Posts filed under 'poetry translation'

Translation Tuesday: “Zinc” by Róger Lindo

March 28, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Matthew Byrne

The rodent will be captivated, as I will, by the hailstones lashing against the roof.

Salvadoran poet Róger Lindo tr. Matthew Byrne sets a tempestuous scene: a night storm both ethereal and mundane that compels all, from the dormouse to the soldier, to collective awe. This Translation Tuesday, we invite you to bear witness to ‘the nocturnal splendor’.

“Zinc”

I have only hubris and kindness.

–G. Ungaretti

Beastly storm.
A dormouse peers out halfway.
The rodent will be captivated, as I will,
by the hailstones
lashing against the roof.
The city mnemonist is here,
a soldier yearning,
drawing near, intrigued by
the nocturnal splendor.
I’ve been a solitary worker bee
in the afternoon,
but I’ve also sung
plowing the soil.
When the rain eases off,
we’re alone with the crickets.

Translated from the Spanish by Matthew Byrne.

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Motion and Emotion: Curtis Bauer on Home Reading Service

December 23, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

As a poet, I need to hear how words sound to my ear, but also how they feel in my mouth.

Our November book club selection, Franco Morábito’s award-winning Home Reading Service, is a fast-paced tour de force rife with twists and turns. It seems fitting, then, that its discussion should touch upon various forms of change and movement. In the following abridged interview, Editor-at-Large Josefina Massot and translator Curtis Bauer talk about the possible shifts within an author’s oeuvre, the back-and-forths between translation drafts, the significance of a character’s subtle motions, travel’s impact on a poet’s work, and movement as great poetry’s defining trait—understood, among other things, as its ability to move us.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Josefina Massot (JM): I read somewhere that you discovered Morábito’s work through El idioma materno (2014), a collection of short pieces that he originally wrote for Argentine newspaper Clarín. You said you found it different from anything you’d encountered before; that it instantly struck you as something you wanted to engage with. What was your first reaction to El lector a domicilio? Did it seem to follow some kind of line relative to Morábito’s prior work, or was it fundamentally different?

Curtis Bauer (CB): It’s a great question—thinking about the movement an author can have across different kinds of work. I immediately loved El lector a domicilio, and I found it very “Morábito-like” in that I didn’t know what to expect but when it happened, it somehow made sense. What I love about his work, whether it’s the short prose pieces or stories or this novel, is that (and I believe you wrote about this in your review) the characters are just average, run-of-the-mill people that don’t seem to have such interesting lives—but of course they do. Morábito finds that aspect to them, or rather, he exposes it; he shows us that we’re surrounded by interesting things taking place all the time.

JM: I think that’s a good point, and for me, it’s one of the most appealing aspects of the book; the other is that it’s very much centered around poetry—there’s Fraire’s poem (which you did a stunning job of translating), a very whimsical piece by Gianni Rodari, and in between the two, all this varied prose. Given that you’re a poet yourself, and that you’ve translated both genres before, what was it like dealing with the two within the scope of a single work? Did you find that you shifted from one headspace to the other? Or was the translation process overarchingly similar?

CB: I wish! The Fraire poem seemed to change throughout the book, because it appears in different sections. I gave myself this framework or “rule” where I couldn’t go back and look at what I had translated previously, so I just tried to translate from memory as I was moving through the drafts. With each draft, it would change, and when I’d go back and look at the beginning of the book, I’d question my choices.

I started out translating poetry, and I still do, but it was the hardest part about translating this book. It does indeed require a different headspace for me, a different pace or breath, although I also recognize some similarities in how I translate the prose: I’m listening to the rhythm of the sentence, and I think about repetitions of sounds and other issues that a poet naturally takes into account. At any rate, yes, the Fraire poem was the most difficult part overall; I was making little tweaks to it up until the last edit, and I’m really thankful to my editor at Other Press for allowing me to do that.

As for the Rodari, it’s actually different in the Spanish original. I think I may have translated it directly from the Italian, because Morábito truncates it in the Spanish. In the novel, Eduardo talks about certain parts of the poem, certain rhymes, with the Vigil children; he has them moving their feet to the rhythm, and I didn’t think it was enough to have these seemingly deaf kids reacting to just a few fragments. Initially I was focusing only on preserving the poem’s meter, but my partner is a linguist and insisted that I do the end rhyme as well. So even though it’s more playful than the Fraire poem, it was equally as difficult to translate.

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Translation Tuesday: Five Poems by Radmila Petrović

January 26, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Jovanka Kalaba

some words are so tender / that we keep them in greenhouses

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, memories of a pastoral youth emerge as an urban woman’s coming-of-age in these selections from Serbian poet Radmila Petrović. Our speaker alternates between moments of bittersweet nostalgia for her erstwhile village life (“The Curse of the Woods”), and a reckoning with the violent patriarchal norms of her home (“Forest, Plow, Primrose”). This sequence of poems demonstrates a liberated wisdom beyond the stifling lessons of past generations, a voice which confronts the brutality of patriarchy—and even the alleged inefficacy of poetry itself—with an acerbic wit (“Above Your Collarbones,” “Just Checking”). Petrović’s verse masterfully bridges a bitter, world-weary narrative voice with moments of childlike vulnerability (see especially the power of maternal silence in “The Language of Plants”), and deploys bucolic images alongside moments of bodily destruction. Of particular note is the poet’s use of line breaks (here captured by the superb translation from Jovanka Kalaba and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać) to almost mimic the process of gradual, episodic recollection—and the hesitation warranted by traumatic memory.

