Cuba | Poetry | Spanish | United States
April, 2019“Poetry saved me from madness,” Jorge Olivera Castillo once said to describe his time in Guantánamo Prison. Between 2016 and 2018, the poet escaped what remained of his 18-year sentence by living in the United States, first as a writer for the Harvard University Scholars at Risk Program (where I met him) and second as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. The poems featured here were written during the writer’s time in the United States, before he returned to Cuba at the risk of being incarcerated once again.
The primary tensions I see in Olivera’s poems lie between experiences of confinement and imaginaries of travel, evocative of the challenges of migratory communities (past and present), of Olivera’s own physically and psychologically traumatizing time in prison, and of his 1981 journey in a cargo ship to fight in the Angolan Civil War. The sincerity of Olivera’s poetry is reminiscent of Cuban journalist-poet José Martí’s Versos sencillos (1897), but also, more recently, of the works of exiled writer Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902-1991). Even as they underline confinement, the poems reflect the motifs of transport, both under the auspices of continued captivity (to political regimes, nightmares, desire) and the hope for freedom.
While the difficulty of translating these poems sometimes sprang from their harrowing content and remarkable tonal candor, I took refuge in the poems’ structures. Olivera’s lines are often jagged, some extending over the page and then followed by brief two- or three-word lines that appear to retreat into quieted, controlled thought, before extending again into rumination. The use of white space and the poems’ brevity speak equally to an aesthetic of erratically controlled speech marked with the quick imposition of silence. As with the queer Cuban poets Severo Sarduy and José Lezama Lima, the Afro-descendant poet’s works are reflective of concerns that Caribbean poets elsewhere share: the bounds between sea and land, land and body, dream and reality, and the myth of home faced with the reality of exile. In illuminating these bounds in “Endangered,” for instance, the poet’s voices leap between anthropomorphized depictions of the sun to “heaps of sand” embedded in a landscape of “hardened faces.” Indeed, it seems in Olivera’s poems that imaginaries of landscape are often more alive and animated than the bodies that navigate their place within it.
Written from Cambridge, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, these poems are part and parcel of the ongoing work Olivera has taken up to share his memory of imprisonment and aspirations for uncensored speech and literary discourse in and about Cuba. When I served as an interpreter for Jorge Olivera—at a talk he gave at Harvard University—he shared these objectives with his audience while stating that one of the main poets that provided him sustenance in solitary confinement was a woman from Massachusetts who passed much of her life in solitude: Emily Dickinson.
As Jorge Olivera Castillo has just recently returned to Cuba, he seeks further opportunities to share his voice in English while building literary and political conversations on and beyond the island.
– David Francis
In Stella Díaz Varín’s poems, woman speaks. She speaks as god, as wife, as mother, as poet; she “intone[s] the song of love” and slices society into fine, jagged pieces. She calls to the reader as her confessor, her disappointing lover, her jailer, her child. She asks, flatly, insistently, what choice is hers—“What do you all want me to do with these materials. / Nothing. Except write melancholy poetry.”
Díaz Varín’s materials—her experiences, her words—were vast, and she wrote the poem featured here, “The House,” for her 1959 collection, Time, Imaginary Measure. The book title is apt: her voice is atemporal, daring us to keep her to her generation. Such verse opens itself generously to translation into American English, which prefers directness, wants us to lean in and tell all.
In her introduction to the Collected Work, Chilean poet and academic Eugenia Brito wrote that Díaz Varín’s speaker is a sacred, pagan, archaic figure, one that expresses the poet’s own “fiebre de malestar cultural y de locura reparadora, intuitiva, poética.” This is the motor of her poetry— a fever caused by both her cultural malaise and her intuitive, poetic, healing madness. In translation, the challenge is to let the poems be mad, let them resist sense, without exaggeration or imprisonment.
– Rebecca Levi
El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
November, 2018Claudia Lars (pen name for Carmen Brannon Vega, 1899-1974) is one of El Salvador’s most important and beloved poets. She is required reading in many Salvadoran schools, and several schools have been named in her honor. I first came to know her work in the 1990s, when I worked with a human rights organization in El Salvador: whenever I asked about poets, the reply included Lars, and I was delighted to discover that many of the Salvadorans I met had one or more of her poems memorized. As Stephen Tapscott notes, Lars was “a writer of integrity and continuity whose example and generosity toward younger writers, especially young woman poets, made her a beloved—and even symbolically maternal—figure in Latin American poetry.”
Born to a Salvadoran mother and an Irish-American father, she was raised bilingual, and she learned French in Catholic school. Her youth was spent in the Salvadoran countryside reading Shakespeare, Jules Verne, and Lorca. She eventually translated a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry into Spanish. Though she never traveled to Ireland, she retained a strong sense of connection to what she called “the land of my song.” Her “two bloods” (as Gabriela Mistral writes in a famous letter) became an important theme in her work. Over the course of thirteen volumes of poetry, her poetics expand from an early reliance on the sonnet, ballad, and lira to uniquely-voiced explorations in free verse.
It feels important to bring Lars’s work into English. Beyond the remarkable language and the many worlds brought into view, these poems offer a fresh glimpse of a country many of us in the United States think we know. El Salvador has long been in the news, at first because of the brutal civil war and later because of the U.N.-brokered ceasefire and elections. More recently, violence (in particular gang violence) has garnered headlines. Through it all, the U.S. has played a devastating and disproportionate role, whether by supporting the military governments of the 1980s or by deporting gang members in the years after the war. While such developments have kept the country in our sights, I have always felt that it is too easy to attend to the disasters. We should bear witness to them, certainly, and Lars herself takes note (in a poem like “Crumbs”) as her country veers toward civil war. But the danger is that we let the catastrophes define the country and thereby narrow our sense of the world beyond our borders. What Lars’s work offers is a glimpse of a woman’s mind at work in the years before the tumultuous events of recent decades. Her concerns are worldly, spiritual, and lyrical; her verse offers the perspective of a poet who looks at the world around her—and into the future that is coming—with a longing and hopefulness that strike me as fundamentally and importantly human.
– Philip Pardi
Argentina | Poetry | Spanish | United States
November, 2018What makes Silvina López Medin’s poetry complicated is its philosophical, impressionistic, associative qualities. Often her language steers us away from noticing the despair behind her images by forcing us to work with nuances of abstraction. To some degree, translating the words suffices to render that complexity: present it as she’s presented it. But I have also tried to select words that point to what is missing. Often, López Medin’s poems are more about what is not there than what is there—the missing man, his missing eyes, the missing laughter, the touch that doesn’t happen. This, to me, makes López Medin’s poems consummately Argentinean: it’s a country where there is almost more missing than present, where the stifled voice rings after the spoken falls silent. André Lefevere wrote, “The word does not create a world ex nihilo. Through the grid of tradition it creates a counterworld, one that is fashioned under the constraints of the world the creator lives and works in, and one that can be explained, understood better if these constraints are taken into account.” López Medin creates a counterworld out of the one that exists, her world peopled by what is missing and the language that has survived people’s disappearance. If ever a country needed poets to create a counterworld from the language that has survived its violence, Argentina does.
– Jasmine V. Bailey
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.
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.
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