This is the third and last installment of my interview to poet and translator Robin Myers. The first part was published on May 11 and the second on July 7.
Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): I would like to delve a bit deeper into the relation between creative writing and translation. How does being a poet inform your translation practice or the other way around?
Robin Myers (RM): Poetry led me into translation, and I started translating only poetry, so what feels absolutely shared by my experiences of both writing poetry and translating anything is this compulsive contact with language as a material thing, as something that you get to experiment with. It happens of course in writing prose, too, but I think there’s something especially tactile about poetry, and this sense that it always could’ve been otherwise. There’s just a kind of intoxication I’ve felt with poetry that has made me think about translation as a site for looking for freedom within constraints. I do think there’s something different about writing poetry and translating it, however, at least for me. When you’re translating, you’re never entirely by yourself in your own head. I mean, in writing you’re not either, really. As we’ve been talking about, there’s always this sense of where you come from and who you’re seeking with. But with translating you’re writing toward something and with something that’s already concretely there. When I start writing poetry again after a long time of mostly just translating, there’s a renewed sense of me making something up out of nothing, which is both thrilling and scary.
AM: And there’s also not a harsh division between writing creatively and translating. In a way, when you write, you are translating a continuous flow of language or ideas into the more precise form of a poem on the page. So we can even consider writing a self translation.
RM: Yes, and I love how Kate Briggs talks about that in This Little Art. It’s easy to overgeneralize this stuff—Briggs says something like, “Say it too fast and it all goes down the trap door.” Like, okay, all writing is translating, we can agree on that, but how do we keep from getting lost in the abstraction? How else can we get at the differences or the similarities between the two practices?
I’ll say that translating has also helped me get through my fallow periods as a poet in a really gratifying way. I am a fairly off-and-on poetry writer. I have periods of writing a lot followed by long, long periods when I don’t write at all. And that used to fill me with despair. Translation keeps me company during those times in a way that lets me know that I’m engaged with language and that I’m collecting things and learning.
AM: And I imagine it is also, you know, healthy to just inhabit someone else’s mind, which you do through translation. That can get you away from yourself a bit.
RM: Yeah, and kind of push you into writing as a translator in ways you wouldn’t do ordinarily. Translation invites you out. It invites you to break habits, to realize that your habits are just habits, nothing more. It shows you that you can write in many different modes. It also shows me how confusing the concept of “the voice” is, you know? What is that?
AM: Exactly, what is the voice? And where do voices meet when you are translating? How does the voice of the translator come through? Because translators have a voice. They’re not just mechanically moving a text from one language to another. They put a lot of themselves [in], from the very act of selecting what to translate to choosing the words for their translations.
RM: Yes, there’s a translator’s own personal sense of music and pacing and phrasing, and the vocabulary that leaps to mind the most “naturally,” with the understanding that there are usually, you know, six or more words that you could’ve used instead, and the cultural context of these words. To give an example, I was co-translating a book by Ave Barrera with Ellen Jones, who is a British translator, and it’s going to be published by Charco Press, which is based in Scotland but distributes in both the UK and the US. When Ellen and I were working on our translation, we would privilege terms in UK English, trying to settle on a lexicon which was predominantly British, while also trying to choose words that would at least be recognizable, hopefully, most of the time, to readers in both the UK and the US. It felt like a translation and a half! And it was a reminder to me of how intensely contextual speech is, and [of] our sense of voice and tone, even within the same language and its variations.
AM: Yes, I always feel like I’m missing something when I read texts originally written in English, as someone who is a native Spanish speaker.
RM: Yes, I really like the idea that we read in our own accents, too. Accent is a word we use predominantly to refer to oral speech, but of course we hear ourselves and we hear others when we read.
AM: Sometimes I try to exaggerate a British accent when reading a British poet, to see if I am missing something. But hopefully I’m not missing too much.
I’ve brought this poem “Joy” by Alejandro Crotto that you translated for Asymptote. And I’m very curious about some choices you made and about your process because I’m also a translator and I am constantly asking myself how to best carry some phrases from one language to the other. Something that struck me in your translation of Crotto’s poem is that you shifted the order of the elements in a list. In Spanish the list goes “dromedarios, elefantes de trompas extravagantes, delfines” (dromedaries, elephants of extravagant trunks, dolphins), but the list in your translation is “dromedaries, dolphins, elephants of extravagant trunks.” Could you elaborate a bit on your thought process for this shift?
RM: I have to confess I can’t remember the exact moment I made this decision, but I think I know why I did. It’s because of the meter. This is a poem translated in meter. Alejandro is a poet who is extremely attuned to meter and writes for the most part in metrical lines, though he does it so gracefully that you can’t always tell he’s following metrical patterns at all. Usually, when I shift the order of the elements in a list, that’s why. Unless, of course, the order in a list is meant to establish a logical sequence, or if the order itself is essential to communicating what’s going on. But in this case I took the liberty of rearranging it to accommodate the metrical line that begins before the list itself: “the ancient shrews bore dromedaries, / dolphins, elephants of extravagant / trunks.”
AM: Yes, it’s a hidden meter. I didn’t actually notice it until reading it aloud. So how do you translate meter? Especially from a language like Spanish that has really specific meters such as endecasílabos, alejandrinos, or octosílabos. Do you try to find equivalent meters in English or do you develop your own patterns?
RM: It depends on how structured the poem is in its own meter. Alejandro has some extreme examples, like sonnets that can also be read as sets of interlocking alejandrinos, and in a case like that I don’t even try to replicate the structure because I don’t have those kind of chops! I’d focus on replicating one element, like the iambic pentameter, say. And maybe I won’t try to reproduce the rhyme scheme but focus instead on assonance and consonance and other sound elements that will make the poem sonically rich without fixating on a more “exact” equivalent. There are also times when maybe the poem isn’t written in a specific metrical form, like a sonnet, but the poet will sort of shift in and out of different metrical lines, so I’ll try to do something similar in English, maybe in an even looser way. I don’t go line by line thinking how to get a line to correspond to a specific meter, but when I translate metrically it’s usually in different lengths of iambic lines.
AM: Something that I also noticed is that you sometimes suppress prepositions in Spanish. So for example here it says “la rama que se estira con sus peras sembradas de perales” then you translate it to “the branch that stretches out, [comma] its pears seeded with pear trees.”
RM: I think this is a case where I felt that the most important part was the stretching as an action, and that the following line “Its pears seeded with pear trees” implies the “with.” You know? It’s stretching out, it’s bearing these pears that are in turn seeded with their seeds which will become pear trees. So there is this sense of them being latent.
AM: That’s great. And of course, I’m not questioning these decisions. I’m genuinely curious about them because I think that sometimes a translation can make or break a translator’s reputation, which I think is a bit unfair. The author is dead, but translators are very much alive in the public watch and often have to take hard blows when they make controversial choices.
RM: Totally. And to be honest, in rereading the passage in a cursory way right now, that’s something that I might try to do differently if I were to translate the poem today.
AM: That’s wonderful—the idea that translation is not a fixed and rigid process but something that is always transforming. I also brought this book Tener/Having that you published with Antílope. Could you talk about what inspired it?
RM: Yes, this is my second book of poems. I say that because it’s very different than the first one, and I wrote it at a time when I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to start writing poems again. My first book is made up of poems that I’d written over a long period of time without thinking of them at the time as a book. It was just like eventually there were enough of them and they seemed to speak to each other enough that they could be sequenced as a manuscript. But this time, I was feeling frustrated with my habits as a poet. I knew I tended to write more narrative poems, discursive poems, which I approached in an almost essayistic way. And I knew that I wanted to try something really new but I wasn’t sure how. I had been interested in the concept of the persona poem, which are poems that take on the voices of characters. So, I started to think my way into another voice that felt very far away from my habitual voice. It started with a kind of character, very loosely, impressionistically based on an old man I’d met in my early twenties. He died a number of years ago now. He just had this incredible voice, in both senses—like the actual sound of his voice and then way he spoke, an amazing sense of narrative presence. I started asking myself what it would be like for me, as a very young person, to think my way into the voice of someone who was looking back on a long life. It was just something that seemed like a real reach for me empathically and aesthetically and that’s how it started. I wanted to write very short and terse poems that felt like someone speaking to you. And as I started to write these poems, which became excuses, ways of angling myself into images that I’d been collecting for a while, the voice started to change, and it started to feel like a blurring between what I felt to be my own voice—whatever that is—and a fictional character’s voice. In that sense, it gave me a new way of thinking about voice in general, about how porous it is and how it can change.
AM: And speaking about one’s own voice is hard, as we’ve been discussing. Where does it start? When does it end?
RM: How does it evolve? Exactly.
AM: So, to finish, would you like to read a poem from your book?
RM: I’m going to read the last poem.
AM: Sure.
RM: It’s untitled, like all the rest of the poems in the book.
And when
in a dream I askedsomeone wiser than myself
what the hell it was allabout, she said
love, and I said Ohplease, but it all
falls away,we are made of water,
we live in an oilspill, we kiss
the world through a handkerchief,we invented
rubber bullets,there must
be somethingelse. And I saw
that she was notgoing to answer me
again.
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator of both poetry and prose. Her latest translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), and The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing). She is currently working on a book of essays about translating poetry.
Alan Mendoza Sosa holds a BA degree in Comparative Literature in English and Spanish from Brown University, and an MPhil in Latin American Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature from The University of Cambridge. He is an incoming student at Yale University’s PhD in Spanish and Portuguese. He is interested in eighteenth century Hispanic Culture, the Latin American Avant-Gardes, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Studies, and Contemporary Hispanic Literature.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: