I, IX
Maybe all we are lacking
is to be a little less young, to experience life
in another, more distant tone
without abuses
of our inevitable humanity.
Paradise again.
Again the good fortune of a house
not too big, under a Friday sun,
a sincere refuge on a hill
from which to watch the earth tenderly,
as March leaves and April lifts
the face of the inherited fields
two hours away.
Against the injured glass of the door,
I like to watch the roots wanting you,
to know their desire is mine as they cling
with wild fingers to your body,
to your enormous days of small breasts,
like shadows of the olive tree.
Just as a dream would have it, you begin the descent
to sleep with me,
igniting
the hidden kingdom of retired light,
which neither silences arguments of the flesh
nor brings distance
to the mundane noise of its vocabulary,
inherited too with these stones.
Although the smoke of firewood is whiter
and floats on the sound of peace
over the aged silence of these mountains,
although the hymns of the dawn
weaken their voices, drawing nearer,
I know not the path that separates me
from a body from whom I beg dignity,
a body not invited to its anniversaries, that liturgical heat
of its ancestors
and of ancient dances
of naked shoulders
that look like the sea.
It is impossible to retire from time.
It is impossible,
yet I venture to surprise us,
to tell you, to know you,
to have the privilege.
And they are useless, these hours
that are not of your age nor of mine.
I, XIII
The pines have reached their pensiveness.
Your loneliness, so poorly documented,
ignores that people roam the street
a little more naked
and that skin opens to a sky
of tumultuous blue,
half song, half false coin.
And over the fields,
spring returned
under the transparency of a dress
or in the ambiguous garden
that rests
—startled by blackbirds and swifts—
with life against the wall of the house.
Only in you, like shadows,
do the intuitive bodies rise,
the halfway footprints of the birds,
that foreignness
of their games in the navigable air.
And you watch them rise,
maybe disappeared,
scheming in the branches where love schemes
to write the verses
born of us
as a shipwreck is born of the sea.
You represent two things:
sadness and beauty,
limitation
and the wings of a dream.
I, XX
The days take off their shoes
to pass by without us realizing.
They are almost dismissed, almost encounters
— happy but uncomfortable —
of bodies that watch each other
and postpone their appointment.
Although in the background,
we are left with footprints that are not memories.
In that uncultivated garden I keep
the man who came to desire you,
to walk without you,
wild and alone.
Because of you spoke the oleanders,
with their difficult branches like teenage girls,
and the palms tall like your nakedness,
and that confused sky
that sought
the light by which love distinguishes your eyes.
We age not at all. Maybe we never age.
And now I can tell you,
when you remind me of oleanders,
and your arcuate nakedness sketches a palm,
and your eyes mist
over the wild garden of lovers.
Maybe we never age. Or perhaps it is that time
took off its heels so as not to bother us.
Or perhaps desire
walks our lips barefoot still.
from Diary of an Accomplice
Luis García Montero
translated from the Spanish by Alice McAdams
Listen to I, XX read in the original Spanish by Alice McAdams:
Luis García Montero is one of the leaders of a poetry movement in Spain known as poesía de la experiencia or Poetry of Experience. While the social poets of the 1950s envisioned poetry as a wholly utilitarian genre to criticize political repression and the novísimos of the 1970s sought to reclaim poetry as a highly aesthetic, intellectual form, poesía de la experiencia is primarily concerned with locating emotional profundity within the experience of the common man in daily life. García Montero emphasizes the importance of employing a shared, quotidian language; his use of urban spaces mirrors this dedication to communal experience. His poetic voice is one that constantly seeks to minimize its own primacy in an effort to dissolve the barriers between the poet and the wider world.
In many ways, my translation methodology fits neatly with García Montero's poetic ethos. Just as the poet places a heavy emphasis on collaboration and endeavors to combat all forms of isolation, so too my translations rely on a dialogue of shared influence between English and Spanish. I follow Lawrence Venuti's criticism of a fluent strategy, in which the translation is disguised as a work originally produced in the target language, and endorse what I term a foreign strategy, in which the translator deliberately retains syntactical nuances and cultural markers of the source language. By allowing English to be impacted by the structure and style of Spanish, my goal is to challenge an Anglocentric approach to literature in the English-speaking world and depart from the traditionally imperialistic practices of translators.
Yet while my methodology and García Montero's motivations run thematically parallel, I encounter certain obstacles in translating his aesthetic. He has written that "poetry is not the invention of an extravagant language but the personal and rigorous treatment of the language of society." Conversely, I find that a foreign strategy necessarily produces a strangeness of language; to strive for a purely commonplace expression in the target language is to obscure any influence of the source language. Ultimately, I have had to consider what the most ethical meaning of "fidelity" is in poetry translation, at times adhering more closely to the particularities of Spanish than to García Montero's stated intentions.
In many ways, my translation methodology fits neatly with García Montero's poetic ethos. Just as the poet places a heavy emphasis on collaboration and endeavors to combat all forms of isolation, so too my translations rely on a dialogue of shared influence between English and Spanish. I follow Lawrence Venuti's criticism of a fluent strategy, in which the translation is disguised as a work originally produced in the target language, and endorse what I term a foreign strategy, in which the translator deliberately retains syntactical nuances and cultural markers of the source language. By allowing English to be impacted by the structure and style of Spanish, my goal is to challenge an Anglocentric approach to literature in the English-speaking world and depart from the traditionally imperialistic practices of translators.
Yet while my methodology and García Montero's motivations run thematically parallel, I encounter certain obstacles in translating his aesthetic. He has written that "poetry is not the invention of an extravagant language but the personal and rigorous treatment of the language of society." Conversely, I find that a foreign strategy necessarily produces a strangeness of language; to strive for a purely commonplace expression in the target language is to obscure any influence of the source language. Ultimately, I have had to consider what the most ethical meaning of "fidelity" is in poetry translation, at times adhering more closely to the particularities of Spanish than to García Montero's stated intentions.
Luis García Montero is widely considered to be Spain's most prominent contemporary poet. He has written over forty books of poetry, novels, and essays, and is the recipient of the Adonáis Prize, the Loewe Prize, the Spanish National Literature Prize, and the Spanish National Critics Prize. Along with his active work in the literary sphere, he is a prominent voice of Spain's political left and recently helped found the party Open Left (Izquierda Abierta). He has been writing and publishing in Granada for over three decades.
Alice McAdams is a current master's student at Middlebury College in Madrid and will begin a PhD in Spanish literature at the University of Michigan this fall. She began studying and translating García Montero as part of her senior thesis at Oberlin College. Her translations of García Montero's poetry have been published in Typo and are forthcoming in Circumference and Mid-American Review. When not in Spain, she lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
