Todorov describes her as:
the first example, and thereby the symbol, of the
cross-breeding of cultures; she thereby heralds the
modern state of Mexico and beyond that, the
present state of us all, since if we are not
invariably bilingual, we are inevitably bi- or tricultural. La Malinche glorifies mixture to the
detriment of purity — Aztec or Spanish — and the
role of the intermediary. She does not simply
submit to the other (a case unfortunately much
more common: we think of all the young Indian
women, “offered” or not, taken by the Spaniards);
she adopts the other’s ideology and serves it in
order to understand her own culture better, as is
evidenced by the effectiveness of her conduct
(even if “understanding” here means
“destroying”).10
Esquivel on Communication
Esquivel writes that the book Malinche is to be an
attempt “to conciliate two visions, two ways of
storytelling — the written and the symbolic — two
breaths, two yearnings, two times, two hearts in one”
(viii).
The novel builds on a theory of language as a form
of cosmic atunement that to be found in her earlier
book, Swift as Desire.11
Júbilo, the central character, now grown old and
suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, bears a dual
heritage, Indian and “white,” that is nevertheless
overshadowed by his indigenous Mexican ancestry.
His paternal grandmother, Doña Itzel, “was one
hundred percent Mayan Indian and she disapproved of
the mixing of her race’s blood with doña Jesusa’s
Spanish blood” (p. 7). Raised by servants rather than
his mother, “Júbilo became doña Itzel’s first bilingual
grandchild” (p. 8). The text continues:
And so from the age of five, the child became the
family’s official interpreter. This was a fairly
Translation Review
complicated matter for a small child, as he had to
take into account that when doña Jesusa said the
word mar, she was referring to the sea in front of
their home, where the family often swam. On the
other hand, when doña Itzel said the word
K’ak’nab, she wasn’t referring only to the sea, but
also to the “lady of the sea,” which is the name
given to one of the phases of the moon and is
associated with large bodies of water. So, as Júbilo
translated, not only did he have to be aware of
these subtleties, but he also had to pay attention to
his mother’s and grandmother’s tone of voice, the
tension in their vocal chords, as well as the
expression on their faces and the set of their
mouths. It was a difficult task, but one which
Júbilo performed with great pleasure. Of course,
he didn’t always translate literally. He always
added a kind word or two to soften the exchange
between the two women. Over time, this little trick
managed to help them get along a little better each
day, and they eventually grew to love each other.
(p. 8)
This awareness has certain consequences:
This experience helped Júbilo to discover the
power of words for bringing people closer together
or pushing them apart, and that the important thing
wasn’t what was said, but the intention behind the
communication. This sounds simple, but it is in
fact very complicated. When Júbilo’s grandmother
gave him a message to translate, generally the
words didn’t coincide with what she really wanted
to say. The tension around her mouth and vocal
chords gave her away. Even to an innocent child
like Júbilo, it was obvious that his grandmother
was making an effort to swallow her words. But,
strange as it sounds, Júbilo heard the silent words
clearly, even though they had never been spoken.
And he understood that this “voice” that remained
silent was the one that truly represented his
grandmother’s desires. So Júbilo, without thinking
much about it, frequently [translated] those
imperceptible murmurings instead of the words
she spoke out loud. Of course, it never crossed his
mind to do this to be naughty, just the opposite;
his ultimate objective was always to reconcile
these two women, both of them so beloved and
important to him, to say out loud the magic word
that neither of them ever dared to speak, the word
that had to do with repressed desires. (pp. 8–9)
Translation Review
The key to Júbilo’s skill is “a sensitive receptor …
buried deep within his heart,” with which “he could
decipher any number of messages originating from any
other heart, regardless of whether the other person
wanted to make them known or not” (p. 28). True
communication can help “improve people’s emotional
states and their personal relationships” (p. 167). “The
interesting thing about the communication process,”
Júbilo’s daughter, Lluvia, realizes, is that:
in one way or another it allows us to express the
words that come from within us. Whether they are
written, spoken, or sung, they fly through space
charged with the echoes of all the other voices that
have preceded them. They travel through the air
bathed in the saliva from other mouths, humming
with the vibrations from other ears, and throbbing
with the beat of thousands of hearts. They cling to
the very core of our memories and lie there in
silence until a new desire reawakens them and
recharges them with loving energy. That [the
daughter says] is one of the qualities of words that
moves me most, their capacity for transmitting
love. Like water, words are a wonderful conductor
of energy. And the most powerful, transforming
energy is the energy of love. (p. 229)
Communication is not just a human skill, as the
Mayans recognized:
Júbilo firmly believed that everything in the
universe had a soul, that every single thing had
feelings, thoughts — from the tiniest flower to the
furthest galaxy. Everything had a particular way of
vibrating and of saying, “Here I am.” So it could
be said that the stars talked, that they were capable
of sending signals to indicate their most intimate
thoughts. The ancient Mayans believed that the
stars were linked to the mind of the sun, and that if
one managed to establish contact with the king of
stars, it was possible to perceive not only the sun’s
thoughts, but also its desires. And Júbilo, as a
worthy descendant of that wonderful race, liked to
open his consciousness and widen his sensibilities
to embrace the sun, the stars and a galaxy or two,
trying to find a signal, a message, a meaning, a
pulsing vibration that would speak to him. (p. 34)
To be indigenous Mexican is to belong to “the real
Mexico, provincial Mexico, the Mexico of the poor,
the Indians, the forgotten. A Mexico that was
gradually being covered by railway lines and telegraph
poles, spreading out over its surface like a spider web”
43
(p. 89). The original Mexican spirituality, Kuxán
Suum (“The Way to the Sky That Leads to the
Universe’s Umbilical Cord”), saw the galaxy as being
“integrated in a resonating matrix, within which the
transmission of information occurred spontaneously.”
Within this pulsating universe, “any individual who
had the necessary sensitivity to perceive the resonance
of specific objects could connect with them and enjoy
immediate access to all cosmic knowledge” (p. 40–
41). In opposition to true communication in the
modern world are “coded messages,” an
“indecipherable tangle” (p. 183), which are the
consequence of “the forces of production, industry,
and technology” (p. 167). The city is “filled with an
overpowering noise, like that of a rumbling truck. The
sound often bothered him, it filled his ears with
whistling sounds that sometimes even gave him a
headache. And what good had it done him?” (pp. 192–
193).
Esquivel’s Malinche: Myths and Battles
Doña Itzel reinforces Júbilo’s origins by “always
telling him Mayan stories and legends as well as
accounts of the battles the Mayan Indians had been
forced to fight to preserve their history” (p. 11).
Malinche’s story is, of course, the story of Cortés’
conquest of Mexico. As Julio Oretega writes: “the
[Spanish American] subject is constituted between the
European gaze and the testimony of Americans
themselves. From the very first accounts of the New
World, the native is perceived through European
interpretive repertoires and schemes of classification:
it could not have been otherwise.”12 Esquivel tells
Malinche’s story from within a world of battles and
legends, but it is a world already condemned for “the
way in which [the Mexicas] governed, … a system
that determined what a woman was worth, what the
gods wanted, and the amount of blood that they
demanded for their survival. [Malinche] was
convinced that a political, social, and spiritual change
was urgently needed. She knew that the most glorious
era of her ancestors had occurred during the time of
Lord Quetzalcóatl, and because of this she longed for
his return” (20).13
Esquivel calls her Malinche “Malinalli”
throughout the book (“since she was born under the
third sign of the sixth house,” 5 and 43) and reserves
the title “Malinche” for Cortés (“since he always had
her by his side. Malinche in some way meant the
master of Malinalli,” 93). Her birth takes place under
the visible sign of language. The book begins:
44
First came the wind. Later, like a flash of
lightning, like a silver tongue in the heavens over
the Valley of Anáhuac, a storm appeared that
would wash the blood from the stones …
There are further signs in the heavens, and the
priests and wise men of Anáhuac, “accustomed to
listening to and interpreting the voice of the water,”
insist that “not only was Tláloc, God of Rain, trying to
tell them something but that by means of water he had
allowed a new light to fall over them, a new vision that
would bring a different meaning to their lives, and
although they did not yet clearly know what it was,
they could feel it in their hearts” (3).
In this first chapter, two prophecies are made over
the child born in the region of Painala at the time of
the thunderstorm. One is a long, ornate, non-traditional
chant that comes suddenly from the mouth of her
father:
“My daughter, you have come from the water, and
the water speaks. You come from time and will
live in time and your word will live in the wind
and be planted in the wind and be planted in the
earth. Your word will be the fire that transforms
all things. Your word will live in the water and be
a mirror to the tongue. Your word will have eyes
and will see, will have ears and will hear, will
have the tact to lie with the truth and to tell truths
that will seem like lies. And with your word you
will be able to return to the stillness, to the
beginning where nothing is, where all of creation
returns to silence, but your word will awaken it
and you will name the gods and give voice to the
trees and you will give nature a tongue to speak
for you of the invisible that will again be visible
through your word. And your tongue will be the
word of light, a paintbrush of flowers, the word of
colors that your voice will use to paint new
codices.” (9).
