READIN

Monday, June 10th, 2013

🦋 La casa de la loca

My latest translation project is the story "Lavender Mist (1955)", from La casa de la loca. An exciting project, and I'm close to finished with it; I'm planning to submit this story to Asymptote journal's Close Approximations contest.

This book is another that I bought on the strength of its cover illustration -- Rafael Trelles' painting "El suceso inesperado" (The Unexpected Event) pulled me right in. Contents:

1. "The Madwoman's House (1915)" -- Rosario Diaz, widow of the author Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, works on an unfinished story of her husband's.
2. "Glen Island (1900)"
3. "Black House (1904)"
4. "A Few Prosaic Lines (1915)" -- a woman sews clothing to support her family and writes (and translates!) poetry on pieces of a cardboard box.
5. "Lavender Mist (1955)" -- Salvador Suárez visits the MoMA.
6. "Birds of the Soul (1963)" -- After he was released from prison, Nathan Leopold ended his days as a birdwatcher in the Caribbean. Here he writes about the Paloma Sabanera (Columba Inornata Wetmorei), the final entry in his Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
7. "Coconut Milk (1988)" -- A sort of repulsively smug New Yorker named Thomas Smith describes his travails in attempting to reproduce a recipe from Puerto Rican Desserts: An Illustrated Cooking Tour of our New Possession by Rose Kilmer (1900), given him by his uncle William.
8. "The Poison Pen (1999)" -- Nurse Belisa Weaver, daughter of an Irish man and a Puerto Rican woman and mother of an estranged son, tries to make some money for her retirement by connecting couples seeking to adopt with pregnant young women.
9. "The Green Man's Interlude (20--)"

posted evening of June 10th, 2013: Respond
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Sunday, May 26th, 2013

🦋 at the MoMA

-- Compadre, usted es un bárbaro, pinta como tuviera un ojo en la luna y el otro in Marte. Su pintura no me gusta, pero me ha hecho llorar y las lágrimas son la sangre del alma.

Salvador Suárez to Jackson Pollock (from "Lavender Mist" by Marta Aponte Alsina)

posted evening of May 26th, 2013: 1 response
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Friday, May 24th, 2013

🦋 Cuentos ya no traducidos

reconozca yo
en sueños
mi tiempo sea pasado
que los jotes que me mordisquean
el hidalgo
tengan últimamente razón

reconozco
en sueños
los nenes que me
habían llamado papá
érase una vez
en sueños

reconozco
por supuesto
no sería justo

reconozco
por supuesto
debo admitir, o más bién
me corresponde a mi decir
últimamente
afirmarme que
reconozco


en sueños

posted evening of May 24th, 2013: Respond
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Sunday, May 12th, 2013

🦋 Units of rhythm, units of syntax

I was complaining to a friend recently about how the New Yorker had printed its translation of "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" split up into paragraphs where the original was a single paragraph, and he did not really get where I was coming from -- if it was more readable in paragraphs, isn't that the way to go? As I'm reading the first sentence of Queen Isabel was singing rancheras, I'm wondering why it seems so important to me that this block be preserved as a single sentence, thinking I ought to justify that somehow. If it's more readable broken up, why not break it up?

In the flow of a book or story I do not slavishly follow the syntactic boundaries in the source text -- well perhaps I err a bit on the side of slavishly following them; still. There are certainly points where a period in English seems like the correct translation of a comma or a y in Spanish. But these long paragraphs and long sentences in Spanish seem to me to fill more than a syntactic role; they are communicating a rhythm and pacing which splitting them up has a tendency to spoil. And not only in Spanish -- being a single paragraph seems to me like a fundamental quality of (for instance) "Ein Landarzt"; it pulls the reader insistently into the driving rhythm of the story, will not let go.

posted evening of May 12th, 2013: Respond
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Friday, May 10th, 2013

🦋 Translating rhythm, translating syntax

(Rivera Letelier seems really to have given my reading and translation a focus they did not have before.)

Terminan de apagarse los sones de la canción mexicana que antecede a la que él quiere escuchar, y en tanto la aguja del tocadiscos comienza a arrastrarse neurálgica por esa tierra de nadie, por esos arenosos surcos estériles que separan un tema de otro, el ilustre y muy pendejísimo Viejo Fioca, paletó a cuadritos verdes y marengo pantalón sostenido a un jeme por debajo del ombligo -- pasmoso prodigio de malabarismo pélvico --, trémulo aún de la curda del día anterior y palido hasta la transparencia, llena su tercer vaso de vino tinto arrimado espectralmente al mesón del único rancho abierto a esas horas de domingo --...

So, wow; the first sentence of Queen Isabel Was Singing Rancheras is seven pages long... I enjoyed the challenge of getting the multipage paragraphs in Resurrection across with a sense of the driving rhythm of the original, and communicating the sense of it. This is kind of ridiculous! Those paragraphs had maybe page-long sentences at some points, but 7? Gorgeous though. I'm having trouble believing he was able to do this on page one of his first novel (1994) and have it be successful -- a popular novel! It seems audacious and intimidating.

posted evening of May 10th, 2013: 2 responses
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Saturday, April 13th, 2013

🦋 Reflections on the desert

With all this composition and revision, I am getting unnervingly close* to having a finished draft translation of The art of resurrection on my computer and in my notebooks and in my head. Now is the time for me to admit to myself, it is very unlikely that this will ever see publication, or be read by anyone else than (obsessively) myself and (gratifyingly) friends I send the Word file to. (And if you are one of those friends, thanks greatly for the interest and for the kind words, and if you are not but would like to be, then definitely get in touch, I am glad to send drafts around.) This will very likely end up in the category (if there even is such a category) of "fan-translation," an amateur's first foray into translation of a novel, spurred on by infatuation with the book; something to be proud of certainly but not something that will (so to speak) make my name as a translator.

