Chile | English | Hybrid | Spanish
August, 2018The poems featured here use a limited vocabulary derived from the Fortune 500 list of company names to translate “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” as an exploration of what happens to words in the course of the history of their usage. As an experiment in translation, these poems are meant as an active approach to reading Neruda’s poems anew, to discovering what transformations take place in the history of a language and what role the translator might play in that long process. On its surface my project is to see how far the language of capital is capable of replicating Neruda’s poems and what it means for one’s words to be one’s own. My hope is that I have leveraged the gap between Neruda’s poems and my translation into something akin to an empty dictionary. My hope is that this empty dictionary might contain the “actual” translation without uttering it. If it is somehow like a dictionary it is because it contains the possibilities of language, and if it is somehow empty it is not because its words do not exist but because they are not inscribable.
My goal has never been to translate the poems as they are but to re-read them, to attempt to glimpse which words might actually have been uncovered by Neruda who, according to Raúl Zurita, writing in his introduction to Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), “shows us that in speaking, no one is singular. That the act of speaking is the opportunity for those who have preceded us to return, to be granted words.” If Neruda attempts to recover the language that leaves no trace in history, I am interested in the ghost of a translation that leaves unspoken what cannot be spoken, even as it haunts the gap between my poems and Neruda’s.
My choice of “Alturas” as a source text stems from my discomfort with Neruda’s attempt to recover language acts that may not be his to recover. Nevertheless, I hope that my translation will be taken not as a declamation against Neruda or the consensus of those like Zurita who are moved by Neruda’s attempted recovery of those lost voices, but rather as a re-reading that hopefully sheds new light on what it means for one’s language to be one’s own, ethically and literally. When I devised my constraint, I genuinely did not know which words would be available to me, and I am surprised how well this lexicon has been able to capture the suffering named by the originals.
It is my hope that the reader of this manuscript will agree that my translation is, even if it resembles Neruda’s poems a great deal, an original work.
– Adam Greenberg
Giovanni Quessep has been influenced by Colombia’s most important poets from the first half of the 20th century, such as Aurelio Arturo and León de Greiff, with whom he was personally acquainted and developed an important friendship. In the sixties, he worked as an editor at the legendary Mito, Colombia’s highly acclaimed philosophical and literary magazine created by Jorge Gaitán Durán, and in the seventies he co-founded Golpe de dados, a poetry magazine recognised throughout Latin America as one of the most important poetry publications of the past and current centuries.
Quessep’s poetry is nourished by his personal experiences growing up on the Colombian Caribbean coast; by his travels through Italy, where he fell in love with the work of Dante Alighieri; and by his knowledge of the vast tradition of Spanish poetry, particularly the poets of the Spanish Golden Age and Ruben Darío, one of his most important literary references. A descendant of Lebanese immigrants, he is also deeply acquainted with Middle Eastern poetic traditions, and specifically with the work of poets such as Omar Khayyam, Farid Uddin Attar, and Ferdowsi, who have also greatly influenced his work. Quessep’s poetry is the result of an improbable mixture of faraway elements that come together to create a unique voice both indisputably Colombian and universal.
I started working on this project in 2015, with Quessep’s permission, and I have been collaborating with Ranald Barnicot since the beginning of this year, following the advice of some editors who told me that my translations could benefit from a collaboration with a native English speaker, preferably a poet or poetry translator, as Ranald is, and they certainly have.
– Felipe Botero
It has been a privilege and a challenge to work with Felipe on these richly allusive, mysterious, deeply felt and moving poems. I feel that Quessep exemplifies Eliot’s First Voice of Poetry. The poet is primarily addressing himself in the hope of working through profound, personal, and painful issues. Perhaps we are left feeling that we have not completely understood, but, in Eliot’s oft-quoted and memorable words, poetry can communicate before it is understood. Indeed, perhaps it is impertinent to suppose that we have a right to complete understanding.
– Ranald Barnicot
The two poems featured here come from Andrea Cote Botero’s first book, Puerto calcinado [Port in Ashes] (2013), winner of the Puentes de Sturga International Poetry Prize. At first glance, this title seems out of place given that the poet’s native Barrancabermeja conjures up no images of coastline, but rather is most known for a 1998 civilian massacre, one of the most deadly of Colombia’s armed conflict. The poetic voice’s reflection around the port as a place of both arrival and departure, turns illusory, no more than a fleeting bridge to someplace else, or perhaps this place itself. What most stands out, then, is uncertainty, destruction of space, searches for lost identities, labyrinthine memory, and longings for gods–and others–gone missing. The poems take on rhythm and pace while the poetic self explores all this from every possible angle. For Cote Botero’s poetic subject, the port is connection–to now barren terrain, a lost homeland, and María–a connection only truly achieved in the ephemeral uttering of a poem.