The other comes from her paternal grandmother and is
unspoken:
The grandmother sensed that the girl was destined
to lose everything so that she might gain
everything. Because only those who empty
themselves can be filled anew. In emptiness is the
light of understanding, and the body of that child
was like a beautiful vessel that could be filled to
overflowing with the most precious jewels — the
flower and song of her ancestors — but not so that
they would remain there forever but rather so that
Translation Review
they could be remade, transformed and emptied
anew. (5)
The grandmother’s words are ambiguous. They
may refer to the transformative work of the translator.
They may also refer to Don Martín.
Malinalli “The Tongue”
Malinalli learns speech from her grandmother. At the
age of two, her speech is “precise, abundant, and well
structured.” At four she is able to “express doubts and
complex concepts without difficulty” (31). As she
grows, she is able to “imitate any sound that she
heard,” including those of birds and dogs (45).
Language gives her a sense of belonging to other
social groups, of not being excluded (46). After a
while, she stops serving Puertocarrero, “her lord,” and
becomes “The Tongue,” described as “the one who
translated what [Cortés] said into the Náhuatl
language, and what Montezuma’s messengers said,
from Náhuatl to Spanish” (61–62). This is “an
enormous responsibility,” not because of its political
demands, but because of a primeval indigenous
spirituality:
She felt as if each time she uttered a word she
journeyed back hundreds of generations. When
she said the name of Ometéotl, the creator of the
dualities Omecíhuatl and Ometecuhtli, the
masculine and feminine principles, she put herself
at the beginning of creation. That was the power of
the spoken word. (62)
Esquival continues for some pages on the “great
spiritual duty” of the being The Tongue, which put “all
of her being at the service of the gods so that her
tongue was part of the resounding system of the
divinity, so that her voice would spread through the
cosmos the very meaning of existence” (64–65).
Gradually, however, her linguistic system is corrupted
by feelings, by fear, “fear of being unfaithful to the
gods, of failure, fear of not being able to bear
responsibility” (65). And there is a greater fear, the
“fear of power, of taking power” (65).
This is the Spanish concept of language.
Cortés has little imagination about language (48). For
him, language is a tool in his political struggle: “He
fought only when he failed in the field of diplomacy”
(36). In the Old World, he had won high positions
“thanks to his speeches, which were embellished with
Latin phrases and showed off his knowledge” (36). In
the New World, he does not know these “other
Translation Review
languages,” he cannot “seal alliances, negotiate, [or]
win over” (37).
By being in charge for the first time in her life,
Malinalli discovers that “whoever controls
information, whoever controls meaning, acquires
power. And she discovered that when she translated,
she controlled the situation, and not only that but that
words could be weapons. The finest of weapons.” (65).
When it is much too late, when she realizes that she
has indeed been corrupted by “the greatest of all lusts:
the longing for power” (153), Malinalli accuses Cortés
of turning her into “a chattering object that you use
without feeling for the sake of your conquests” (154).
He is stung by the truth of her words but unable to
accept them, and immediately denigrates her as
someone whose mission is simply to be “my
‘Tongue’” (155).
At Tenochlitlán, Malinalli is astounded by her
audacity in looking directly into the eyes of
Montezuma, “an act of great transgression,” worthy of
death (120). Montezuma accepts her act and allows her
to translate his welcome speech. There is a further,
much greater, surprise: “What she never expected was
that Montezuma would dispossess his throne in favor
of Cortés, and that she, being the translator, would be
the one who practically handed Cortés his kingdom”
(120). Esquivel spiritualizes and Hispanicizes this act
too:
To see an emperor, a man who had been educated
for power, give us his kingdom, moved her deeply.
To be a witness to Montezuma’s intense faith, to
the spiritual grandeur that allowed him to detach
himself from his tremendous power before a spirit:
that of Quetzalcóatl. To feel Montezuma’s pride at
being the emperor who was chosen to witness
Quetzalcóatl’s return caused her to shudder. Only
a man who had been spiritually transformed could
undertake such an exchange. (120)
After the disastrous retreat from Tenochlitlán,
caused by the greed and cruelty of Cortés and his men
who have failed to justify their high spiritual status,
after the battles along the way, after Cortés’ drunken
marriage of Malinalli to Jaramillo and her new
husband’s sexual violence on their wedding night,
Marina is forced to reassess her situation. She is
“humiliated, sad, alone,” filled with frustration and
grief (158). Again it is the tongue, and her work as
interpreter, that is at fault:
She thought of the moments in which Cortés’
mouth and her mouth had been one mouth only,
45
and the thought of Cortés and his tongue one
single idea, one new universe. The tongue had
joined them and the tongue had separated them.
The tongue was the cause of everything. Malinalli
had destroyed Montezuma’s empire with her
tongue. Thanks to her words, Cortés had made
allies that ensured his conquest. (158)
In her guilt, Malinalli finds a thorn and pierces her
tongue,14 rendering her unable to “create marvels in
the sky or worlds in the ears,” to ever again be “the
instrument of any conquest, [or] order thought, [or]
explain history.” It is “bifurcated and broken,” and
Cortés’ expedition to Hibueras is a failure (159).
The Mouth and the Tongue, Man and Woman
Esquivel’s use of the words “mouth” and “tongue” is
not innocent. She clearly explains:
The mouth, as feminine principle, as empty space,
as cavity, was the best place for words to be
engendered. And the tongue, as masculine
principle, sharp, pointed, phallic, was the one to
introduce the created word, that universe of
information, into other minds in order to be
fertilized. (66)
Marina’s power as “The Tongue” is, therefore, a
masculine power. It is a power that forces men to
“[stare] into her eyes, [and] wait attentively to hear
what her mouth uttered” (66). Having placed herself at
the service of the Spanish, Malinalli has, in fact,
corrupted language. She can decide what is said and
unsaid, “change the meaning of things,” “impose her
own vision on events,” and in so doing “enter into
direct competition with the gods.” Already in Cholula,
she has begun to question whether the Spaniards have
been sent by Quetzalcóatl, but because her fate is
inextricably bound up with theirs, she cannot say this.
The consequence is that:
Either she remained faithful to the gods and to the
meaning that they had given to the world, or she
followed her instincts, her most earthly and
primary instincts, and made sure that each word
and each action acquired the meaning that most
suited her. The second choice was clearly a
rebellion against the gods, and their eventual
reaction filled her with fear and guilt, but she saw
no other alternative. (67).
Malinalli’s ultimate freedom, if freedom it be, lies
in not being the masculine tongue, but in becoming a
46
woman again. We see this most starkly at the end of
Chapter Four, where Cortés rapes the young woman as
she is washing clothes in the river. Esquivel writes:
For a few minutes — which seemed like an
eternity — Cortés penetrated her time and time
again, like a savage, as if all the power of nature
were contained in his being. Meanwhile, it was
raining so hard that his passion and his orgasm
were drowned in the rains, as were Malinalli’s
tears. She had for the time being ceased to be “The
Tongue” to become simply a woman, silent,
voiceless, a mere woman who did not bear on her
shoulders the enormous responsibility of building
the conquest with her words. A woman who,
contrary to what would be expected, felt relief in
reclaiming her condition of submission, for it was
a much more familiar sensation to be an object at
the service of men than to be a creator of destiny.
(79)
The immediate sequel to her later destroying her
tongue with a thorn is her giving birth to a daughter for
Jaramillo (159) and her reconciliation with the young
Don Martín (165–166). The first of these acts of
motherhood is performed in “silence” (159), the
second through the whispered poetry of Náhuatl
spirituality (165). Having received her son, her
husband, and the gift of land, she is at last able to say
to him: “I am no longer your tongue, Lord Malinche”
(176). And having done so, she slowly undertakes the
mystical journey into death, entering “into the center
of the Cross of Quetzalcóatl, the center of all
crossroads, where the Cihuateteo, the women who had
died during childbirth, who made up the entourage of
the women who follow Tlazolteotl, Coatlicue, and
Tontantzin, the different manifestations of the same
feminine deity, appeared; and there, in the center of
the Universe, Malinalli became liquid.” (185).
Esquivel has often been criticized for writing
“telenovelas,” sentimental and popular works of
literature, which “lack originality,” pander to
“stereotyped notions of Mexico,” and serve the
demands of the international market.15 Esquivel does
provide reflections on the use of language in human
society. I have tried to suggest the complexity of her
ideas about language and translation as spiritual and
political acts. Love is, however, possibly more
important than language in this book and, to me, there
is an abusive edge to that love which I find difficult to
accept. Nevertheless, in an interview with Adriana
Lopez, Esquivel said: “I would love it if my Malinche
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became a role model for those women today who must
‘conquer.’ Women living in two worlds who must
leave their land and belongings to cross the borders of
places where they are not well received, where human
rights are not respected. Women who wish to
overcome their condition of ‘slaves’ in an economy
that annuls them, that ignores them….”16
1
Notes
Laura Esquivel: Malinche. Atria Books. New York 2006.
Trans. by Ernesto Mestre-Reed; the credits page notes that
the copyright to the English translation belongs to Laura
Esquivel.
2
London. Black Swan. 1992.
3
English translation by J.M. Cohen. The Conquest of New
Spain. Penguin. London. 1963. Further references will be
included within my text.
4
Anna Lanyon. Malinche’s Conquest. Allen & Unwin.
Sydney. 1999. pp. 220–221.
5
Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez. La Chicana,
The Mexican-American Woman. University of Chicago
Press. Chicago. 1979. p. 24.
6
Octavio Paz. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Grove Press. New
York. 1985. p. 79.
7
Paz. The Labyrinth of Solitude. p. 86.
8
Mirandé and Enríquez. La Chicana. pp. 24–31.
9
Mirandé and Enríquez. La Chicana. p. 30.
10
T. Todorov. The Conquest of America. Harper & Row.
New York. 1982. p. 101.
11
Trans. by Stephen Lytle. London. Doubleday. 2001. These
ideas are also pervasive in La ley del amor. 1995. Trans. by
Margaret Sayers Peden as The Law of Love. Crown. New
York.
12
Julio Ortega. Transatlantic Translations: Dialogue in
Latin American Literature. Reaktion Books. London. 2006.
p. 185.
13
Bernal Díaz describes Montezuma’s early conviction that
“we were those coming to their country his ancestors had
foretold, and must therefore be of his own race” (115, also
181, 223, 264). Lanyon pours scorn on such a theory:
Malinche’s Conquest, pp. 120–121, claiming that “it appeals
to Western presumptions about the tragic, passive ‘fatalism
of ‘the Indian’ and the natural supremacy of rational
European man.”
14
Lanyon indicates the word “malinalli” also refers to “a
blade of grass that could be twisted on the thigh to form a
point sharp enough to pierce the tongue in an act of
penance. It was the kind of auto-sacrifice you still see
depicted on friezes in the Mayan temples of the south.”
Malinche’s Conquest. p. 41–42.
15
For some of these criticisms, see Taylor, Claire. Bodies
and Texts. Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities
Research Association. Leeds. 2003. pp. 128–129.
Translation Review
16
“Laura Esquivel — Reconquering Malinche — 2/15/2006
— Criticas — CA6305733.” On line at
http://www.criticasmagazine.com/article/CA6305733.html.
Bibliography
Aveling, Harry. “Marina, La Malinche.” PASSPORT, The
Arkansas Review of Literary Translation. In press.
http://uark.edu/~passport.
Balderston, Daniel and Marcy E. Schwartz (eds). VoiceOvers: Translation and Latin American Literature. Albany.
State University of New York Press. 2002.
Díaz de Castillo, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain.
Cohen, J.M. (trans). London. Penguin. 1963.
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. Trans. by Carol
Christensen and Thomas Christensen. (Original Spanish
text, Como aqua para chocolate, 1989.) London. Black
Swan. 1989.
Esquivel, Laura. The Law of Love. Trans. by Margaret
Sayers Peden. (Original Spanish text, La ley del amor,
1995.) New York. Crown. 1996.
Esquivel, Laura. Swift as Desire. New York. Doubleday
Atria Books. Trans. by Stephen Lytle. (Original Spanish
text, Tan veloz como el deseo, 2001.) 2001.
Esquivel, Laura. Malinche, A Novel. New York. Atria
Books. Trans. by Ernesto Mestre-Reed. 2006.
Esquivel, Laura. Malinche, Novela. New York. Atria Books.
2006b.
Kartunnen, Frances. “Rethinking Malinche,” in Susan
Schroeder et al. (eds): Indian Women of Early New Mexico.
Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 1997. 291–312.
López de Gómara, Francisco. Cortés. Trans. and ed. by
Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley. University of California
Press. 1965.
Messinger Cypess, Sandra. La Malinche in Mexican
Literature. Austin. University of Texas Press. 1991.
Mirandé, Alfredo and Evangelina Enríquez. La Chicana,
The Mexican-American Woman. Chicago. University of
Chicago Press. 1979.
Niebylski, Dianna. Humoring Resistance: Laughter and The
Excessive Body in Latin American Women’s Fiction.
Albany. State University of New York Press. 2004.
Ortega, Julio. Transatlantic Translations: Dialogue in Latin
American Literature. Trans. Philip Darbyshire. London.
Reaktion Books. 2006.
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York. Grove
Press. 1985.
Robinson, Douglas. Translation and Empire: Postcolonial
Theories Explained. Manchester. St Jerome. 1997.
Taylor, Claire. Bodies and Texts: Configurations of Identity
in the Works of Griselda Gambaro, Albalucía Ángel, and
Laura Esquivel. Leeds. Maney Publishing for the Modern
Humanities Research Association. 2003.
47
48
Translation Review
ENDANGERED PLACES: TRANSLATING TOPONYMS IN MARÍA
MERCEDES CARRANZA’S “EL CANTO DE LAS MOSCAS” (THE
SONG OF THE FLIES)
By Michael Sisson
¡Sois nombres de cuerpo entero,
libres, propios, los de nómina,
el tuétano intraductible
de nuestra lengua española!
— Miguel de Unamuno, Cancionero
(You are names of full body,
free, unto yourselves, as in a roll-call,
untranslatable marrow
of our Spanish language.)1
In these lines in praise of place-names, or
toponyms, the Spanish poet and philosopher reminds
us that they can be sensuous and powerfully evocative,
yet famously untranslatable. How then is the translator
to approach a literary work in which toponyms play a
prominent if not crucial role in the signifying process
of the text, as is the case with María Mercedes
Carranza’s El canto de las moscas (The Song of the
Flies)? In order to put this question in its proper
context, I will begin by describing the process of
translating the poetic text as I worked through it and
explaining some of the decisions I made along the
way.
El canto de las moscas runs to something over 120
lines, excluding titles, subtitles, and dedications, which
I will refer to collectively, using Gérard Genette’s
useful term, as the “paratext.” Elements of the paratext
carry out important functions here, not the least of
which is to divide the poem into twenty-four short
sections, designated as numbered “Cantos.” Critics
have tended to consider each Canto as a separate poem
(e.g., Kearns 1, Garavito 27), but from the translator’s
point of view, this becomes problematic: in the title
the word “canto” is singular — how can we have a
canto consisting of twenty-four Cantos? This was no
niggling matter, as it impinged on my choice of
English equivalents for words that appeared in
prominent places: in the main title, in each section
title, and in the poetic text itself.
I concluded that I was looking at two different
words with the same phonetic shape, homonyms that
Translation Review
differed orthographically in that the one was
capitalized and the other not (cf. “God” vs. “god”).
The canto of the main title comes from the last line of
Canto 1: “se oirá nada más / el canto de las moscas”
(the only sound left will be / the song of the flies)
(Carranza 2004, 185).2 It ought therefore to be
translated as “song,” or perhaps “singing,” the latter
perhaps preferable from a semantic point of view, i.e.,
more literal, because in the present dipterous context it
would not be a song in the sense of words set to music,
or for that matter a lyric poem, but rather the act of
producing a sound like singing, analogous to birdsong,
though sinister rather than pleasant to the ear. In the
end, I opted for “song” because I thought it would
make a better title for the poem as a whole and wished
to preserve the identity of the latter with the line in the
texts. The Canto, on the other hand, is a literary term
with origins in the Italian Renaissance, a “subdivision
of an epic or narrative poem, that divides and orders
the content, like the chapter in a novel” (Preminger
101). It was used perhaps most famously by Dante and
may in fact allude to his best-known work, L’Inferno,
given the poem’s content. Luckily, “Canto” has been
used in this way by major poets of the English canon,
such as Pope and Byron, so in my version, the word
needed no translation. Clearly there is some kind of
word-play going on here; I would have liked to have
given a sense of that in my translation, but I could not
see a way to do that. Thus, although the word-play was
lost, the literary term “Canto” serves as a bridge
between the two texts and cultures, a universalizing
49
aspect of the paratext that is complicit with rather than
resistant to the process of translation.
