Today, we continue our spotlight on the winners of Asymptote’s annual Close Approximations translation contest, now into its third edition. (Find the official results and citations by judges David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu here.) From 215 fiction and 128 poetry submissions, these six best emerging translators were awarded 3,000 USD in prize money, in addition to publication in our Summer 2017 edition. After interviews with fiction winner Suchitra Ramachandran, fiction runners-up Brian Bergstrom and Clarissa Botsford, and poetry runner-up Sarah Timmer Harvey, today we have poetry runner-up Keith Payne in conversation with Asymptote Assistant Interviews Editor, Claire Jacobson.
Keith Payne is the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award winner 2015–2016. His collection Broken Hill (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2015) was followed by Six Galician Poets (Arc Publications, 2016). Forthcoming from Francis Boutle Publishers is Diary of Crosses Green, from the Galician of Martín Veiga. Keith is director of the La Malinche Readings between Ireland and Galicia and the PoemaRia International Poetry Festival, Vigo. His translation of Welcome to Sing Sing, by Galician poet Elvira Ribeiro Tobío, was a runner-up in Asymptote’s Close Approximations contest. A poet in addition to being a translator, he shares his time between Dublin and Vigo with the musician Su Garrido Pombo.
CJ: The motif of imprisonment strongly undergirds these poems, from Bob Dylan to Ethel Rosenberg and everything in between, with Rosenberg’s Sing Sing prison providing the title and backdrop for these reflections. Where does this theme come from, and what was the significance of writing (and now translating) these famous imprisoned women in verse?
KP: I’ll let Elvira answer this question: “The subject matter of these poems comes from my experience of working in prison and the direct contact I had with the inmates. Since I began in 2001, when I first entered the prison system as a workshop facilitator and tutor, I wanted to write about this world that so many people know nothing about, although we drive past them every day on the highways. But there are also the personal prisons that we are all at times locked into: the prison cells of loneliness, disaffection, of separation. Writing about all those historical figures meant thinking about prison from another point of view, inquiring into the memory of the women and wanting to show the terrible wounds inflicted by totalitarianism and intolerance.”
For me, translating these poems was both the natural extension of hearing Elvira read and of then reading the poems closely in order to find a way into them. Why these poems specifically, and not the hundreds of others that deserve translation from the Galician? Well, in a country like Spain, where so many of the horrors of the Civil War still remain uncovered and unspoken about, as with much of the past in this country where for example the new King’s speech at Christmas urged Spaniards ‘to look ahead, to look forward;’ a sleight of hand urging more forgetfulness. So, the act and art of translation encourages engagement with the cultural memory from beyond the native tongue. There’s also of course the personal horrors and imprisonment of child abuse that has not been fully addressed in countries like Ireland and Spain, so it was important for me to translate these poems into English where voices like that in ‘Crab’ can tell us about how their uncle Fernando showed her “how to stay quiet while he put his hands down my pearl knickers.”
CJ: Can you talk about the choice to keep and footnote the images in several of these poems (namely “Crab,” “Kangaroo,” and “Tiger”), rather than attempt to translate the whole metaphor?
KP: In his translation of Todo e silencio (All is silence), by Manuel Rivas, Jonathan Dunne chooses to maintain some of the ‘exoticisms’ of the text, of reminding us exactly where we are. He reminds us that this story does not take place in North County Dublin or East Belfast, Brooklyn or the Northern Beaches of Sydney. The novel, as with all of Rivas’ work, takes place in Galicia, most often on the Galician coast of the Costa de Morte, the place that is particular and fundamental to his tale telling. Early in the novel, the protagonist is asked to rush home before his father begins the procession in the role of Jesus. Now, the obvious go to in English translation would be ‘he ran like the wind’ or ‘he flew home,’ but no, Dunne allows the Galician phrase to stand and has the boy ‘grease his shins,’ a direct translation from the Galician. In the context, it is perfectly understood what is meant, but the trick here is that Dunne subtly reminds us, as we read through the scene, of where we are. Of locating the novel, of reminding the reader of the elsewhere while still granting us the comfort of the reader’s native tongue.
So, keeping “crab,” “kangaroo” and “tiger” were all important for me both because they emphasize the terrors of prison life, while granting us an alternative perspective. This is fundamental to Elvira’s poems since this is not only an unfamiliar Galician text, but an unfamiliar—for many of us—prison text. We are not only in the otherwhere of Galicia, but in the otherwhere of a women’s prison, as far away as Beijing for most of us, and yet often only down the road.
CJ: In your translator’s note, you wrote that you “only had to find the right tone, and to avoid that translator’s tic of localising everything. In my case, in contorting Elvira’s Galician into a modern Dublinese, or at the very least into the Hiberno-English that is the default register in my ear.” For myself, as a speaker of American English, there were still one or two instances when reading your translation required the extra step of translating the Dublinese, as it were. Can you talk about how you strike the balance of rendering the text in a natural but not over-localized way?
KP: Yes, when I wrote that translator’s note I was in a way challenging both myself and the reader of these poems to pick up on just that element of Hiberno-English that is my default register. Each case is always particular, obviously, and some examples come to mind of the localized language. Cases such as Kei Miller, Tony Harrison and most recently in Galicia, Luz Pichel’s Co Co Co U. These writers are writing out of a particular language, a dialect, a register that itself is the essence of the work.
But in Elvira’s poems, it is not the language of the imprisoned voices that is the essence of the poems but rather their perspective from inside the prison cell—hence, as above, keeping words such as crab, tiger etc. So all it needed was a subtle drop here and there of a word or phrasing such as “grá” or “chilblains,” enough to suggest the otherwhere or othertime of the poems. So yes, I have to watch how far I drift from the setting of the poem, and may not in this case have been successful in curbing my enthusiasm for Hibernicisms; that’ll be for the close reader to decide.
Localising language works at times and at times not, depending on what the poem calls for, one of my favourite Dante translations is Ciaran Carson’s where there’s often a Belfastese ship-rivetted into the text and that’s wholly acceptable if we consider the Civil War that Carson, as with Dante, are writing out of. What I do not or cannot accept at any point, whether newsreader or translator, is the beigeing of language, the neutralising of accent or register so as not to distance anyone. Language is local; for all our travel and world-webbed wideness, we are beasts of habit and most often stay within the same 10 square miles, so let the language reflect that. I also trust the reader to be intelligent enough to make these leaps, to link, imaginatively my Hiberno- English to their regional variation. It’s makes for an altogether more enjoyable reading experience the more the imagination is given play.
I chose words like “grá” for example, which comes from the Irish meaning “love” as in the phrase ‘is grá liom tú’ I love you, as can be read in Michael Hartnett’s ‘mo ghrá thú. I chose the word grá simply because, well, a grá is stronger than a want or a need, I suppose it’s a yearning in standard English –but then the voice in the poem concerned, as much as we know of her, isn’t one that would ‘yearn’ for anything, it’s just not in her register. And grá, with its open vocalic ending, has an onomatopoeic ring to it, the never ended á (/aw/), echoing the length of the prison corridor. There’s the grá to run down the long corridors that comes bang up against the “gall” and the “bane” of the iron doors, which I think are sonically self-explanatory.
CJ: You also wrote that you “heard a tone that it seemed Elvira’s grandmother and my grandmother would have shared,” that some of the words and phrases you encountered seemed to belong to another time. How did you navigate that translation-through-time element in these poems, both in language and in the frequent allusions to historically well-known figures?
There’s really no problem, for me, to navigate through the “translation-through-time element in these poems” or for that matter in any poems. As writers we deal with language, language often considered dead and yet its revival, its twisting and contorting, its mistakes and errors made by non-native speakers in fact enrich the language. An example that comes to mind is by the singer Su Garrido Pombo who has put several of my own poems to music. In one, The Half-Door/Grey Stones, I write ‘I dream of French breads hot and soft I’d butter and eat as quick as you could bake them’ which she sings, unconsciously it must be said as, “I dream with French breads…” because in Spanish you dream ‘con’ something or somebody, you dream ‘with’ something and not ‘of’ it as we do in English. Yet this slight twist opens up the notion of dreaming, the act of the dreaming the participation of the dreamt, it’s much more intimate, don’t you think? So the point about translating through time is also the point of translating through space. In Spanish you “take” a coffee—not for a walk, but up to your lips—just as you take a beer, a wine, a whiskey. And it’s not that long ago that the phrase “Do you take a drink?” was heard in bars all over Ireland at least, and therefore, I imagine, through the U.S. as well. So, often these apparent anachronisms are more reflective than at first appears.
A word like “chilblains” that I mentioned in the translator’s note, is a word that’s fallen out of use in most places. And yet, my mother for example still has the scars on her legs from getting chilblains as a child. And I would wager that there are refugees in the frozen and snow-covered camps hugging edges of Europe right now, that are experiencing the pain of chilblains. So yes, the word needs to be used, it needs to come back into existence.
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Read more interviews with our Close Approximations winners: