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On translations
You can’t translate without blemishing; but try to render a poet’s poem and you’ll find your efforts quite preposterous.
Cervantes said that translations are exercises in inverted tapestry; he could be right on prose; but if you’re dealing with poetry your brocade will be entirely different: never the same, always for the worse; in sackcloth.
There’s only one exception where the tapestry might be as good as the original, and that’s when the poem is foreign to you, and one read years ago; it’s the case when suddenly one morning your translator wakes up and on the spur of the moment translates it currente calamo not even remembering every line; and that can only happen if the translator is in fact a better poet than the one he’s translating; but then, it’s difficult to conceive a man with that class of talent doing translations.
Because if he is a minor or an equal poet, the rendering will always be inferior for the obvious reason that the translated poet had a free hand when he was at his work whereas the translator, as if in a sack race, has his own ideas and feelings tied up in someone’s else bag; and for any poet the things referred to are wound up to certain words in such a way that transplanted to other ones they just wither away; keep in mind that there is no such thing as an exact correspondence between two languages, and that only “transpositions” are possible.
So it has been said, and verily, that in literature, stealing is lawful provided it is followed by murder.
Such has been the case in the history of poetry three or four times; if I say seven, I think I’d be counting one to many. Horace’s Odes rendered by Luis de León, Virgil’s Pastoral Poems by Garcilaso de la Vega...
I don’t remember a third example, but I’m quite sure it’s not Mitre’s translation of Shakespeare, as a friend over here suggests. Maybe one could include Goethe’s version of Marlowe.
One example I do remember is Leopardi’s translation of the short and precious poem and epitaph that belongs to an unknown Spanish poet, remarkable for its sober brevity.
Lungi dal proprio ramo
Povera foglia frale
Dove vai? Dal faggio
Là ov’io naqui, mi divise el vento.
Esso, tornando a volo
Dal bosco alla campagna
Dalla valle mi porta alla montagna...
Seco instancabilmente
Vo pellegrina e tuto l’altro ignoro.
Vo dov e va ogni cosa
Dove naturalmente
Va la foglia di rosa
E la foglia d’alloro...
The original inspired dirge has been translated to Italian without a word too many (in fact, one can count three words in excess, but that’s neither here nor there). It goes this way:
Pobre hoja seca, ¿dónde vas en vuelo
De mariposa enferma y desvaída,
Entre la niebla y luz descolorida
Del sol de otoño y desteñido cielo?
¿Dónde vas, hoja seca, no nacida
Ni para el alto azul ni el bajo suelo,
Ni para demasiada dicha y duelo,
Hoja que va como se va mi vida?
(Yo no sé. De la flor vuelo a la fosa,
Del suelo al astro, al lodo o al vergel,
Presa de un aspirar que no reposa,
Donde va toda cosa
En confuso tropel...
Voy donde va la hoja de la rosa,
Voy donde va la hoja del laurel...
Perhaps one should note in two pieces with identical content where the differences between the Italian and Spanish taste lie; the latter stresses color and ornament, the former is pure.
We believe the Italian rendering is superior to the original sonnet (unless they both plagiarized an anonymous French poet), which was common practice during the 19th century.
Having said this, there was no need to wrong the great Mr. Gilbert by translating him in verse, especially if the translation would be published with the original face to face, as is here the case.
In front of me I have two volumes of translations from English and American poets into Spanish... They all seem rather like each other... In spite of the fact that they are as different as a village of angels, the Spanish translations sound monotonously uniform (one seems to be repeatedly listening to the tones of the Spanish Academy before the times of Rubén Darío.) And that, even when the translators are excellent poets such as Querol, de Vedia, José María Heredia (not the French one), Caro, Unamuno, Isaacs, Samaniego, Díez Canedo, Pombo and Llorente: this last one, the nearly succesful translator of Faust and Sully-Prudhomme.
In Llorente’s version, Byron’s ferocious pirate sounds like a medieval troubador: the Viking transformed into a southern Spaniard. Ideas get diffused, unduly sweetened and, as it were, “caulked”.
Here however is a poet that seems to be up to the job: Mr. Félix M. de Samaniego who’s several fables where presented to the public as his own when in fact they belong to the English poet, John Gay (1688-1752). The innocent thief was discovered by Marquis Melgar; we say innocent because the perfect Spanish makes him worthy of the indult we have mentioned before.
The great translator in verse, Mr. Carlos Obligado, once told us that your can translate from English into Spanish respecting the metrics because Spanish synalephas work in a way that it is quite possible to squash several words into the hendecasyllabic verse. We didn’t agree. We’re sorry for our much loved and missed friend, it just isn’t possible. English is the most brief, barbarian and beautiful language in the world. On the other hand, Spanish, at least the way we use it, is swollen and obese.
So after trying in vain to render,
But I have learned what wiser knights
Follow the Grail and not the Gleam
and suchlike verses, the translator here sagely chose to put it into prose—at least that would be of some use to the Spanish reader, avoiding the jarring notes; grinding sounds is something we could do without, especially in a book dedicated to Our Blessed Lady, our “Queen of the Seven Swords”.
As it is, in Argentina we’ve had enough of that.
end
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