Live Commentary Poetry Translation

I’d been thinking about  trying to translate poetry, so Lytton’s email a few weeks ago about translating work into English for Multicultural Night was a cool surprise. Spanish is my first language, so that’s what what I decided to work with on this one, and I assumed that the hardest part of translating poetry would be literally getting the words of the text into the desired language and that I’d therefore find this whole thing to be not very difficult. I’m very quickly realizing that I was wrong – not about the getting the words from Spanish into English, but in preserving the meaning and feel of the poem as I do that. Grammatically, Spanish is looser with verb placement than English is, so if I keep the word order as it is, some sentences won’t make sense. That shouldn’t be a big deal, but I’m generally trying to keep my translation as close to the source material as possible, so this is complicating that. There’s very little punctuation in this poem too, which works fine with the kind of language the author is using, which suggests stops via its structure and the conventions of Spanish writing, but doesn’t do the same thing at all in English.
I’m also realizing, especially after hearing a recording of the poet reading this piece, that the poem plays a lot with the use of speech sounds that imitate the wind, and it’s hard to move those sounds into English. The poem, a lot of which is focused on the sky, uses as one of the images a rook flying through the sky. In this line, the author has used a lot of vowels that sound especially wind-like when combined with the j’s and sibilant noises the line includes. In English, however, this sentence uses a lot more consonants and sounds pretty weight – a word like rook doesn’t remind me of flight. This airiness is something I think is really crucial to the success of the poem in its original language, and I don’t know that my translation will be faithful to the original piece in the effect on the reader if these sounds are entirely lost. On the other hand, I know I’m going to have to change the words around a lot if my criteria for choosing them is how they sound, and then I won’t  able to be entirely faithful to the original in content, so I’m hesitant about going either way. It seems almost as if I’m learning a lesson from this.

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