Translating Neruda

Posted on December 15, 2009 by

Literary translation has been happening for ten years now in elementary and middle-school classrooms via the Center's Poetry Inside Out program. In 2003, Audrey Larkin was a fourth-grader in a Spanish-language dual-immersion program at Buena Vista Elementary School in San Francisco when she was introduced to PIO's translation curriculum. Reflecting on her experience today, Audrey writes:

Literary translation, as I soon found out, and continually rediscover, is terribly difficult. To translate a poem one must first understand a highly complex work of art well enough to exactly transpose its meaning into another language. One must delve into the mind of an extremely gifted writer and see the poem through the poet's eyes. But that is just half the work. To translate a poem well, one must also have a remarkable sense of two languages, of their nuances, their wordplay, their flow, their sounds, and the subtle difference between synonyms. In brief, especially for a girl still learning Spanish, it was, and is, a thankless task, because no matter how much one works, edits, tweaks, and shuffles through a Spanish-English dictionary, the poem simply sounds better in the original language. Still, in the process of translation, one comes to know a poem so well, so intimately, as each word is pondered, considered, and wrestled with, that a little bit of the author's brilliancy is rubbed into the translator, and one understands, even if it is unconsciously, something more about language and poetry. It is inevitable. Thus, through the process of translation I was introduced to poetry.

As a ninth-grader, Audrey participated in PIO's after-school class, Fuego de Palabras, which spent a number of sessions last fall working on the Elemental Odes of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. An ode is a poem written in praise of a person, place, or thing. Neruda dedicated most of his more than two hundred published odes to the most commonplace, everyday things: salt, a lizard, the ocean, tomatoes. Neruda's odes drop down the page in skinny little lines, the reader's eye descending from image to image. Here's how Audrey and her friend and classmate Erida Tosini-Corea translated a few lines of Oda a unas flores amarillas:

estalla
sobre la arena el oro
de una sola
planta amarilla
y se amarran
tus ojos
a la tierra
on the sand
the gold of a single
yellow plant
explodes
and fastened
are your eyes
to the earth

There are two Spanish verbs in this passage, estallar and amarrar. Their English translations, explode and fasten, are not particularly controversial. What provoked a lively class discussion is the way Erida and Audrey chose to re-order the sentence across the lines that ladder it down the page. They moved explodes/ estalla from the beginning to the middle of the passage, making a more natural subject-verb English word-order and keeping it as a one-word line so that explodes seems to explode in front of you: a tiny explosion of yellow flowers against the self-important magnificence of the ocean . . .
Then the two young translators did something a little trickier. The translators held onto the verb-subject Spanish order in which fastened/ se amarran comes before the eyes which are fastened. That sounds weird, one of their classmates objected. Shouldn't it be your eyes/ are fastened/ to the earth?
Erida and Audrey staunchly defended their decision: When you're reading the poem, they explained, your eyes move from the explosion to the fastening.
Interestingly, our two young translators find very different ways to work as poets. Erida Tosini-Corea eschews the example suggested by Neruda in his Odes to write in long lines, first in Spanish and then translating into English, piling up sensory images to attain a synaesthetic vision beyond mere description:
Cae la lluvia
pero el sol acaricia mi mejilla
y susurra melodías intoxicantes en mi oído
llevándome al fin de mi mundo
estoy cegada por colores
disecar un rayo es convertirte en luz
coexistiendo con la extasía
lo que veo es inalcanzable en el arte
e indescriptible en mi lengua
Rain pours
but the sun caresses my cheek
and whispers intoxicating melodies in my ear
leading me to the end of my world
I am blinded by colors
to dissect one ray is to become light
coexisting with ecstasy
what I see is unattainable in art
and indescribable in language

Audrey Larkin, on the other hand, closely follows Neruda's example, writing in skinny lines, dropping just a few words on each rung to create her poem. In her ode to a tangerine, also written first in Spanish and translated into English, the longer she looks at the fruit, the bigger it seems, until it becomes:
un mundo
orbitando
su propio sol
que todavía no se
ha descubierto
los científicos
llenos de instrumentos para
medir eternidad
pero faltando
un
sentido de sabor
a world
orbiting
its own sun
still
undiscovered
by scientists
full of instruments to
measure eternity
but lacking
a
sense of taste

What a wonder: an everyday fruit becomes an undiscovered world which all the science in the universe is unable to measure without the humble human senses!
Translation is the closest possible reading of a text. As Poetry Inside Out's student translators practice the forms and devices of great poets, they begin to re-imagine themselves as creative members of a larger literary community stretching across continents and centuries.