This use of the Canto as a subdivision of the text
also supports my view of El canto de las moscas as an
extended narrative poem, rather than a series of short
lyrics. The full title of the poem includes a subtitle:
Canto de las moscas (Versión de los acontecimientos)
— this is a “version,” i.e., a recounting, a retelling, of
a series of events (acontecimientos). This view is
somewhat undercut by the fact that it is not a
chronologically ordered narrative but rather a loose
collection of stories that are not so much told as
evoked or alluded to in a minimalist language that has
been compared with that of haiku and related forms of
Japanese poetry (Kearns 5). Haiku in English became
the model for the language I would use in translating
Carranza’s text.
Haiku, with its distinctive visual appearance, its
three short lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, is one of the
most recognizable poetic forms in the world today.
Since the early 20th century, many poets outside Japan
have cultivated the form. In Spanish, the Mexican José
Juan Tablada published a collection of his original
haiku as early as 1919, and other practitioners of the
form have included Antonio Machado, Octavio Paz,
and Jorge Luis Borges (Higginson 53–55). Hence, the
formal resemblance would resonate with the reader of
the original Spanish text and create expectations with
regard to language and content similar to what might
be experienced by the English-speaking reader. Thus,
the cross-cultural nature of haiku allowed me to
exploit this feature of the original text in my
translation.
In terms of form, the individual Cantos resemble
haiku first of all in their brevity: the shortest, Canto
12, has the standard three lines; Canto 1 has six lines
set off by indentations into two groups of three, a kind
of double haiku. Others have the five lines of the
haiku-related tanka, whereas the longest, Canto 11,
has only seven. The number of syllables per line often
echoes haiku practice: for instance, in Canto 11 there
are alternating lines of five syllables, and in Canto 12,
alternating lines of seven, both typical of Japanese
poetry. Like most haiku written in the West,
Carranza’s poems do not follow the strict 5-7-5
pattern, yet they have the look and feel of haiku and
related Japanese forms.
The effect of this resemblance, a kind of generic
intertextuality that alludes not to another text but to an
entire genre, is to create expectations in the reader
based on the conventions of that genre. In other words,
50
if a poem looks like a haiku, the reader might expect
language that is condensed, suggestive, and allusive,
an imagistic text in which nouns predominate over
verbs and the lyric subject is suppressed in favor of an
objectivist presentation of images — expectations that
Carranza often satisfies.
Haiku often has a binary structure in which two
images or an image and an observation are juxtaposed
without grammatical connectives or comment by the
subject. Compare Canto 1 with this tanka by the
fourteenth-century poet Hanazono:
Canto 1
Necoclí
Perhaps
at any moment
of evening night or morning
in Necoclí
the only sound left will be
the song of the flies. (Carranza 2004, 185)
No trace remains
Among all the crumbling hovels
Of their bamboo fences,
And only a dog breaks the silence,
Barking from the hindmost shack. (Preminger 426)
Both poems present a description of a place, followed
by an acoustic image. The connection between the two
parts must be inferred by the reader, and in both texts,
what is suggested is a narrative of desertion,
abandonment, or mass death. Given the notable
similarities in form, language, and imagery, I decided
to make haiku the guiding aesthetic / linguistic model
for my English version of the poem: whenever I faced
a choice of synonyms, the omission or inclusion of an
article, etc., I asked myself, which option would make
it sound more haiku-like?
Haiku is often thought of as nature poetry,
characterized by images drawn from acute and detailed
observation, and Carranza does not disappoint in that
regard. This makes it all the more effective when she
flouts the conventions, as in Canto 12, “Pájaro”
(literally “Bird”). The title and visual appearance
would seem to promise a haiku-like poem, but the text
does not deliver on that promise:
Si la mar es el morir
en Pájaro
la vida sabe a mar. (Carranza 2004, 196)
Translation Review
(If the sea is death
in Pájaro
life smells of the sea.)
No songbirds here — Pájaro is a place permeated by
death. The first line is an allusion that any educated
reader of Spanish would recognize as a slightly
transformed quotation from one of the masterpieces of
Spanish literature, one of the bleakest poems on death
ever written, the 15th-century poet Jorge Manrique’s
powerful “Coplas por la muerte de su padre” (Coplas
on the Death of His Father). In so brief a text as this
Canto, reference to such an intertext can vastly expand
the possibilities of signification, and indeed, for this
very reason, allusion is a common device in haiku.
Here, the allusion is part of a proposition upon which
the poet builds an argument, a kind of syllogism in
which two terms are explicitly stated and the third, that
life in Pájaro equals death, is left for the reader to
infer. The argument acquires authority through the
authorship and antiquity of the intertext; if the latter
goes unrecognized, the depth of the allusion is lost on
the reader. How to convey this in the translation, while
preserving the condensed, suggestive, and allusive
language of the original?
I searched my memory and reference books for a
similarly well-known, semantically equivalent
metaphor in the English literary canon and came up
empty-handed. It occurred to me to attribute the
quotation in a footnote, but I decided against it
because of the scholarly feeling it would bring to the
experience of reading this text, which is so
contemporary and, as we shall see, engaged with the
present historical moment. Instead, I opted to add an
extra line in the translation (“as the poet said”),
knowing that to add anything at all to such a small
poem would be a betrayal of the elegant brevity of the
original text. I think this solution restores some degree
of authority to the proposition of line 1 while doing
minimal damage to the text, though I am sure not all
would agree.
Adding a line is a strategy to which I reluctantly
resorted in two other instances, in Canto 6 and Canto
11:
Canto 11
Vista Hermosa
El alto tallo
espectral
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quemada, yerta
solitaria
flor del páramo.
Así
Vista Hermosa. (Carranza 1998)
The first thing to observe is that the title of this Canto,
like all the other twenty-three that make up the poem,
has two parts: the Canto number, and below that, a
place-name. Second, the toponym from the title (Vista
Hermosa) is reiterated in the last line. This is not
unusual; in three-quarters of the Cantos, the toponym
in the title appears somewhere in the poetic text. As in
Canto 1, the text consists of two parts: a longer
descriptive section drawn from nature, and a brief coda
of two short lines that constitute an ironic comment:
Canto 11
Vista Hermosa
The tall, spectral
stalk,
burnt, inert,
solitary flower
of the high barren plain.
Such
is Vista Hermosa,
“Beautiful View.”
What makes this particular reiteration of the toponym
(and the same in Canto 6, “Barrancabermeja”) is that it
is translatable (i.e., composed of ordinary Spanish
words, not an indigenous name such as Necoclí, whose
meaning has been lost in time) and that its meaning is
indispensable to the process of signification of the text.
That is, if the last line is left in Spanish as simply
“Vista Hermosa,” the irony that arises from the
contrast between the title’s initial promise of beauty
and the ugliness of the scene described is lost. But if it
is translated into English, its identity with the title, and
hence its referentiality to the world outside the text, is
lost. In order to retain both the irony and the
referentiality, I opted to add an extra line to the poem,
leaving intact the original Spanish toponym but
following it with an echo in English.3
So far in the translation process, I have identified
three constituent elements of the poem: (1) a paratext
that implies a narrative structure (in the main subtitle
and the division into Cantos); (2) an imagistic and
ironic poetic text that describes a scarred and
depopulated landscape in the aftermath of violence and
51
death; and (3) a set of place-names, “a litany, a
catalogue of dead and dying places” (Binns 66) that
occur in both the text and the paratext. Perhaps this is
enough; I would like my translation to stand on its
own, without footnotes or other ancillary material, but
my sense is that the English-speaking reader needs to
know what her or his Colombian counterpart would
know about the significance of these toponyms. Why
do they figure so prominently in the poem? And what
of the promised narrativity — what is the story behind
this post-apocalyptic scenery? The answers lie outside
the poem, in the historical experience of contemporary
Colombia: “These twenty-four poems [sic] tell the
whole story of the desolation of a country that has lost
its way… the deaths and massacres, which are
enumerated one by one in titles that refer to the places
where they occurred…” (Garavito 27, emphasis
added). The full story is provided by J. Eduardo
Jaramillo in his Notes on The Song of the Flies, written
as a possible preface to my translation:
Colombia, the place where María Mercedes
Carranza was born (Bogotá, 1945) and lived her
whole life, has not known a day of peace in over
half a century. The assassination of the popular
leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 sparked the
period of what has been called “La Violencia,” a
civil war between the two major political parties in
which 200,000 people perished. Since then there
has been a continuous succession of other
violencias, in which the government, guerrilla
groups, and the paramilitaries, private armies of
the drug trade, have all had a part.
