the theatre makes
mixers of us
all
Brief space
in spite of the sun
in which LIMBS are
snowcurds
snow of hues
Shadow
blooms
time to the hill girls equals
distance from sun to wolf
bringing turbulent morning
Then (over there) walnut
drainage ditch
Dawn parades in
her new hat
But here slow squadron
of mountain
men dissolves
They’ve come to the village
Double-crossed
by flaming arrow day
exhales
purple breath
JOYRIDES
like in that ardent car
Charged with solemnizing
fire—elder gobbles
mad at the wedding
torch
But youth is fast
nighttime orchard
morning’s ash
Next are poplars
Doing their green hair
while thick boys
lithe women
Lights—mirrors
Poplars and poplars
the sun would turn star
to see these night things
would rob bengal
of stripes
surly riverbird
then the bagpipes want
dancing bad +
hard for as long
as the big dipper
mows the sphere
Major trunk shake
now by river now echo
is yelling (anxious
host) spikes
the drink of silence
silence goes far from
these woods and woods
become a wedding yard
Wild dream in motion
Sleep is no remedy
for a while the bonfires
—who strive to be night
dots—stars—who think
w/ sun brains
keep death at bay night
dark cooking a fear
and then put themselves to bed
Life unlaced a
tomb inside you
Finally the night wins and silence
wins but sliced through by
a laurel moan
knife glade something
dead
Some villain strips her frondy
pomp—although a tree
can resist many things
like ghosts
gallant
poplars—
trunk is paper for shepherds
carve drunk secrets
Love
speaks
those trees
well
morning’s espionage
caught them dreaming
other forests
knock knock it is morning
instead of birds (bizarre) it was
two topazes clinked
together
the sun zooms a little
sweaty
wedding day on the mountain
roses jasmines violets
marvellous
thinks the wanderer
here we call strangers
foresters or people from
the forest
Pacing outside the
scene—curled
rose the groom
obviously a hero etc
August: the wanderer
is in sick memory
the day he told her
spurned
maroon
no land
no life but forgetting
The Solitudes
Luis de Góngora
translated from the Spanish by Hamish Ballantyne
Listen to the original read by the translator:
The Solitudes begins with a shipwreck. The only survivor is a youth who, we learn, abandoned the court after being spurned in love, boarding a ship to the New World. After the wreck, the youth—referred to only as the pilgrim, the stranger, or the wanderer—washes ashore in a strange pastoral. He begins an aimless journey, drifting almost invisible between encounters with the inhabitants of a mythic island. The passage excerpted here describes the lovelorn stranger’s impressions of a village wedding.
The greatest challenge when translating Góngora is trying to replicate the freshness and weirdness of his idiom, with all its neologisms, inversions, and deliberate obfuscations. Further, the original continually conflates the metaphorical imaginary of the text with the substance of the plot, such that it can be hard to tell which is the narrative reality we’re supposed to be following. Upon publication of the first section, the work was considered so obscure that Góngora was called before the Inquisition on charges of heresy. Four hundred years later, it is no easier to understand. If, as has been commented, the hero of this text is language itself, then the antihero of the translation is misinterpretation.
One of the most important gestures of the text is performed in the very first stanza. Shipwrecked and marooned, the text travels from real historical time—the stranger on his way to the New World, Spain’s golden age of conquest—to the outside-time of the text’s mythical island. The text of The Solitudes is an alternative to the text that should have been. In order to replicate this effect, the translator must blur the borders between discourse and action, between mythological allusion and pastoral mundaneness. It is important to resist creating an equivalency between Góngora’s idiom and a readymade analogue in English—the temptation in translating Golden Age poetry has been to use some approximation of Elizabethan English—to try to stay with the contradictions of the text rather than flatten them. Góngora is interested in disrupting official histories and literary forms. The challenge for the translator is to disrupt the ways in which anglophone audiences are conditioned to think about Góngora, The Solitudes, and the culture that produced them.
The greatest challenge when translating Góngora is trying to replicate the freshness and weirdness of his idiom, with all its neologisms, inversions, and deliberate obfuscations. Further, the original continually conflates the metaphorical imaginary of the text with the substance of the plot, such that it can be hard to tell which is the narrative reality we’re supposed to be following. Upon publication of the first section, the work was considered so obscure that Góngora was called before the Inquisition on charges of heresy. Four hundred years later, it is no easier to understand. If, as has been commented, the hero of this text is language itself, then the antihero of the translation is misinterpretation.
One of the most important gestures of the text is performed in the very first stanza. Shipwrecked and marooned, the text travels from real historical time—the stranger on his way to the New World, Spain’s golden age of conquest—to the outside-time of the text’s mythical island. The text of The Solitudes is an alternative to the text that should have been. In order to replicate this effect, the translator must blur the borders between discourse and action, between mythological allusion and pastoral mundaneness. It is important to resist creating an equivalency between Góngora’s idiom and a readymade analogue in English—the temptation in translating Golden Age poetry has been to use some approximation of Elizabethan English—to try to stay with the contradictions of the text rather than flatten them. Góngora is interested in disrupting official histories and literary forms. The challenge for the translator is to disrupt the ways in which anglophone audiences are conditioned to think about Góngora, The Solitudes, and the culture that produced them.
Luis de Góngora was born in 1561 in Córdoba, Spain. After taking deacon’s orders as a young man, he went on to become an ordained priest. Góngora achieved great renown as a poet in his lifetime, though he remained a controversial figure. He is known for his wildly inventive use of language. Góngora began writing an epic, The Solitudes, toward the end of his lifetime, but ill health and grievous debts made its completion impossible. Less than half of the work was finished when he died.
Hamish Ballantyne is a poet and translator from Vancouver Island. He is a founding
member of the pure-sound collective Sex Panic!. He is currently at work on a full-
length translation of The Solitudes by Luis de Góngora.
