On
Writing in Two Languages and Other Intimacies
My point of departure in this
essay is contemporary women poets from both the Spanish- and
English-language
traditions and my experience in translating them into another language.
Translating is a special act of intimacy that goes to the heart of
writing
itself. Poems can haunt you. They won’t let you go, and when that
happens, you feel possessed by them. Sometimes then, you have to
wrestle with
possession, with the poem that’s taken over in some nameless place of
the
mind-body continuum. You’ve got to turn it into something else, move it
out by reliving it in the language of your own mind and body. That’s
where translation comes in.
The Latin trans- expresses a notion
of
“beyond,” “across,” or “over.” To translate
is “to remove from one place to another”; “to turn from one
language into another.” It isn’t just translators who translate:
writers do as well. Words never express what is, only what is sought.
Poets are
always driven to say what cannot be said. They are always looking for
verbal
equivalents, for images and forms of the poem that has not yet emerged
from
inside, from its intimate life inside the poet. They speak with two
tongues:
one is the language of the poem we are reading; the other is the
language we
cannot read, that comes from a place that resists naming. In a word,
writing
itself is a kind of translation, in which writers try for the perfect
translation.
Historically and culturally, however, this matter of poetic intimacy
has been
complicated for women writers. Until recently, there were limits on the
accepted and acceptable
ways
of expressing oneself as a woman, of translating interiority into
words. The
classic nineteenth-century figure of the woman writer was embodied in
the poetess
or poetisa considered as a
victim of
suffering and renunciation. By contrast, what we have today especially
since the 1960s and 70s are poets, plain and simple, who
do
not
accept suffering in silence but who take that pain and pulverize it
with their
anger, deflate it with a razor-sharp irony or transform it into
positive images
of serenity regained. Intimacy is made public, through writing.
Almost the only exception to the poetess-victim of the past was Emily
Dickinson, who continues to be a major influence on contemporary women
poets.
In the nineteenth century
One of the most startling and boldest tendencies in this poetry is the
re-empowering of the human body. Not only is there a noticeable
openness of
expression concerning this theme, but it is through the body or body
imagery
that these poets often communicate the significance of their poetry.
This
tendency seems to be more pronounced in English-language poets like
Sharon Olds
and Carolyn Forché than in some of
the
Spanish-language poets I’ve translated, such as Sara Pujol
Russell, Julia Uceda, and Noni
Benegas, though Ana Rossetti and Clara Janés also come to mind as “body poets”
of note. It is worth considering, in exploring this poetry, why such
differences exist and what they may mean. In any case, whether the body
is
imaged explicitly or not, it is never the body as body that we are
reading; it
becomes a metaphor that points to something beyond itself, as metaphors
do, and
gesturing towards its own opaqueness.
The body images of this poetry are intimate translations of nonverbal
experience, akin to what Walter Benjamin called “thing languages”
found in sculpture and painting: “ . . . in them we find a translation
of
the language of things into an infinitely higher language, which may
still be
of the same sphere. We are concerned here with
nameless, nonacoustic languages, languages
issuing from matter”
(330).
In focusing on the body, writers like Olds and Forché
stress a sense of place and emplacement, recalling that language, like
translation, must move from one place to another in order to be. In
reclaiming
the body as a place for poetry, as a place of poetry, they also suggest
that no
one ends with the same body you start out with. Which is a way of
saying no one
ends with the same history. Bodies are biographical maps. Some of the
countries
will get filled in, others remain forever
unknown
territory, unlived experience. Bodies are living and dead history.
Within us,
we carry other “bodies,” memories of earlier selves, of other
persons. We become a repository of the breath and matter of other
people. You
could say we become a morgue filled with the bodies of those we’ve
loved,
of those we’ve hated.
This same capacity for storage of
memories, of
experience, of sensations points,
however, to
something else besides burial: it suggests revelation. Bodies
constantly
incorporate. Everything becomes food for the body. Everything also
becomes
transformed. One story is brought inside, undergoes a change of plot,
and
another story emerges. Bodies are stories. Which
brings us
back to the thinginess of language as
matter.
Consider, for example, two very different poems that rely on the image
of
cartography to embody poetic intimacy. The first is Sharon Olds’s
“Topography,” in which she imagines the act of love as a verbal and
fleshly map and two bodies as different territories uniting:
Here is the
Spanish version:
This delicious poem flaunts its eroticism through playfulness,
consciously
avoiding the dual clichés of romantic love and literal
lovemaking by
converting body parts into a moving geography of tropes. The poem works
imaginatively because readers cannot help retranslating back her map
into another
language: that of the body itself. The body is and isn’t there. The
poem
begins with a sweeping sense of movement and ends with an ironic yet
amusing
gesture to the world beyond, the nation that is anything but united,
with
liberty and justice for all. Also implied is the notion that two bodies
unite,
only to disunite afterwards. Indeed, other poems by Olds speak
disturbingly of
the passions, hatreds, and inhumanity of men towards other men, of how
the
personal and the historical can fuse in a series of intense body images
centering on the mutilation of body and spirit.
My translation had to cope with the immediate problem of proper names.
With the
exception of the
My second poem is called “Una cartógrafa,” or “Mapmaker,” by Noni Benegas, an Argentinian writer who has resided in
Here is the
English translation:
As a citizen
of two countries, Noni Benegas is
familiar with the map of the world. But it is a different map we read
in the
prose poem cited above. In “Mapmaker” different universes collide, but
there is
no apocalpyse. The cosmos continues. We simply do not understand it. It
is
filled with enigmatic objects from the everyday world: with hinges and
rings,
teeth and skulls, can openers and dolls. In this map everything is
included,
even the travelers. The poem is also laced with literary and other
allusions,
reinforcing the notion that maps are artificial constructions. Noni’s
poem
suggests that people make their own maps, charted surfaces that are
both
general and particular, that at once contain the collective history of
the
world and the private stories of individual lives.
Writing is a kind of map in this wonderful poem. Language,
whether on the page or in the air, in coffers or on the Greek seas,
makes maps
of our lives. Indeed, many of her poems point to a
geography of writing. Far more than Olds’s
“Topography,” this poem resists interpretation, thus making its
translation even more challenging. All the quotidian objects in this
text are
also alien, other-worldly, made so through incongruous juxtaposition
and a
sense of cosmic irony communicated here. Although body imagery is not
apparent,
the idea of embodiment is, the mind made concrete and particular
through real
objects and cultural allusions that inhabit it, like coffers squeezed
into
angles. The poem’s intriguing opacity suggests to me that the
poet
herself does not know what the “solution hidden inside” might be.
This is a good example of how words never express what is, only what is
sought.
In translating this poem, I found myself not only as much taken by
surprise as
Don José in the text, but continually off-balance, knowing that
my
coming closer to the poem signified only that: coming closer, as in a
journey
that is infinite but tastes musky-sweet like the Greek seas receding
before us.
I think the poem is meant to keep us off-balance.
In another poem, the body takes center stage, but only does so through
paradox,
by the poet deliberately not naming the fleshly object that drives the
description. The
text is called “Frida Kahlo”:
And the English version:
For anyone
who has stood transfixed in front of a Frida
Kahlo
painting, especially her self-portraits, this poem does with words what
Kahlo
did with paint: it appears to break the barrier between art and life,
while
suggesting that life, or perhaps some lives like Frida
Kahlo’s, are like a work of art. We see references to the terrible
accident that pierced Kahlo’s life, that “harvested steel”
which brutally split her body but which also traverses the poem that Noni has made, breaking it into two questions:
“Was
it a work of art or her desire?” The column of harvested
steel has become at the end of the poem a column of damp chalk, the
stroke of
painted fate. The mystery of this poem, like that of Kahlo’s painting,
resides not in the initial question posed, which in any event is never
answered, but in the way the portrait continues “forever
flowering.” What makes Frida’s agile
pupil so alive?
There is no
suffering victim in this poem, just as there isn’t in Kahlo’s
painting, which makes us feel her pain without exploiting it
emotionally.
Rather, there is the pride of having created art out of a horrifying
experience
that cannot possibly be duplicated with words or paintit
can only be sought, reembodied as art,
knowing full
well that words and paint cannot pierce the enigma of experience or of
being. Noni’s tightly condensed imagery,
which seems at once
neobaroque and surreal, expresses that
enigma
beautifully, while also challenging the translator’s abilities. Which is to say, Frida’s
buffalo
bower eyebrows are as dense as ever. They can be translated but
never
really penetrated. The body is there, but isn’t there.
Here is
another example of this same conjuring act, this time from the poetry
of Sara Pujol Russell, whose bio, she once
told me, is only
“the stuff that appears in the inside flap of my books.” The poem
is called “Creación de mi nombre” (“Creation of my Name”):
And the English:
Sara’s
poetry is remarkable for the way she takes something abstract beauty,
time, or truth and turns it into
something
intimate. The length of the line, its incantatory qualities build
towards that
final intensity, in which her breath is in the deep-down fog, in the
lips of a burning woods. Here again,
whatever the body is in
poetry, it signals both more and less than itself. Sara expresses the
paradox
by using the construction “si + the preterite,” rather than the subjunctive. What if
this
was so means “this was so.” If we can wrap
our minds around such a possibility, we can also embrace her exquisite
rereading of
Finally, as a translator into both languages, I’ve also had occasion to
turn my own poems into another language. This dual role poses its own
difficulties. Let me give an example, in a poem titled “Women Spread
Their Skirts Over the Men” (“Las mujeres tienden sus faldas
sobre los hombres”):
Here is the Spanish version:
In reworking
my own poetry, I was made doubly aware of translation as a process of
creation.
If a poem like “Creation of my Name” already points in this
direction, translating a poem you have authored drives home the
inseparability
of translation and writing, as Carol Maier has observed. In a word,
translations are, as she also remarks, “poems in their own right,”
while still remaining translations (24). As a translator, I had to make
decisions which would inevitably turn the poem towards a particular
reading,
while eliminating other ones. The last sentence is illustrative of what
I mean.
In the original the line is ambivalently charged, as declarative and/or
imperative: “You make something else.” In the Spanish version, I
have opted for the imperative: “Haz tú otra cosa.” I sacrificed that ambivalence for
something
more decisive.2 The declarative
sounded
weak to me in Spanish, in this context, and I was stumped over how to
provide
the original ambivalence. On the other hand, the familiar form of tú compensates to some
extent because
it emphasizes and enriches, more than the English “you,” the
intimate.
And this
brings me back to poetic intimacy, to tears nestled between breasts, to
tender
garments flapping, small buttons that burst and fall and roll, skirts
that
billow and furl, and that glistening, that tremor of being female. All
these
images hover over, in, and around the body, which is both present and
absent in
this poem. The body image is, in all these texts, a metaphor for
different
forms of poetic intimacy and for the difficulty of engaging and
penetrating
that intimacy, that net of shadows, which is also the lips of
a burning woods, the four bodies of the sky, and the eyebrows of
a
buffalo bower.
Notes
Works Cited
Benegas, Noni.
Burning Cartography. Trans. & Introd. Noël Valis. Austin: Host
Publications,
2007.
______. “Una cartógrafa.” Argonáutica.
Prol. José María Valverde. Barcelona: Laertes, 1984.
______. “Frida Kahlo.” La balsa de la Medusa.
Prol. José Muñoz Garrigos. Alicante: Caja de Ahorros
Provincial de Alicante, 1987.
Benjamin,
Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language
of
Dickinson, Emily. “I’m Nobody!
Who are you?” The Complete Poems of Emily
Dickinson.
Ed. Thomas H. Johnson.
Juan de la Cruz, San. Poesías.
Maier, Carol. Prologue. Mi casa me recuerda / My House Remembers Me. By N.Valis. 19-24.
Old, Sharon. “Topography.”
The Gold Cell.
Pujol Russell, Sara.
“Creación de mi nombre.” El fuego tiende su aire / El
aire tiende a su fuente. Ferrol:
Esquío, 1999.
______. The Poetry of Sara Pujol Russell. Trans.
& Introd. Noël Valis.
Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2005.
Valis, Noël. Mi
casa me recuerda / My House Remembers
______, ed. Las conjuradoras.
Antología bilingüe de seis
poetas norteamericanas
de hoy. Trans.
& Introd. N. Valis. Ferrol: Esquío,
1993.