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.But if we translate it colloquially, are we simply undermining one ofthe most interesting differences in the ways that the two languages ne-gotiate experience?And then, again, if we draw attention to differences by foregroundingthe literal  Or with the gangrene climbing me by a leg  aren t we merelyexoticizing a distinction imposed by our foreignness, by our own pointof view, one that isn t discerned by the readers of the host language asPound and Fennellosa did in their ascription of ideograms to Chinese?(Chinese readers, it must be acknowledged, simply don t see in theircharacters  the horse or  the sun in the trees that the Americans weredelightedly deciphering.)These are the sorts of questions that interest me.The language of the South American Aymara also interests me, andin particular because I ve cotranslated two books by the Bolivian poetJaime Saenz, whose work is notably influenced by Aymara languageand culture.In Aymara, it is impossible to say something like  Joan ofArc burned at the stake in May 1431 since that statement is unqualifiedby anyone s experience and because every sentence must express whetheran action or event was personally witnessed or not.According to RafaelNuñez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego,Aymara is the only studied culture for which the past is linguisticallyand conceptually in front of the people while the future lies behind them.To speak of the future, he notes, elderly Aymara thumb or wave back-ward over their shoulder.To reference the past, they make forwardsweeping motions with their hands and arms. The main word for  eye,Part II: The Translator at Work112  front, and  sight in Aymara means the past, while the basic word for back or  behind also means the future.It has been suggested that in a culture that places a premium on stip-ulating degrees of evidential investment distinguishing the observedfrom the unobserved, the known from the unknown it makes sense tometaphorically position the past in your field of vision while the futurealways speculative remains invisible behind you.In this case, and others (like the widely publicized research by Dan-iel Everett on the  Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition inPirahã ), there seems to be a close relation between the particularitiesof language and the perceptions and conceptions of the speakers of thatlanguage.Here s the Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz channeling an Aymara spiritualregard for the harmony of opposites into a philosophical grammar:What is the night? you ask now and forever.The night, a revelation still veiled.Perhaps a deathform, tenacious and flexed,perhaps a body lost to the night itself.Truly a chasm, a space unimaginable.A subtle, lightless realm not unlike the body dwelling in you,which hides, surely, many clues to the night. . .One time I came close to my body;and realizing I had never seen it, even though I bore it with me,I asked it who it was;and a voice, in the silence, said to me:I am the body who inhabits you, and I am here in the darkness, and Isuffer you, and I live you, and die you.But I am not your body.I am the night.That indelible tone meditative, poised, haunting, mystical and Saenz suse of the full phrase as a line penetrated me and strongly affected thedevelopment of poems I wrote after finishing the Saenz translation.Myown poems at the time were particularly attentive to line breaks, percus-sive prosody, and polyrhythms.Soon after translating Saenz s La Noche, I wrote a poem called A Clearing to accompany photographs by Raymond Meeks.I wasn tThe Great Leap: César and the Caesura113 conscious of the Saenz effect until months after I had written the poemthat begins:Where are you going? Ghosted with dust.From where have youcome?Dull assertiveness of the rock heap, a barren monarchy.Wolfspider, size of a hand, encrusted with dirt at the rubble s edge.What crosses here goes fanged or spiked and draws its color fromthe ground.Xanthic shadow at the edges.Where are we going? Ghosted with dust.From where have we come?This may be an obvious instance of a translation influencing my ownwriting.But I wasn t at all aware of it as I wrote; the influence had beenabsorbed and metabolized.And it has happened the other way as well.In my last book of poems,Eye Against Eye, I worked a medial caesura, a wide blank space, into thelines of a number of poems.In addition to gapping pentameter rhythms,the caesura represented for me the call and response of Southern worksongs and the experience of talking to my wife as we walked in ruts oneither side of a hump in the dirt road where we spent a summer inArkansas.Last year, giving readings from Firefly Under the Tongue, a translation ofthe selected poems of Mexican poet Coral Bracho, I found my eyes slidingacross the gutter of the en face edition as though I were reading theinside margin as a caesura in one of my own poems and plucking Span-ish lines from the left page as I read the translations in English on theright.I developed a strategy for including Spanish lines as part of a per-formance that allows an audience to hear the original language in conver-sation with English.Surprisingly, rather than deforming the music of thepoem, the technique seems to me to intensify and clarify the music.Most recently, when I was translating poems from Santa y Seña (Watch-word in my version), the Villarrutia Award-winning book by Mexican poetPura López Colomé, I began to incorporate Spanish lines into the Englishtranslations  where I heard them, sometimes preceded or followed bytheir English translations.Occasionally, where I meant to stress an ineluc-table music in Spanish or where I thought semantic meaning would beintuited in context, I didn t translate the Spanish at all.Part II: The Translator at Work114 MERRY-GO-ROUNDThree horses came down the hilland sumptuously enteredthe river s transparencya la diafanidad del río.Onewaded out next to me.At times, it paused to drink.A ratos se detenía a beber.At times, it looked me in the eye.A ratos me miraba fijamente.And between us both,y entre ambos,an ancient murmur passedon its sojourn.I realize my method which is derived first from my own poems andmy development of a caesura to approximate the effect of call and re-sponse, and then from my performance of translations at public readingscomplicates the translation in ways that don t represent the original.ButI wonder if the goal of  representing the original is the goal of transla-tion at all, given that the work in translation is necessarily subjected toalteration, transformation, dislocation, and displacement.Maybe thereare times when not  representing the original is precisely what permitsthe creation of something less definitive but more ongoing, a form of trans-lation that amplifies and renews (and even multiplies) the original poetry smeanings.And if the point of translation, to begin with, is that one language isnot enough, doesn t the interaction of two languages celebrate thatapriorism by refusing to fully convert the foreign into a version of thefamiliar?I m influenced in my approach to translation both by Brechtian the-ater, its acknowledgment of artifice, and by Spanish philosopher JoséOrtega y Gasset s interpretation of translation as  another genre entirefrom the original, but it is nevertheless my intention to create poems inEnglish, poems with a comparable impact on the reader [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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