Your pain:
My guilt, in the mirror
—mirror, challenge which attracts blind eyes
that return to me, naked,
slingshot stones
embedded in my pain:
your guilt in the mirror.
Your guilt:
My pain in the mirror
—mirror, desert where the bounds
of the sand are questioned,
blind guess of wreckage, by
my obstinate and loyal guilt:
your pain, in the mirror.
*
I know it’s you and I know it’s not you,
the blood that I suck from this wound.
Remember? The stars were menstruating
and a cry of reckless spring
stained the pale sheets with fear:
now no bleach will erase the mark.
Remember? far off, the mad scattering
bloodless, giving, ignited roses
of your-my sex, between silk and onyx
—trap of untamable melancholies:
bright clock, eclipse of melting hours
unmarked, almanac and embrace?
And now that you’re no longer here, absurdly,
my blood becomes, absurdly, a wound.
from The Sister, the Stranger
Maria-Mercè Marçal
translated from the Catalan by Núria Alishio-Caballero
Listen to an excerpt of the original Catalan read by the author:
These poems are from Marçal’s 1985 book of poetry La germana, l’estrangera (The Sister, the Stranger; Ediciones Del Mall), originally published by Llibres del Mall. In it, the poet explores the emotional and physical experiences of women in relation to other women, both as lovers and as mothers.
As in other romance languages, the flexibility of Catalan makes it possible to follow long, winding phrases without much confusion. These sentences can be tricky to translate into English because the word order is more rigid. For example, the second stanza of “your pain” includes a phrase whose subject, la meva culpa (my guilt), is left for the end, long after the verb, interrogar (question). In order to maintain the delay and anticipation of the subject’s disclosure as well as the mirroring effect of la meva culpa with el meu dolor in the first stanza, the translation employs the passive voice to align as closely as possible with the original sequence of ideas.
A defining characteristic of Marçal’s poetry is her broad embrace of ambiguity and multiple meanings. She is drawn to words that allow her to say several things at once, like viu in line eleven of “I know it’s you and I know it’s not you”. Technically, this word could be read as various adjectival qualifiers (alive, bright, vivid) or as a verb (to live). Part of the beauty of the poem is the space for these various meanings, whereas in English the translator is forced to make an interpretational decision. Here “bright” has been used in keeping with the repeated imagery of light, but the translator laments the loss of an element of “living” or “alive.” The search for solutions to this type of poetic play in order to maintain Marçal’s compelling ambiguities is among the most challenging and enthralling tasks of translating her work.
As in other romance languages, the flexibility of Catalan makes it possible to follow long, winding phrases without much confusion. These sentences can be tricky to translate into English because the word order is more rigid. For example, the second stanza of “your pain” includes a phrase whose subject, la meva culpa (my guilt), is left for the end, long after the verb, interrogar (question). In order to maintain the delay and anticipation of the subject’s disclosure as well as the mirroring effect of la meva culpa with el meu dolor in the first stanza, the translation employs the passive voice to align as closely as possible with the original sequence of ideas.
A defining characteristic of Marçal’s poetry is her broad embrace of ambiguity and multiple meanings. She is drawn to words that allow her to say several things at once, like viu in line eleven of “I know it’s you and I know it’s not you”. Technically, this word could be read as various adjectival qualifiers (alive, bright, vivid) or as a verb (to live). Part of the beauty of the poem is the space for these various meanings, whereas in English the translator is forced to make an interpretational decision. Here “bright” has been used in keeping with the repeated imagery of light, but the translator laments the loss of an element of “living” or “alive.” The search for solutions to this type of poetic play in order to maintain Marçal’s compelling ambiguities is among the most challenging and enthralling tasks of translating her work.
Maria-Mercè Marçal (1952–1998) is considered a pioneer of Catalan poetry written from the feminine perspective. Her body of poetry, which she referred to as llengua abolida (abolished tongue), aimed to create a poetic language with which to express feminine experiences in a radically new way. These experiences included a spectrum of ambiguities inherent to pregnancy and motherhood as well as lesbian eroticism, illness, and death. She published seven collections of poetry and one novel during her life and was a recipient of the Carles Riba Poetry Prize, among others. She is also credited with spearheading a larger genealogical project which introduced a new breadth of feminine poetry into Catalan. Marçal achieved this in part through her own work as a translator of women poets from other linguistic traditions, such as Renée Vivien and Anna Akhmatova.
Núria Alishio-Caballero is a doctoral student of Hispanic literatures and cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on productive intersections between queer theory and translation theory, particularly in the Catalan context. As the child of an American father and a Catalan mother, Alishio-Caballero has spent much of her life moving between the United States and Catalan-speaking regions, including Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, where she lived for five years before moving to Bloomington.