As a young woman Carranza became one of
the most important and outspoken poets of her
generation. In her poetry she adopted a decidedly
prosaic, anti-poetic, and dissonant stance. Her
work was collected in books with titles such as
Vainas y otros poemas (Crap and Other Poems,
1973), Tengo miedo (I’m Afraid, 1983), Hola,
Soledad (Hello, Solitude, 1987) and Maneras del
desamor (Ways of Falling Out of Love, 1993).
Apart from writing poetry, Carranza was also a
journalist and a cultural and political activist.
Beginning in 1986, when she became director of
the Casa de Poesía Silva (the Silva House of
Poetry), she initiated numerous campaigns against
la violencia. Hundreds of thousands of
Colombians participated in events such as “Poetry
Speaks Out” and “May War Rest in Peace,” filling
52
plazas and stadiums to denounce the continuous
war with their poems.
The Song of the Flies (A Version of Events) is
an expression of despair in the spirit of protest. All
the “events” referred to occurred in Colombia at
particular times and places. On 12 July 1997
paramilitary forces took the town of Mapiripán
and murdered fifty peasants. On 17 November of
the same year they murdered fifteen in Dabeiba.
Almost every day the newspapers report a killing
in one place or another: Necocli, Tamborales,
Encimadas, El Doncello, Uribia, Miraflores. This
is the origin of The Song of the Flies.
The book consists of twenty-four short poems
[sic], snapshots in which the poet contrasts the
musicality of rural Colombian place-names with
the brutal massacres that have occurred there. In
the first poem, the mellifluous syllables of
“Necocli” give way to the buzzing of flies over the
massacred bodies. The last poem, “Soacha,” was
the site of the assassination on 18 August 1989 of
the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, a
friend and colleague of the poet, by a hit man in
the pay of drug lords. It is to him, to Luis Carlos,
that Carranza dedicated these poems.
Only one of the Cantos finds relief from this
despair. “Segovia” is devoted to the poet Julio
Daniel Chaparro, murdered in the town of that
name on 27 April 1991. Carranza compares
Chaparro’s poems with the smile of the Cheshire
Cat, as a way of saying that his words endure, in
the air, above the body of the murdered poet.
Events have since turned The Song of the Flies
into a smile of the Cheshire Cat as well: María
Mercedes Carranza committed suicide on 11 July
2003.
Thus, the toponyms are allusions to events, the
“events” referred to in the subtitle, episodes in a
narrative, a grand social intertext that is known in
Colombia as la violencia. They serve as the crucial
nexus between the text and the world, yet they are
highly resistant to translation and opaque to the
uninformed reader. Jaramillo writes of the
“musicality” of the names of these villages, which
stands in stark contrast to the horrors that occurred
there. Such musicality is unfortunately lost on most
English-speaking readers, who would be pressed to
appreciate their aesthetic qualities as a native speaker
might. Except in a few cases, such as “Vista
Hermosa,” we are forced to accept this tension
Translation Review
between text and paratext as an inevitable “lost in
translation.”
It is interesting to note that Carranza’s earlier
poetry was largely personal and confessional, and
toponyms were few and incidental. El canto de las
moscas grew out of her engagement with the historical
process as a peace activist, and toponyms came to
embody the word–world relationship in this her last
book. A similar trajectory is observable in the work of
Pablo Neruda, whose early books Residencia en la
tierra I and II, which projected an isolated, alienated
subject, were mostly devoid of toponyms; it was only
with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the
poet’s solidarity with the anti-fascist cause that
toponyms took a prominent place in his writing, as in
the lists of devastated Spanish towns and villages in
“España en el corazón.” In both Carranza’s and
Neruda’s work, as Niall Binns has suggested, such use
of toponyms serves to “fight against forgetting; for the
poet, it is the convocation of names that have been
abandoned or are in danger of abandonment” (Binns
59–62).
María Mercedes herself once described El canto
de las moscas as simply “a book about death”
(Martínez 40), and on a certain level, if the historicogeographical allusions are uncoupled from the
narrative of la violencia, it can be just that. From the
point of view of the translator, the universality of
death as a theme and certain cross-cultural aspects of
poetic language, such as the designation of sections as
Cantos and their haiku-like quality, mitigate the
localizing and particularizing force of the toponyms.
But a full reading of the poem requires an
understanding of the relations between Canto and
event, title and text, writing and reality. When it
becomes possible for the toponyms to exercise their
full allusive power, it then becomes possible for the
poem to realize its mission to rescue endangered
places and their stories from oblivion, to preserve them
in the collective historical memory of a marginalized
population, or, for readers of an English translation, to
bring an awareness of the events and their effects on
the land, the people, and one writer in particular, to
those outside of the local context in which those events
have taken place.
Translation Review
1
Notes
This and all other translations in this article are mine,
unless otherwise noted.
2
The numbering of the Cantos used here follows that of the
second edition of the poem, published by Arango Editores
in 1998 and again in a collection of Carranza’s complete
poetry in 2004. Page number references in this article
correspond to the 2004 edition. An earlier version,
containing only eighteen Cantos, was published in the
literary review Golpe de Dados in 1997.
3
Ideally, the English version should sound believably like
the name of a town in the United States or the United
Kingdom yet still carry the two semantic elements of beauty
and sight. This has not proved to be as simple as one might
think. We have toponyms that end in “-view,” and I
considered Fairview as a more natural-sounding alternative
but ultimately felt that the modern usage of “fair” no longer
corresponded with physical beauty, as it once did; so in the
end, the literal “Beautiful View,” which partially
compensates for its unnaturalness with its vowel harmony,
seemed the better choice. In the case of Canto 6, I was more
fortunate, in that Barrancabermeja translates readily into the
more believable “Crimson Canyon.”
Works Cited
Binns, Niall. “Criaturas del desarraigo, o en busca de los
lugares perdidos: alienación y ecología en la poesía
hispanoamericana.” América Latina Hoy (April 2002), 43–77.
Carranza, María Mercedes. “El canto de las moscas
(Versión de los acontecimientos).” Golpe de Dados 35: 50
(November–December 1997).
—. El canto de las moscas, Versión de los acontecimientos.
Bogotá: Arango Editores, 1998.
—. Poesía completa y cinco poemas inéditos. Bogotá: Casa
de Poesía Silva, 2004.
Garavito, Fernando. “María Mercedes Carranza. Toda la
tierra sobre ella pesa.” In Carranza, María Mercedes. Poesía
completa y cinco poemas inéditos. Bogotá: Casa de Poesía
Silva, 2004.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. La Litérature au second
degré. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982.
Higginson, William J. Haiku Handbook. New York:
Kodansha, 1985.
Jaramillo Zuluaga, José Eduardo. Una nota sobre El canto
de las moscas (Versión de los acontecimientos). Trans.
Michael Sisson. Unpublished ms., 2004.
Kearns, Sofia. “Political and Toxic Discourse in María
Mercedes Carranza’s Latest Poems.” CiberLetras 5 (August
2001)
http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v05/kearns.html.
Martínez León, Sandra. “La poesía debe ir desnuda.” In
María Mercedes Carranza, vida y obra. Bogotá: Grupo
Editorial Norma, 2003.
Preminger, Alex, et al. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974.
Unamuno, Miguel de. Cancionero. Madrid: Akal, 1984.
53
THE SONG OF THE FLIES
(A VERSION OF EVENTS)
By María Mercedes Carranza (Colombia, 1945–2003).
Translated by Michael Sisson.
For Luis Carlos: always
Canto 6: Barrancabermeja
Between the earth and sky
lies pale
Barrancabermeja.
Crimson Canyon.
You might say
colorless blood.
Canto 1: Necoclí
Perhaps
at any moment
of evening night or morning
in Necoclí
the only sound left will be
the song of the flies.
Canto 7: Tierralta
Canto 2: Mapiripán
Canto 8: El Doncello
Still the wind,
and time.
Mapiripán is now
a death-date.
The assassin dances
the Dance of Death.
At each step
someone falls
into his own shadow.
Canto 3: Tamborales
for Mario Rivera
Beneath
banana leaves
rustle of silk
someone dreams
of having lived.
This is the mouth that was,
these the kisses.
Now only earth: earth
fills the unmoving mouth.
Canto 9: Segovia
The poems
of Julio Daniel
are the laugh
of the Cheshire Cat
in the air over Segovia.
Canto 4: Dabeiba
Canto 10: Amaime
The river flows sweetly here
in Dabeiba
and carries red roses
scattered on the water.
Those are not roses,
it is blood
that follows a different course.
In Amaime
dreams are heaped
with soil
like so much garbage.
Canto 11
Vista Hermosa
Canto 5: Encimadas
Under the ground in Encimadas
terror flashes still
in eyes that open like flowers
in the soil of Encimadas.