The Curse of the Woods

does never came near the households
we would see them when we headed uphill
to pick rosehips for jam

one summer while mowing a meadow
Father accidentally mowed a fawn
the mountain wailed at sunset

ever since that day I have always
walked in front of the mower
moved rabbit kits out of the way
catapulted snakes with a pitchfork

ever since that day I have carried the curse of the woods

your doelike heart sees yellow hunting dogs
in my eyes
my fingers feel like blades of a mower

You can’t do this anymore, you said

Mother put my legs out with the hay
this morning
for the cows READ MORE…

Mother-Daughter Collaboration: An Interview with Jean Paira-Pemberton and Catherine Piron-Paira

January 3, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lou Sarabadzic

This was what we could share together at this time in her life; I think it added much tenderness between us.

I met Catherine Piron-Paira last June in Paris at the annual poetry market, and at the time was already aware of Éditions des Lisières, a remarkable independent press committed to translation and multilingualism. I had recently read their latest bilingual English-French release, Seeds in My Ground/Ma terre ensemencée by Jean Paira-Pemberton, and discovered that the translator (or co-translator), Catherine Piron-Paira, was the author’s daughter. Many poems were substantially re-written in their French translation, suggesting a very creative working relationship. The press’ website says the text is “adapted” rather than merely translated, and the book itself indicates that the French version was developed “in collaboration” between Jean and Catherine. A few months later, all three of us scheduled a video chat. Jean and Catherine were then sent the condensed and edited transcript of this interview for approval and final edits, and it is now our great pleasure to bring it to Asymptote’s readers.

Lou Sarabadzic (LS): In the foreword, Catherine, you explain that your mother, Jean Paira-Pemberton, “is a nomad between two languages, two cultures, two countries.” Could you tell us a bit more?

Catherine Piron-Paira (CPP): Mum settled in France in 1952, but she continued going to England for reasons of both business and pleasure. She also went from Strasbourg to Saverne every day for work. There was a place where we went for holidays: Chapeau Cornu, near Lyon. We used to go from Strasbourg to Lyon, from Lyon to Strasbourg. As for “nomad,” how do you feel about that?

Jean Paira-Pemberton (JPP): Well, I have a relationship now with French, which is almost like the relationship with a mother tongue. I think I am completely bilingual. I can use both languages for practically everything, except poetry. Poetry is only in English.

LS: Why do you think that is?

JPP: Because English is my mother tongue, and I have wanted to be a poet ever since I learnt how to write, so it goes back to way before I learnt French. I started to learn French in secondary school, when I was eleven. It is very much a second language. I have never written poetry in French. I have written lots of other texts in French, of course, as part of my job; I was a university teacher, and I published articles and all sorts of things on linguistics in French–my thesis about John Clare’s life was in French. But not poetry. READ MORE…

In Review: The Tongue of Adam by Abdelfattah Kilito

December 8, 2016  |  in Reviews  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

All languages had the same value . . . The plurality of tongues was synonymous with cohesion—diversity with unity.

In the afterword to the book, Abdelfattah Kilito, a Moroccan writer who writes in both French and Arabic, speaks about his obsession with “the fact of language”. And this obsession is exactly what we get a great introduction to in his intriguing new book of essays, The Tongue of Adam (New Directions, 2016, tr. Robyn Creswell).

The book is divided into several chapters: “Babblings,” “Babels,” “A Babelian Eden,” “The Oldest Poem in the World,” “Poet or Prophet?” “The Oblivion of Adam,” “Poetic Destiny,” and the afterword entitled “That’s . . . nice.” In these chapters, he takes us on an exploration into our origins of language, multilingualism, poetry, history, religion, myth, translation, and much more, consulting ancient Arabic sources throughout.

In “Babblings”, Kilito writes, “No one bothers to ask about the tongue of Adam anymore. It’s a naïve question, vaguely embarrassing and irksome, like questions posed by children, which can only be answered rather stupidly. But for the ancients this question was serious and consequential. To answer it meant to take a stand”.  So that is where he begins: he asks about the tongue (the language and the organ) and discusses what the ancients thought about the original human language, approaching these questions with an attitude that is serious and playful at the same time.

The inquiry into humanity’s original language, Kilito informs us, can arise only “when multiple languages are found in a state of competition or rivalry. Every inquiry into the tongue of Adam hopes to uncover a beginning”—to identify the one and only language of origin—but such inquiries also point toward the one who asks the question: Why does my language differ from that of others? How can we explain the plurality of languages?” These are post-Babelian inquiries, implying a rupture between communities.

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