Cuatro Poemas

Juan Arabia’s poetry exhibits a penchant for dialogue with masters of world poetry, transcending his Buenos Aires roots and often extending beyond the Latin American subcontinent. This is not out of pedantry, intellectual nostalgia, or rejection of autochthonous development in Ibero-America, but rather as a pursuit of a poetic craft that surpasses the confines of any single nation, language, or individual. Reflecting on the Greeks, Nietzsche once noted, “[They] absorbed all the culture flourishing among other nations, and they advanced so far, just because they understood how to hurl the spear further from the very spot where another nation had let it rest.” (Mügge, trans.). Spanning French troubadours and Anglophone modernists to Symbolist poets and luminaries from the Tang dynasty, Arabia’s eclectic choice of ‘neighbors’ underscores that, in an era marked by rising nationalism and uniformity, embracing plurality is an indispensable path onward.   
 
Three of the four poems featured here attest to Arabia’s engagement with French letters. “Le poète sud-américain” [The South American Poet], written originally in French, recovers the idea of writing from the margins, and does so with an infusion of irony. “Almea” [Almah] transforms the exquisite twilight of the early hours depicted by Rimbaud in “Est-elle almée?” [Is She an Almah?] into a darkening, decrepit nightscape. Lastly, “Encrapuler” [Pulling Some Crap] introduces from the outset a polysemic interpretation to the neologism Rimbaud unveiled in one of his visionary letters dated May 13, 1871.
 
Capturing the depth of engagement becomes one of the primary challenges when translating a layered poem that is in direct conversation with its predecessor(s). Disregarding or obfuscating this engagement would be akin to muddling its footprints. Let us take “Encrapuler.” 
 
Translating the title posed the inherent problem that the Rimbaldian coinage (“je m’encrapule” [I debase myself]), itself difficult to render directly due to its nuanced connotations, signifies engaging in debauched or morally degraded behavior. This reflects the desire to break free from conventional expectations and explore the depths of human experience and creativity. The colloquial expression ‘pulling some crap’ suggests debasement, particularly when actions and words compromise one’s dignity or integrity, as depicted in Arabia’s poem. Moreover, it mirrors the sound pattern of Rimbaud’s lexical invention (Encrapuler > Pulling Some Crap). To reflect the older reference of the  original title, I chose cognates in the opening line of each stanza (“pardo” to “pardine” and “lágrima” to “lacrimal”). These choices position the speaker in a context that is less immediate or contemporary. Furthermore, in the opening line of the text, the verb “enbrillanté”—a neologism, normally ‘abrillantar’—is translated as ‘embrightened,’ a rare term in English, rather than the more commonly used ‘brightened.’ The reader will notice the phonetically closer rendering of the line “pené mis sombras” as “I pondered my dark’s sum,” preserving all the original consonants (p, n, m, s, r), except for ‘b.’ This choice deviates from the literal translation, ‘I suffered my shadows.’ The addition of the noun “sum” in translating “sombras” to “dark’s sum” creates a resonance, while amplifying the darkness and conveying a sense of accumulating shadowy aspects.  
 
Apart from “Almea” [Almah], which was first featured in Arabia’s Hacia Carcassonne, the other three poems are presented here in their original form for the first time.