54
The tall, spectral
stalk,
burnt, inert,
solitary flower
of the high barren plain.
Such
is Vista Hermosa,
“Beautiful View.”
Translation Review
Canto 12: Pájaro
If death is the sea
as the poet said
in Pájaro
life smells of the sea.
Canto 13: Uribia
A body falls, and another,
and another.
The whole earth
weighs on them.
Canto 14: Confines
Rain and silence:
the world in
Confines.
Desolation,
the barren plain.
Canto 15: Caldono
Who
comes to Caldono
lights the foxfire
and summons
the worms?
Canto 16: Humadea
Go to
Humadea and gaze
at its streets of pure air:
red rivers teeming
with white herons.
Still rivers.
Canto 17: Pore
In Pore death
is passed from hand to hand.
Death:
the meat of the earth.
Canto 18: Paujil
Flowers explode
on the ground
of Paujil. In their corollas
you see the mouths
of the dead.
Translation Review
Canto 19: Sotavento
Like clouds,
death today
in Sotavento.
Lifeless whiteness.
Canto 20: Ituango
The wind
laughs in the jawbones
of the dead.
In Ituago,
laughter’s cadaver.
Canto 21: Taraira
In Taraira
remembering life
brings pain.
Tomorrow
it will all be dust, forgotten.
Canto 22: Miraflores
Bodies fall
in Miraflores
dreams fall.
Miraflores:
graveyard of dreams.
Canto 23: Cumbal
In blue jeans
and painted face
death came
to Cumbal.
Flower War
at machete-point.
Canto 24: Soacha
A black
bird rummages
among the remains
of life.
It could be God
or the assassin:
it makes no difference now.
55
56
Translation Review
THE VISION OF ZEPHYR PRESS: A PROFILE
By Erica Mena
The name Zephyr conjures up images of days gone
by, when the famed train closed the distance between
Illinois and California, slipping through scenic routes,
the passengers comfortably ensconced in domed cars.
In 1980, calling on memories of the exploration and
reflection made possible by rail travel, Ed Hogan,
editor of the literary magazine Aspect, founded a new
press named after the historic rail line, Zephyr Press.
Although not originally envisioned as a
translation press, Zephyr Press has become the home
of some of the most important translations and
translators, crossing the borders of language and
literary tradition, connecting English readers to the
contemporary literature of Russia, Eastern Europe, and
Asia.
If the name Zephyr immediately brings to mind a
form of outmoded transportation — a throwback to
days of contemplative luxury in travel — then
consider the mission and publication list of Zephyr
Press and what it brings to life on the page. The works
recall the intention of the great literary publishers of
translation, work that has, like the trains, largely
succumbed to the everquickening pace of
consumption. Zephyr Press
has refused to discontinue
the considerable
investment that makes
exceptional literary
translation possible under
the pressures of the market
and the narrowing focus of
American literature. The
list of titles bears witness
to this. It includes the first
complete collection of
Anna Akhmatova’s poetry in English or in Russian —
a book that took thirteen years to complete. It was this
book that launched Zephyr Press into the world of
translation publishing. The editors have maintained
this vision of publishing not only in magnitude but
also in longevity, becoming one of the most important
publishing houses for work translated from Eastern
Europe and East Asia.
Like many small presses, Zephyr began by
publishing books of poetry and even a cookbook in its
early years. Through the combination of opportunity,
Translation Review
circumstance, and expertise, shortly after founding the
press (a story that co-director and translator J. Kates
tells with dizzying precision), the editors began work
on the complete poems of Anna Akhmatova.
Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, an awardwinning poet and translator of several other Russian
poets, including Alexander Pushkin and Inna
Lisnianskaya, and edited by Roberta Reeder, the twovolume hardcover edition was published in 1990. That
year it was named one of the New York Times Book
Review’s best books of the year, and it is still in print
today, having sold more than 20,000 copies, making it
one of the most successful books of poetry in recent
years. The Akhmatova project altered Hogan’s initial
vision for Zephyr, and this ambitious beginning in the
field of translation (when very few independent
presses even ventured into translation, much less from
Russian) resulted in an equally impressive list,
branching into a variety of translated literatures, with
Russian at the core.
After getting “bitten by the Russian bug,” as Kates
put it, the press commissioned him to compile an
anthology of contemporary Russian poetry. While
Russian remained the foundation, Zephyr began to
branch into other Eastern European literatures. Hogan
co-edited with Askold Melnyczuk (founding editor of
Agni and Arrowsmith Press) and Michael Naydan (a
translator and Professor of Slavic Languages) an
anthology of contemporary Ukrainian writing.
Published in 1996, From Three Worlds was the first
major publication in English of Ukrainian literature.
Yet Hogan wanted to focus the press on translation,
more or less exclusively of Russian works, and he
attempted to support the literary work through a series
of travel guides to Russia, which received great
acclaim but ultimately were unsustainable. As work
continued on the Russian anthology, Hogan died in a
canoeing accident in 1997, leaving J. Kates and Leora
Zeitlin, the only functioning Board members, with an
immense question: What now? The press had been
Hogan’s from the beginning, guided by his vision.
After considering several options, they decided to
continue running Zephyr Press at least until the
Russian anthology, which was nearing completion,
was published.
The chaos of the following year, while Zephyr
Press was without an editor, with only a pro forma
57
board and running on the contribution of volunteers,
led to the hiring of Cris Mattison, former editor of the
translation journal Exchanges, to take over running the
press. Kates met Mattison at the ALTA conference in
Bloomington, and soon thereafter, Mattison moved to
Massachusetts, where the
press is based, bringing
with him his knowledge of
Russian and connections
with the Chinese literary
world.
Whereas Hogan had
wanted to narrow the focus
of the press to Russian,
Mattison immediately
began expanding the scope
of the editorial horizon. He
broadened the list of titles
by including the Chinese
poet Bei Dao’s first book
of essays, Blue House, and
Steve Bradbury’s
mesmerizing translations
of the Taiwanese poet Hsia
Yü. By 1999, work had
been finished on the
Russian anthology In The
Grip of Strange Thoughts.
Including translations of
thirty-two contemporary
Russian poets, it is one of
the most substantial
volumes in English of
Russian poetry. The book
contains poems that were
written long before the fall
of the Soviet Union but
remained unpublished for
political reasons, poems
that dealt with the shifting
of Russian culture and
society through the fall of
the Soviet Union,
representing styles ranging
from extraordinarily
traditional to avant-garde.
The anthology represents
one of the most comprehensive collections of modern
Russian poetry, and its publication reinvigorated the
press and led to a flurry of important works in
translation.
58
Although it would be impossible to list all the
important works of translation and translators Zephyr
Press is home to, it would be remiss not to point out a
few highlights of the recently published translations.
In their line of groundbreaking canonical anthologies,
Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous
Bird, a collection of
contemporary Polish poetry,
appeared in 2002, introducing a
new generation of Polish poets
to the English-reading world.
More recently, as part of the
“Modern Poetry in Translation”
series, Zephyr Press has copublished poets from Iraq in
Iraqi Poetry Today (2003),
edited and translated by Daniel
Weissbort and Saadi Simawe.
Simawe, one of the most
important Arabic-English
translators, has collected and
translated forty contemporary
Iraqi poets in this anthology,
ranging from Kurdish to Jewish
and Arab Iraqis. The collection
is the first one of its kind in
English or the Western World.
In addition, Zephyr press
launched a collection of three
contemporary women poets
from Korea, Anxiety of Words
(2006), translated and compiled
by Don Mee Choi. Contrary to
the established tradition that
Korean women must be
submissive and subservient, the
three poets in this collection are
rather revolutionary in their
aesthetic and cultural
perspectives.
The publication of the
various anthologies by Zephyr
Press has also generated a series
of individual poets and writers
in translation: seven authors
from Russian, five from
Chinese, and a beginning series of Polish writers.
Furthermore, Zephyr Press has expanded its list of
languages to include new collected poems of Ingeborg
Bachmann, Darkness Spoken, translated from the
Translation Review
German by Peter Filkins. The collection includes one
hundred twenty-nine translations of previously
unavailable poems from one of the most important
German poets after World
War II. Filkins’s
translation of Bachmann’s
complete poems in 1994
won him ALTA’s
Outstanding Translation
Award. Since then, he has
published the translations
of two novel fragments of
Bachmann and of a novel
by Alois Hotschnig.
Since 1980, Zephyr
Press has continuously
expanded its publication
program. The press has formed partnerships with the
“Adventures in Poetry” series to promote innovative
Translation Review
English-language books of poetry. Although
publishing remains Zephyr’s primary focus, other
endeavors include Leora Zeitlin’s translation reading
series “World In Translation,” funded generously by
the Witter Bynner Foundation. Authors such as Bei
Dao, Zhang Er, and Don Mee Choi have read to full
audiences from Santa Fe to Albuquerque to Las
Cruces to Silver City.
Like the train from which they take the name, the
editors of Zephyr Press continue to move into the
future with their translations of international poets and
writers. As Mattison said, the goal of Zephyr Press’s
ever-expanding list of titles and languages is to “keep
chipping away at a monolingual society,” providing
readers with the resources to cross literary and
aesthetic borders and introduce English-speaking
readers to the experience of foreign cultures, which
will allow them to explore new worlds.
59
60
Translation Review
BOOK REVIEWS
THE SHAMBHALA ANTHOLOGY
OF CHINESE POETRY
by J.P. Seaton (Author)
Publisher: Shambhala, 2006
Paperback: 246 pp.
ISBN-10: 1570628629
U.S. $15.95, Canada $21.00
Mike Farman, Reviewer
At last! Here we have what J.P. Seaton himself
calls “the best of my life’s work” conveniently
encapsulated in one very attractively presented
paperback. This is a book to treasure and enjoy, for
scholars and lovers of good poetry alike. Right away, I
have to declare my full agreement with Carolyn Kizer,
who calls Seaton “the finest living translator and
explicator of Chinese poetry.” My first introduction to
his translations was when I came across the anthology
“Sunflower Splendor.” Seaton’s contributions seemed
on a different plane from the others. I was led on to
seek out his other publications, which all confirmed
my opinion that here is someone who has a unique gift
to bring alive this poetry of a distant time and place.
What sets him apart from most other translators in
this field? I believe it is the fact that he is a scholarpoet in the same mold as many of those who created
the poetry he translates. He is both in sympathy with
the authors and uniquely able to give full weight to the
two sides of the translation process — the scholarship
of a respected academic combined with the word-craft
of a natural poet. The result is poetry in the English
language that stems from deep insight into the world
of the Chinese literati, imbued with warm humanity
and flashes of humor that ensure pleasure in opening
this book at any page to read.
The language he uses is contemporary and
colloquial. If he occasionally takes some liberties with
the text, he knows how to preserve the spirit of the
original. The first four lines of T’ao Ch’ien’s Drinking
Wine #1 emerge as follows:
Success and failure? No known address.
This or that goes on, depending on the other.
And who can say if Milord Shao was happier
ruling a city, or sacked, his excellent melon patch?
As with all true poets, his individual style is
clearly recognizable; translations should, of course,
Translation Review
always look like original creations, but although these
do just that, paradoxically, he is also able to suggest
the individual voices of so many of the great literati.
Here, for example, is a letter from Tu Fu, the great
Tang Dynasty poet, written from exile to his young
son:
Thinking of My Little Boy
Pony boy, it’s spring, and we’re still parted.
The orioles sing, as if to warm away our troubles.
Parted from you: surprised as your birthday passes,
not a one to brag of the clever things you do.
Water falls, there, by the mountain road,
by bramble gate, at Ancient Trees, the village
where you dwell.
I think of you, and sleep’s the only antidote for grief.
I toast my back, bent, bowed,
beneath the smiling sunlight on the porch.
Some of these translations have the power to spirit
us back to a specific time and place, to share in the
experience:
Kuan Hsiu: On the Border
Gusts blow a cloud up, sudden
from the sand: we can tell the
tartars are massing to cross the River Liao.
Gulping the dust of fear, here, now, us
border guards: sure we’re ghosts already.
Seaton embraces economy and simplicity where it
truly counts, as in the following oft-translated quatrain.
His version, unlike many, follows the original word
for word, and he doesn’t commit the folly of trying to
“improve” it.
Liu Tsung-yuan: River Snow
A thousand mountains, no birds fly.
Ten thousand paths, no footprints.
Lone skiff, rush-cloaked old man.
Fishing alone, cold river snow.
The wit of many of these poets comes through
loud and clear; this poem, for example, could be a
guide to the art of translation:
61
Shi Te
My poems are poems;
some people call them sermons.
Well now, poems and sermons share one thing;
when you read them you got to be careful.
Keep at it. Get into detail.
Don’t just claim they’re easy.
If you were to live your life like that,
a lot of funny things might happen.
Seaton gives very nearly the last word to Yuan
Mei, clearly one of his favorites:
Did I not know that garden’s guests
of poems and lutes, wine and songs
would also hear the gong of time,
the last dripped drop of the water clock?
The anthology is in four sections, corresponding to
distinct periods in the evolution of Chinese literature.
There is a comprehensive general introduction, and
each section also has its own mini- introduction. These
essays may be easily assimilated by those with little or
no previous knowledge of Chinese poetry; Seaton
adopts a light and entertaining style that effectively
disguises the scholarship and hoodwinks the reader
into enjoying the process of learning.
With so much richness, it seems scurrilous to
gripe at all, but here goes anyway: I do feel that
Seaton’s selection puts too much emphasis on the
wonders of the Tang and undervalues the
achievements from other periods, including the Song.
He calls the post–Tang Dynasty section of the
anthology A few strong voices still singing and
promptly fulfills the “few” prediction by leaving out
such celebrated poets as Hsin Ch’i-chi, Chou Pangyen, and Huang Ting-chien. I would have wished for a
little more balance. But this is clearly an anthology of
personal favorites along the rather capricious lines of
Yeats’ Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and is
presumably not designed to be comprehensive.
Treasures enough are here, but plenty of room is left
for more in future from this great scholar/poet/
translator, whom we proudly claim as a fellow ALTA
member.
62
LOVE HOUND: Poems by Oliver Welden,
translated by Dave Oliphant.
Austin. Host. 2006, 59 pp. $8 paper.
James Hoggard, Reviewer
Literary translation can be, at times, as much a
political act as it is a bicultural form of aesthetic
communication. That is especially true of this new
rendering into English of a near-legendary work,
Perros de amor (Love Hound), that first appeared to
great acclaim in Chile in 1970, after it was awarded
the prestigious Luis Tello National Poetry Award.
Then a few years after that, a political explosion
occurred. Aided by U.S.–sponsored underground
forces (known better as CIA operatives), the Augusto
Pinochet–led military junta overthrew the duly elected
regime of Salvador Allende (who was then murdered
or took his own life, depending on your sources), and
debacle reigned for years. In recent years, however,
the aging and ailing Pinochet was hammered by the
justice system in Chile. He died on 10 December,
2006.
All that seems alien to the translation of a thin
volume of poems, except that this particular prizewinning volume, like numerous others, including work
by the long-important Chilean poet Oscar Hahn,
disappeared for years from public view in the writers’
native country. This is where the political dimensions
of translation come — sometimes involuntarily — into
view. After having been released from prison, and
under daily threats of execution, Hahn (whose work I
have been translating now for some thirty years) came
to the United States, completed a doctorate, and
continues his long and internationally distinguished
career at the University of Iowa.
Oliver Welden’s reputation did not sustain itself as
quickly or as broadly as Hahn’s, although both fled
Chile and came to the United States, in rather
perpetual exile from the home country, at about the
same time. Welden went to the University of Alabama,
and, although he continued to write through the years,
he published little or nothing. The reason for that, at
this point, is a mystery, because, early on, he had been
hailed as a literary hero of sorts.
In his introduction, Dave Oliphant refers to three
young poets making a long pilgrimage to visit the
equally young Welden, who had not yet reached his
mid-twenties. Shortly after that visit, Welden left Chile
and sank into obscurity. His one book, honored though
it had been, was available in no Chilean library. Still,
he kept writing, but his work found no home. Echoes
Translation Review
of his legend persisted; in fact, Dave Oliphant —
faithful publisher, prolific poet, steadfast literary
sensibility — was connected with Welden’s work
early on. In the early 1970s, he published a collection
of contemporary Chilean poets in the Wisconsin-based
Road Apple Review, a literary magazine of serious
reputation. Responding to the collection, the wellknown poet Robert Bly singled out Welden’s work.
Then everything went quiet until now, when, with
Oliphant’s translation and Host’s help, Welden came
back into print. Not only that, two of his previously
unpublished volumes are due out soon in Chile. The
reason is clear. A fine publisher with vision and a fine
translator with dedication have made Welden’s rise
from obscurity possible.
One ought to recognize, however, that,
provocative as it might have been more than thirty-five
years ago, when it first emerged, Love Hound was a
young man’s work. In it are the common tensions of
rebellion and edginess that have often characterized
the unsettled sensibilities of those on their way to
finding both voice and personal points of solid
reference. The anger and tendency toward the bizarre
often come from a feeling of being unsettled, and that
can make for both immoderation and excitement.
