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
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
100 Refutations | Chile | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
June, 2018Sor Tadea de San Joaquín (1750-1827) was a Catholic nun and writer during the Chilean colonial period. She is regarded as the first woman poet of Chile.
100 Refutations | Chile | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Rosario Orrego (1834-1879) was a renowned Chilean writer and women’s rights activist during the nineteenth century. Her pioneering novels, poetry, and journalism led to her becoming the first woman in Chile to be recognized as an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Santiago.
Laughter, anguish, pain, and beauty are all sensations Rodrigo Lira’s poetry arouses. Though his life was cut short by suicide in 1981, he continues to influence contemporary Chilean poetry today, establishing an essential point of reference between experimental neo-avant garde movements of the 1970s and 80s and younger generations of post-dictatorship poets. Combining erudite literary knowledge, intense language, and dark burlesque humor, Lira’s work is often read in comparison to contemporaries Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn, both of whom greatly admired his poetry.
From a historical and political perspective, Lira offers a glimpse into the suffocating environment of Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing dictatorship (1973-90). Shifting between explicit and more concealed political criticism, Lira’s poetry profoundly reflects the psychology of living under dictatorship, as expressed in “4 Three Hundred and Sixty-Fives and One 366 Elevens,” one of his longer poems whose obscure title refers to the number of years past since the military coup of September 11, 1973. In this poem, Santiago is on the verge of dystopia and, despite attempts to resist repression, the lyric personae only finds consolation in death, albeit through humor.
Interest in the poetry and figure of Rodrigo Lira has yet to spread much beyond the borders of Chile, due mainly to the difficulty of translating his work into other languages. While exploiting Chilean slang and complex wordplay, Lira also develops a particular way of integrating pop and popular culture into his writing. The effort to transfer such poetry into another language, with its own distant cultural references, must forsake certain interpretations and possible impacts among Chilean readers. These translations attempt to break down those barriers and bring Lira’s poetry closer to an English-speaking audience.
- Thomas Rothe
Héctor Hernández Montecinos was born in Santiago, Chile in 1979. His books of poetry that were published between 2001 and 2003 are collected in [guión] (Lom Ediciones: Santiago, Chile, 2008); [coma] (Lom Ediciones, 2009) collects his writings from 2004-2006. His other books include Putamadre (Zignos: Lima, 2005), Ay de Mi (Ripio: Santiago, 2006), La poesia chilena soy yo (Mandrágora cartonera: Cochabamba, 2007), Segunda mano (Zignos: Lima, 2007), A 1000 (Lustra editores: Lima, 2008), Livro Universal (Demonio negro: Sao Paulo, 2008, traducido al portugués), Poemas para muchachos en llamas (RdlPS: Ciudad de México, 2008), La Escalera (Yerba Mala cartonera: La Paz, 2008) El secreto de esta estrella (Felicita cartonera: Asunción, 2008), La interpretación de mis sueños (Moda y Pueblo: Stgo, 2008) y NGC 224 (Literal: Ciudad de México, 2009). He has been invited to present his poetry in Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru. Since 2008, he has lived in Mexico where he teaches, and directs a small literary press called Santa Muerte cartonera. He holds a doctorate in literature with a focus in art theory.
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).