So what do I get out of it if not publication? Well -- it ia a hugely fun project. So there's that -- I can't really think of a better way I could have spent these past months of evenings and weekend, than by reading and rereading this book and my translation of it. And too, it has truly been increasing the intimacy of my relationship with language: I am feeling fluent in English in ways I had not realized before, that I lacked fluency. I think I am gaining, as well, some skill in or understanding of storytelling, and in the process of revision.

So -- that's my story and I'm sticking with it. (And yes, I am submitting this translation for publication, thinking of a couple of different places. And keeping my fingers crossed.) Tomorrow I am going to start composing my notes and excerpts for the submission. Here are a couple of great things about this novel: Narrative Person. I don;t think I've encountered another author able so easily and so subtly/seamlessly to shift between 3rd-person narrative, 1st-person recollection, 1st-person-plural narration, paraphrase and dialog -- the subtlety of structure can be a bit tricky to untangle at times, but it makes for a very pleasant sensual response to the way you slide around, between different camera angles and lenses. Squalid Erotica. The sex scenes between Magalena Mercado and the Christ of Elqui are uncomfortably, weirdly titillating . Haunting Irreality. The eerie final chapters will keep you up at night. (This is almost the opposite of Magical Realism!) Slapstick Meditation on Faith. Rivera Letelier's reverent (and at the same time bawdy) treatment of the Christ of Elqui's faith and lunacy is inspiring and touching. I have had the sense all along, despite the passages that I couldn't quite get in the original, that this is a great novel; and reading the English is bearing that out. This is just a pearl of a book.

* Progress at the moment, for those keeping score at home: 23 chapters, which is 62,000 words, completed in a very-close-to-finished-draft state. Three chapters at the end which I have not started working on yet, and two in the middle that I skipped over as insufficiently fun. I am going to leave those five for the time being and focus on getting this draft actually finished, and picking out the chapters that I want to include in the submission.

↻...done

posted evening of April 13th, 2013: 2 responses
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Saturday, March 30th, 2013

🦋 Translation, Revision: practice and progress

In the past few months of not-blogging-much (and not at all, I suppose, about translation), I have been quite busy with reading and re-reading The art of resurrection and extending the excerpt I published in translation. I thought a good thing to write about here would be the manner in which I've been doing the translation.

Essentially I've split the process into four (or 3 1/2) phases, rough draft, revision, close read of the revision, second revision. I have (mostly) finished this process for the first 2/3 of the book and taking a break to look at what I've come up with; I must say, reading my translation feels a whole lot to me like reading the original feels to me -- not sure if that has any bearing at all on how others will perceive the text.

The rough draft process is always done longhand; much of it takes place on the train to and from work. This is where I read the Spanish and write very rough, almost literal translation as fast as I can, with (ideally) very little re-reading. The goal is to come up with something vaguely like a Google Translate translation, where the sentence structure is not quite right and some of the words are untranslated or incorrectly translated, but the overall structure and meaning of the sentence can be divined.

Revision is transferring my rough draft onto the computer, tweaking the language so it reads smoothly and sounds right, and communicates the image in the original. This is a much slower process and involves a lot of looking up words and phrases (at variously, Span¡shD!ct, Google Translate, WordReference.com,... the list goes on...) and consulting with friends and acquaintances, thanks all!

Now it's time for a close read of what you've done so far. Print out a few chapters of what's on the computer, and spend a few days reading it, marking changes in the text or on the computer. When done, go through the document adding in the changes you have marked.

What's great about this process is I never feel like I am or should be dealing with a finished product so I'm free to leave notes and uncertainties in the text. What I have now for chapters 1-16 reads really well, mostly, but there are still notes in it about changes that need to be made. Obvious? Probably, but this feels like the first time I am really believing it.

posted afternoon of March 30th, 2013: 2 responses
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Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

The narrator himself is just the author,
it's a shorthand, see,
unclothes himself seductively
and cryptically
and hands to you
his heart

posted evening of February 27th, 2013: 1 response

Saturday, January 26th, 2013

Anoche soñaba contigo y con el abuelo.

Miramos al oeste donde se crepusculaba
y me apretaste la mano mientras
me explicabas la ausencia de los padres
y la furia del viejo.

Y encima de todo y atrás de todo se parecía
rondar el rostro y el ceño hostil de él, de Pablo Josner.
Voy soñando y lo que sueño no me parece tal sueño.

--

from journals of Lorenzo Josner (undated)

posted morning of January 26th, 2013: 2 responses
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Sunday, January 20th, 2013

🦋 Otra vez «Prufrock»

caminamos tú y yo
se anochece en el cielo
como un borracho en el arroyo
visitamos calles desiertos
esquinas quejumbrosas
y otras calles las que sigamos
y que formen argumento
cada vez mas aparente
hacia un propósito muy obvio
lo que sin embargo no podemos llamar
por cualquier nombre
o palabra

pero vengamos, no discutamos.

posted afternoon of January 20th, 2013: 2 responses
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