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Friday, July 29th, 2011
 In case you have not been following comments on my years-old threads (and really -- who could blame you?): Ben has convinced me to re-open the Novalis translation project that I started back in 2007 but never really got anywhere with. He has contributed some excellent suggestions regarding nearly all of the sentences in the poem's second stanza. Perhaps you started reading this blog sometime since 2007 and you would be interested in helping out with this project, if only you knew about it! -- Well, here is your chance. We're trying to improve on the various English translations of Novalis' poem Hymns to the Night, and we're trying to do it by committee. Take a look and see what you think.
Ben's working translation of the second hymn is below the fold.
Hymn to the Night â…¡Does the Morning always have to return?
Will the obligations of everyday life never stop?
Troublesome activity undermines the heavenly passage of Night.
Won’t the secret offering of love ever burn for ever?
Light’s time was measured out, but the power of the Night is timeless and
boundless.
Holy Sleep, gladden not too seldom the Night’s servant in everyday work.
The span of sleep is endless.
Only fools misunderstand you and know of no sleep except that shadow that
in the half-light of genuine sleep you softly throw over us.
They aren’t aware of you in the nectar of the golden grape, in the almond
tree’s marvelous oil, and in the brown juice of the poppy.
They don’t know you are that which lingers around the bosom of the tender
maiden and makes a heaven in her lap; they have no idea that you open
a path to Heaven from the Old Stories, and that you carry the key to the
dwellings of the blessed,
O, silent bringer of endless secrets.
↻...done
posted evening of July 29th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
So I am reading some of the pieces in this edition of Two Lines (the one I mentioned yesterday) and it is making me feel very good to be included in this crowd. The quality of selections and of translation is just off the charts. And rereading my piece in this context, I honestly think it holds up, that it is of a like quality to the rest of the anthology. (Although almost the first thing I noticed was a problem of tense, a sentence that would have sounded much better with the addition of the word "had". Oh well, too late for revisions.)
- Chris Andrews' translation of the opening of Varamo, by César Aira, had me laughing out loud on the train this morning, underlining passages ("the sequence was dense with meaning, but threatened from within by the infinite"! "the innocent look of an incoherent letter"! "Light dissolved the worries created by its dark twin, thought"!) and longing to read the whole thing.
- Joanne Turnbull's translation of The Letter Killers, by Sigizmund Krzhinzhanovsky, again makes me want to read the whole book. The inklings of asemia contained in Krzhinzhanovsky's protagonist's method of composition have me dying to know where he goes from here.
- Andrew Oakland translates Martin Reiner's meditation on "The Angel of Destruction" -- the Warsaw Pact troops entering Brno when Reiner was 4 years old, in kindergarten. Extremely powerful and, as Oakland asserts in his translator's note, it does not require much familiarity with Czech history to get the point.
- Harry Thomas and Marco Sonzogni translate two poems by Primo Levi which have me wondering how come I have not read any Levi yet.
posted evening of July 19th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, July 18th, 2011
 My copy of the forthcoming issue of Two Lines -- journal of the Center for the Art of Translation -- arrived in today's mail. A nice feeling to see my name there; my translation of the first chapter of The Art of Resurrection is my first contribution to Two Lines, hopefully there will be more to come.
And -- well, this seems like some kind of sign to me, to me who is always looking for portents: The editor's note from Luc Sante mentions in its second sentence "the late Kenneth Koch, one of my greatest teachers" -- so soon after I'd been thinking about Koch in the context of translation...
posted evening of July 18th, 2011: 4 responses
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La pareja sentada en el vagón del tren soltaba risitas y hablaba francés, discutÃa de lo que miraba en la pantalla del iPhone de la mujer. El hombre era alto y delgado, llevaba traje y corbata, y yo estaba mirando un poco divertido su nuez grande. Me preguntaba de qué hablaban, y me preguntaba si alcanzarÃa Penn Station a tiempo para tomar el tren a la casa. Su cuello largo estaba estirado mientras buscaba la pantalla pequeña que su amiga tenÃa en el regazo.
posted evening of July 18th, 2011: Respond
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Friday, July 15th, 2011
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow
He dreamt of his distributed weight
lying hair's-breadth by hair's-breadth this side of collapse
on the springs of his mattress; his linen-clad pillow,
the thousands of hairs on the nape of his neck; dreamt of
covers and sheets and the million thread count, the
mechanics of sleep, of the pale thunder moon, of the
gasp from his lungs as his body escapes
this cold matrix of wakefulness, bitterness, playfulness:
memories of nuzzling close in the arms of the
black grinning spectre of night.