Likewise, emphasis on connection, on bridge-building, guides my approach to translating Cote Botero. She has been doubly underrepresented in translation: first, as a woman, given that women are far less likely than men to be translated into English (and even less frequently by a woman); and, second, as a Colombian, since poetry from the region is the second-least translated into English among all Spanish-speaking countries. In fact, according to the Three Percent Translation Database, from 2008 to 2018 no book-length translation of a Colombian woman poet has been published in the United States. Given these conditions, I view the choice of who to translate as an act of bridge-building, forging connections between places and readerships that might not otherwise come into contact. The question of how to translate this voice, then, becomes bridge-crossing, the process of carrying what makes Cote Botero’s poetry so compelling into English, allowing its complexity to find its footing in new linguistic terrain. In this way, the bridge Cote Botero and I build through translation is far from illusory: these two poems intend to highlight marginalized voices, complicate notions of how Colombians–and women–are expected to write, and forge strong, long-lasting literary connections.
– Olivia Lott
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish
July, 2018Cacamatzin (1483-1520) was born into the most illustrious family of Tezcoco, a region known for its many wise governors and celebrated poets. He was the grandson of the famous poet-king Nezahualtcóyotl and son of the famous Lord of Tezcoco Nezahualpilli, whom Cacamatzin eventually replaced. As Lord of Tezcoco, Cacamatzin was unable to stop the invasion of gold-hungry Hernán Cortes and his conquistadors. In 1520, Cacamatzin was captured, tortured, and killed under the direction of Alvarado, whom Cortes left in charge before going on to commit further atrocities in the land of the Aztecs and beyond.
100 Refutations | Guatemala | Poetry | Spanish
July, 2018Enrique Noriega is a Guatemalan poet and the director of Guatemala’s Dependency Ministry Unit for the Promotion of Books and Reading. He has published many poetry collections, including Oh banalidad (1973), Post actus (1982), Libreta del centauro copulante (1994), La pasión según Judas (1998), El cuerpo que se cansa (1998), Libro caliente voz de hielo (1999), La saga de n (2006), Épica del ocio (2007), Lo que la memoria viste y calza (2012), and Guastatoya (2015). Noriega has also won numerous awards, including the Mesoamerican Poetry Prize “Luis Cardoza y Aragón” (2007, 2012), the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature (2010), and the Rubén Darío prize for poetry (2013).
100 Refutations | Paraguay | Poetry | Spanish
July, 2018Eloy Fariña Nuñez (1885-1929) studied in the Paraná seminary in Argentina, but soon thereafter traded his aspirations of an ecclesiastical career for a law career in Buenos Aires. He was eventually forced to abandon his studies for financial reasons, but this allowed him to dedicate himself wholly to the pursuit of arts and letters. He was a poet, storyteller, essayist, dramaturge, and journalist. He is often referred to as the greatest poet of Paraguay.
100 Refutations | Guatemala | Poetry | Spanish
July, 2018Rafael Landívar (1731-1793) was a Guatemalan poet and Jesuit priest. He was born in what was then called La Capitanía de Guatemala, and is now the territory of Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Antigua, and he died in Italy. He was a descendant of the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and chose philosophy as his primary field of study. In 1749, he joined a Jesuit order and began working soon thereafter on what would become Rusticatio Mexicana, 15 books of poetry describing the regional fauna, flora, and customs using Latin hexameter. This text was translated into Spanish in 1897 by Antonio Ramírez Fontecha, in order to present it in the Exposición Centroamericana of the same year.
100 Refutations | Paraguay | Poetry | Spanish
July, 2018Manuel Ortiz Guerrero (1897-1933) was a poet, playwright, and musician. He was born in Villarrica, Paraguay and began to gain some popularity after the publication of one of his earliest poems, “Loca,” featured in the journal Letras. He was the founder of the literary journal Órbita, and his verses were often accompanied by the music of his friend José Asunción Flores. Guerrero published numerous works of poetry, prose, and drama in his lifetime, and two of his books were published posthumously. He was also the composer of the song “India,” which was later declared the national song by the Paraguayan government. He died of leprosy in the company of his lifelong partner, Dalmacia.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish
July, 2018This poem tells the traditional Guaraní story of the creation of language as relayed over the course of hundreds of years. According to Alfredo López Austin, writing in La Literatura De Los Guaraníes (1965), the language formed in this myth by the great Creator is “the future essence of human souls.” Immediately after creating language, the great Creator decides to make the love human beings can feel for one another.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish | Venezuela
June, 2018Andrés Mata (1870-1931) is considered the initiator of the Modernist movement in Venezuela. His early writing was influenced by Victor Hugo, Nuñez de Arce, and Diaz Mirón, as well as his contemporaries Chocano and Lugones. Julio Planchart, writing in Antología de La Poesia Hispanoamericana (1965), asserted that Mata “belonged very much to his time in his continuous effort to find in his verses a fine and external musicality” and a “vague and internal sentiment which would echo that musicality.” This, Planchart concluded, showed that Mata truly embodied the Modernist movement.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).