Several examples from the collection illustrate this. In
“Autobiography,” for example, Welden’s speaker says
through Oliphant’s faithful translation, “So this is why
we’ll go on the same: running away / and after one
another with words.” Only an oaf would criticize the
young speaker for not being more loyal to the moral
power of articulateness. At the same time that one
recognizes limits of sensibility in the voices of the
young, one can just as easily recognize the largeness
of possibility reflected in the meaningful ambiguities
of a short poem like “Sacrifice”:
I’ll bring the wine for moistening
this feast of your mouth
with my mouth on your navel and abdomen:
nothing will remain
unmoistened
now that the gods
have rejected my blood
for the milk of your breasts.
In addition to the problematic length of the third line,
what one quickly notices — whether one reads the
verse in its original Spanish or in Oliphant’s
stylistically faithful translation, is the naively freeverse quality of the poetry. Description like that is not
critical, simply descriptive, because throughout the
greatest part of the 20th century, free verse has been
Translation Review
the dominant poetic style. That said, one realizes the
implications of the description. If not meaningful linebreaks, one turns to attitudes, not technique, for points
of interest. One turns to sensibility, not craft, for
assessment; and it is at that juncture where phrase
comes face to face with the judgment that one must
say that, however promising Welden’s early verse was,
its resurrection says more about the nobility of
translation’s effort to rescue (or, in this case, resurrect)
what was threatened by loss so that we, the lay readers
and professionals, can connect with what was once
considered both promising and provocative.
Doing that, one does not insist that what was once
about to disappear has to be glorious and sophisticated
or exquisite or flawless to be worth our attention. In
the case of Welden and his bridge-figure Oliphant, we
recognize an interesting factor of culture: the
vulnerability of aesthetics to political mayhem. The
tensions there are interesting in themselves. One’s
attitude is not even dependent on whether one, for
heaven’s sake, prefers right-wing military juntas or
justly elected regimes. The issue of note has to do with
the recognition that, in art, what survives or thrives is
often connected with far more points of reference than
clarity of mind and artistic accomplishment.
That said, what do we have here? First, we have a
record of what a highly respected artistic culture —
Chile (a country perhaps as artistically accomplished
through the years as, say, Cuba) — once considered
worth serious notice. Second, we have a voice from a
later time — with a demonstrably fine knowledge of
Chilean Spanish and culture — bringing us a sizable
fragment of the past — which is what the literary
translator does. Third, we meet a series of other
questions: Do the translations work in their new
idiom? Do the poems seem more than curious
documents from a faded past? Does our own
perspective grow from having met a voice that was not
originally our own?
Having asked those questions, we turn toward
specifics in our assessment. How good a job has the
translator done? After all, most of the readers of this
(re)new(ed) collection will be reading it in English,
though more than we think will probably have access
to major dimensions of the original versions in
Spanish, because the volume is presented bilingually.
As already indicated, for more than three decades,
Dave Oliphant has been a serious presence in bringing
South American voices into English. In addition to
that, he has sponsored the exporting of English-writing
poets to Spanish in his imaginatively produced
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bilingual anthology: Washing The Cow’s Skull /
Lavanda la calavera de vaca (1981).
In Welden’s Love Hound, Oliphant’s most recent
volume, two passages show the level of excellence he
can achieve as a translator and also the sometimes
troublesome fact that almost any passage can be
rendered fairly in a number of different ways. In
“Backsliding” (the title a fine translation of
Reincidencia), Oliphant clearly hits the mark by
bringing the comparatively prolix Spanish Demasiadas
personas opinaron flagrantes in contra into the crisply
and naturally angular English: “Too many people were
dead set against.” Oliphant’s ear is good throughout.
At the same time, at the end of “The Coarsest Form of
Love,” he lets the stiff formality of the Spanish control
him more than it should when he submits to literalism
and a questionable linguistic archness in the lines:
“and already is rising from / I don’t know where deep
inside me / this bitter grief.”
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That said, translators can quibble endlessly (and
often do) with themselves as well as with others. More
important than that, though, is what Dave Oliphant has
done here. He has brought us serious news from a
prickly, distant past; and one suspects — because
suddenly two previously unpublished collections of
Welden are due to come out soon in his home country
of Chile — translation itself is often the agent that
resurrects what should not have been neglected in the
first place. Translation can also act as an aesthetically
driven form of redress whose effects can be both
aesthetic and political. Once again, Dave Oliphant, as
he has done with anthologies and his own work, has
proved himself a valuable and generous literary
presence.
Translation Review
CONTRIBUTORS
Donovan Anderson is an assistant professor of German at
Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids,
Michigan. He has written articles on the phenomenon of the
literary event, on salon culture in early nineteenth-century
Germany, and on the early history of Germanistik. His
research focuses on literary reception and on disciplinary
history. He is currently working on a book that examines the
development of the academic study of German literature in
the early nineteenth century within the context of local city
culture in university towns.
Harry Aveling is President of the Australian Association
for Literary Translation. A professor of Indonesian/Malay at
La Trobe University, Melbourne Australia, he is
also Adjunct Professor of Southeast Asian Literature at
Ohio University. He specializes in the theory and practice of
literary translation. His recent publications include Secrets
Need Words: Indonesian Poetry 1966-1998 (Ohio
University 2001); Saint Rosa, recent poetry of Dorothea
Rosa Herliany (winner of the Khatulistiwa Literary Award
for Poetry, Jakarta 2006); and Kill the Radio, also by
Dorothea Rosa Herliany (Arc Publications, England 2007).
Philip Balma, a Ph.D. candidate in Italian at Indiana
University, currently teaches in the Department of Romance
Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame.
His work has been published in Lettere Italiane, Italica, and
Translation Review. His translations of poetry by Fernando
Bandini and Raffaele Crovi are forthcoming in a bilingual
volume titled Quelli che da lontano sembrano mosche:
Antologia di poesia italiana. Eds. Luigi Ballerini and Beppe
Cavatorta. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2007.
Dr. Michael Scott Doyle is a Professor of Spanish and
Translating and Translation Studies (TTS) at the University
of North Carolina at Charlotte. He serves as Graduate
Coordinator of the M.A. in Spanish, which has a full track
in TTS. He has published a well reviewed translation of
Spanish writer Ana María Matute's collection of short
stories, The Heliotrope Wall (Columbia UP 1989) as well as
numerous shorter translations and articles on translation. He
was a participant in the first National Endowment of the
Humanities Literary Translation Institute at the University
of California, Santa Cruz in 1987.
Michael Farman is an Electronics Engineer currently living
in Texas, USA, where he designs instrumentation for
scientific balloons under contract to NASA. He had earlier
studied Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African
Studies, London University, and his enthusiasm for Chinese
Translation Review
classical and ancient poetry later led him into translation.
His translations have since appeared frequently in literary
and translation magazines, and in the Renditions anthology
A Silver Treasury of Chinese Lyrics. His chapbook Clouds
and Rain, Lyrics of Love and Desire from China’s Golden
Age was published by Pipers’ Ash in 2003. He is an active
member of ALTA and has appeared on conference panels
and contributed articles to Translation Review.
John Felstiner’s books include The Lies of Art: Max
Beerbohm’s Parody and Caricature, Translating Neruda:
The Way to Macchu Picchu (Commonwealth Club Gold
Medal), Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Truman Capote
Award), Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (MLA,
PEN, American Translators Association prizes). During
2007, American Poetry Review is running six essays from
his MS, So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental
Urgency. He teaches in English and Jewish Studies at
Stanford.
James Hoggard, the author of 17 books, has published six
collections of translations of literary work. Poet Laureate of
Texas in 2000, he has been an NEA Fellow, two-term
president of The Texas Institute of Letters, and a long-time
member of ALTA. He is the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished
Professor of English at Midwestern State University in
Wichita Falls, Texas.
Erica Mena is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. Her first
book of translations, Return to the Sea, by Etnairis Rivera in
translation from the Spanish, was published in 2007, and her
poetry has been published by Pressed Wafer and
Arrowsmith Press. She is the catalog and book designer for
Lame Duck Books and Pierre Menard Gallery in
Cambridge, MA.
Michael Sisson’s translations of Spanish American poetry
have appeared in Seneca Review, Mid-American Review,
Luna, and Another Chicago Magazine, and in the books
Reflexiones maquiavélicas / Machiavellian Reflections by
Pedro Shimose, City of Memory and Other Poems (with
Cynthia Steele), and Inca Blues: Poems and Translations
from the Jazz Poetry Ensemble. He is currently at work on
an anthology of Quechua poetry, in collaboration with Julio
E. Noriega, and a selection of poems by María Mercedes
Carranza, with J. Eduardo Jaramillo. He teaches Spanish at
Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.
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