Woke up this morning without much memory of the dream but with the strong impression that I had been dreaming about being asleep. Within a few minutes the poem had assembled itself in rough outline; over the next hour or so it came into a nice sharp focus.The epigraph is from a villanelle by Roethke: one I did not know of until today. I like its sense and its sound. "I learn by going where I have to go."
 Here is a link to several pieces I've posted over the last few months that I've been particularly happy with: Memories and Dreaming -- 7 original pieces plus 2 translations. Maybe if I get a couple more together, I will make a chapbook.
posted evening of July 15th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, July 14th, 2011
Un hombre flaco y con gafas de carey y una coleta marrón está todos los dÃas de pie por delante de la estación del ferro-carril y vende con entusiasmo ramos mustios, marchitado por el sol del verano. Esta tarde me he pasado por su puesto y le he saludado y nosotros pasábamos unos minutos charlando sobre el calor extraño, intentaba me persuadir comprarte tulipanes cortados... Mataba el tiempo hasta el próximo tren, me habÃa perdido el de siempre. Varios semanas ya ando siempre atrasado... Texteé a tu celular que estuviera tarde; entré en la estación para ver si habÃan publicado ya la pista.
posted evening of July 14th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, July 11th, 2011
Two more poems from the "el maestro de Tarca" series:
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…¦)
Con el oÃdo atento
al fragor de las olas
y los vientos
el Maestro de Tarca
nos decÃa:
En el rencor del Lago
me parece oÃr
la voz de un pueblo.
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EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…¦)
His ear turned, alert
to the clamor of the waves
and to the wind
el Maestro de Tarca
would tell us:
In the rancor of the Lake
I seem to hear
the voice of a nation.
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EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…ª)
El maestro de Tarca
aconsejó al marinero:
Si tu pensamiento
alcanza menos
que tu corazón,
piensa dos veces:
La nave tiene
la vela a pájaros
y la quilla a peces. |
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…ª)
El maestro de Tarca
gave counsel to the sailor:
If your thoughts
cannot reach
as far as your heart,
then think two times:
Your ships possess
a sail, like birds
and a keel, like fish. |
The four I have not yet made a stab at are going to remain untranslated for the nonce: #2 is a series of couplets about sailing conditions betokened by different cloud covers (after the manner of "Red sky at night, sailor's delight") -- I would not know where to begin with it. #5 warns of a tiny fish called La Pepesca, which will invade a sailor's body via his asshole and devour his innards. (Can't find any evidence pointing to this being a real thing? A couple of sites refer to the tetra astyanax fasciatus as "la pepesca" but they don't mention it being dangerous, which you'd think they would mention...) #6 is a long, attractive poem with advice for what to hunt and to cook during the summertime. #10 is similar to #2, but concerns sailing at night.Besides these, the maestro makes a brief appearance in one of the final poems of the book, "The Islands", which is dedicated to Ernesto Cardenal. Here he is telling the people of the Lake a legend of a once and future king:
-- En Solentiname,
archipiélago de las codornices
pereció Tamagastad
contra los escollos de la Venadita.
Allà lloró la tribu a su héroe.
Allà todavÃa lloran los que pasan
esperando una antigua promesa.
Allà dice la leyenda
que ha de volver a su pueblo
con una palabra nueva.
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-- In Solentiname,
archipelago where quails nest
Tamagastad bled out his life
on the reefs of Venadita.
His tribe wept there for its hero.
And all who pass by there still weep;
they're waiting on an ancient promise.
For legend tells us there
that he must come back to his people
bearing a new word.
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posted evening of July 11th, 2011: 1 response
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Sunday, July 10th, 2011
Still thinking about Cuadra, about the teacher and his teachings,
I met up with local cyclists for our Sunday morning ride.
We rode today through glorious weather up to Thomas Edison’s
Old factory in West Orange, to see the rusty old machinery,
The evidence that a genius once called our small hamlet home.
But I didn’t take the tour, still felt like riding, so I split off
From the group and rode up Eagle Rock into the reservation.
It’s a long, slow climb, fantastic when
You get up to the top and see
The valley spread before you,
Tops of trees like ocean waves and
White rooftops like breakers stretching out
Through Hudson County, in the distance see the
Skyline of Manhattan silhouetted in the yellow haze.
Until 2001 that skyline peaked at two glass towers --
Here the county’s built a shrine to the thousands dead who fell that day;
I walked along the path and looked across into the past, remembered
That September morning a decade past, and all the time gone by since then.
This is a different Eagle Rock, no maestro sat here telling riddles;
It’s got its own long history, its meanings and its influence.
I rode back down to meet the group, the wind was blowing past me hard,
It blew away deep memories that had bubbled to the surface,
Cleared away my thoughts of ages past,
My darkening meditations
And the sunshine of this summer morning
Calmed that frothing turbulence --
Rode back home with the group, and now a quiet afternoon.
posted afternoon of July 10th, 2011: Respond
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The first and eighth poems in the "el maestro de Tarca" series both feature el maestro seated on Eagle Rock, telling his disciples what is fitting and just.
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â… )
Sentado en la piedra del Ãguila
el maestro de Tarca nos decÃa:
Es conveniente
es recto
que el marinero
tenga cogidas
las cosas por su nombre.
En el peligro
son las cosas sin nombre
las que dañan.
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EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â… )
Seated up on Eagle Rock
el maestro de Tarca told us:
It is fitting
it is just
that the seafarer
should grasp
all things by their name.
In times of danger
the things without names
are the ones that harm.
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Carlos MejÃa Godoy sings
about grasping all things by their name
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…§)
Sentado en la piedra del Ãguila
el maestro de Tarca nos decÃa:
Es conveniente
es recto
que el marinero
olvide a las aguas
su aventura.
Estela hecha
tiempo vivido
Estela deshecha
tiempo borrado. |
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…§)
Seated up on Eagle Rock
el maestro de Tarca told us:
It is fitting
it is just
that the seafarer
should entrust his adventure
to the waters.
Wake formed
time lived
Wake dissolved
time erased. |
posted morning of July 10th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, July 9th, 2011
In the third "teachings of el maestro de Tarca" poem, the customary introduction is reversed: here Cifar is speaking to the teacher. This suggests to me that the other poems in this series, where el maestro is speaking "to me" or "to us", are told from the POV of Cifar. The two main difficulties for me in translating this poem were the conditional tense of "jurarÃa" and the parallelism in the final two lines. I'm not really sure what conditional tense does -- from its name it sounds like it has a similar function to subjunctive. Schulman translates "jurarÃa" as "I would swear", which sounds ok, but makes me ask what the condition is. I am going with "I could swear" which sounds a little more natural to my ears. (As a weak bonus, "I could swear it" scans the same as "jurarÃa" -- though in the rest of the poem, I am not doing much to preserve the metric pattern.) The last two lines, el maestro's response to Cifar, are the koanic element of this poem. In the original there is a strong parallelism: "Lo conocido/ es lo desconocido." I am going with a literal rendering to preserve this parallelism even though I think it mangles the meaning of the words slightly. Schulman uses the wordy "That which is known/ is the unknown", which I think is slightly closer to Cuadra's meaning, but not nearly as pleasant to read.
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…¢)
Maestro, dijo Cifar,
seguà tu consejo
y crucé el Lago
buscando la isla desconocida.
Fui con viento benévolo
a la más lejana, virgen y perdida
Pero
que yo conocà esa isla
jurarÃa!
que su sonoro acantilado
devolvió mi canto un dÃa
jurarÃa!
que era la misma mujer
casi lo jurarÃa!
Sonrió el maestro y dijo:
Lo conocido
es lo desconocido. |
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…¢)
Maestro, said Cifar,
I followed your counsel
and crossed the Lake
in search of the unknown island.
I sailed with a gentle wind
to its farthest point, untouched and lost
But
I knew this island
I could swear it!
her echoing cliffs
had once already returned my song
I could swear it!
it was the same woman
I could almost swear it!
El maestro smiled and spoke:
The known
is the unknown. |
The fourth poem in the series is a sweet little gem.
EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£)
Dijo el maestro
de Tarca:
Coge la cigarra
del ala
Al menos
llevas en la mano
el canto.
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EL MAESTRO DE TARCA (â…£)
Thus spoke el maestro
de Tarca:
Seize the locust
by its wing
At least
carry in your hand
its song.
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(I am tampering with the voice of the verb "llevas" in the next-to-last line -- Schulman renders it as "you carry" which is true to the original; whereas "coge" is imperative, "llevas" is indicative.) (Update: here is a better idea.)
posted afternoon of July 9th, 2011: Respond
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