Acts of Translation
Over the past year, I have been working on a book about Miami, Cuba, and the ghosts that I have floating between the two. I have been writing long chunks of the book in Spanish and then rewriting them in English to get the taste right. This is an act of translation.
This book has largely been written in Nebraska, which is new to me, and which I am working to find a sturdy appreciation for. Nebraska, I have found, is an acquired taste. This, too, the acquiring of a taste for something you do not have a taste for, is an act of translation.
My friend, Kasey, who is also one of the fiction editors here at Prairie Schooner, is from Nebraska and knows a great deal more about it than I do. They also know a lot more about farming than I do, even though I grew up on a farm, although it wasn’t really a farm, we just called it that. The farm I grew up on had ten-foot-tall chain-link fences on both sides, and in between there were fruit trees and sugarcane and root vegetables and tubers, some of which do not have names in English, but if I were to cook them for you, to mash the malanga into puree and fry the yuca into sticks of salted gold, you would understand, and this too is an act of translation.
Kasey often uses the words “monocrop” and “monoculture” when they talk about Nebraska and its farms and its corn. I don’t know the definition of these words, but I know what they mean to me: one, only one, no more than one. What an interesting place this is to be thinking about the translation of one voice to another.
The summer 1943 Prairie Schooner featured an essay about the works of Octavio Paz and Efraín Huerta written by Lloyd Mallan. The piece, titled “New Mexican Poetry,” offered an analysis laden with glowing praise for the young authors as well as two poems and several excerpts written by Paz and Huerta and translated to English by Mallan.
According to the opening of that issue, this was the first time that Paz and Huerta had been published in translation in the United States. Paz would go on to win the Nobel prize for literature forty-seven years later and Huerta would spend much of the next four decades defining his own forms and cementing himself as one of the most important voices in modern Mexican poetry. These early translations, then, can be seen as a door being opened for and toward two essentially important voices of Latin American literature.
I think about the time and place of that door and I think about the namesake of this journal. The “prairie schooner” is an image burdened with myriad meanings, depending on whom you ask. I’ve heard it described as a symbol of settler colonialism, and I’ve been asked if it is a sort of boat and why a literary magazine published in the Great Plains would hitch its identity to a boat instead of a wagon. But it is a wagon, one that carried and ferried scores of families Westward, from semihospitable territories they knew into wildly inhospitable territories they didn’t. They found miles of flatland, with nothing to protect them from the violence of the wind and the cold winter, and it made some of them go insane. They found Native Americans, whom they sometimes killed and sometimes were killed by. They found new ways to survive and new ways to die, and somehow, over the generations that passed between when their covered wagons rolled in from the East and when I did, they made this brutal, barren place something like a home, still flat and cold and prone to madness but not quite so inhospitable. This, too, is a long, painful act of translation.
And so, in a way, it makes sense that Paz and Huerta would enter the American lexicon through this weird door in the middle of the country. It also goes a long way toward making this particular door feel a bit more welcoming: makes the taste a little easier to acquire for someone who brings their own suitcases full of life lived in Spanish between the shores of the Atlantic and the swamp grasses of the Everglades, between the wafting airs of empanadas and the tinny clip of bachata guitar licks; for someone who finds this place alarmingly devoid of saltwater and seasoning and Spanish. There is great comfort in finding a history of translation here, a history of listening and sharing voices beyond those that carry most readily on the prairie wind, voices that sound different from me and mine.
Because at least they want to listen to me and mine. But when they listen, what do they hear?
Lloyd Mallan was not a translator by trade. A Polish Jew born in Pittsburgh, he dabbled in many things—sometimes a communist, other times an anti-communist—eventually carving out a niche as a science writer who wrote mostly about space. He spent time in Spain during the civil war and dedicated himself to studying and translating the works of Federico Garcia Lorca, though it is unclear whether he ever set foot in Mexico, where Paz and Huerta wrote and lived.
There are problems with his essay, problems of listening and hearing. He writes of Mexican poetry before Paz and Huerta as some large monolithic thing made up of homogeneous themes and styles imported and molded by the Spanish tradition, but he seems to ignore centuries of Mexican poets dating back to the 1600s, such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who challenged not only Spanish traditions of form but also of gender and religious faith. He notes that “the poetry of Octavio Paz is in bitter revolt against society in terms of society, Efraín Huerta’s work revolts against tradition in terms of the individual,” seeming to elide (or miss entirely) the fact that Paz and Huerta’s writings in these early years—including the poems included in the piece—are both considerably focused on the intimacy of the individual in the case of the former, and distinctly aware of the societal in terms of the latter. The essay spends a great deal of time explaining what Mallan thinks these poets are, giving the poems themselves considerably less of a chance to speak for the poets.
Mallan makes many odd choices at the line level, most of which I can’t explain, except perhaps by referencing another Prairie Schooner essay on translation, this time written by W. G. Regier for the summer issue of 1973. In a piece titled “Spanish Language and American Verse,” Regier describes the translations of his contemporaries as a qualitative mixed bag: “Like all mass movements, its results are sometimes good, sometimes bad, and often mediocre.”
Thirty years after Mallan’s essay and fifty years before this one, Regier’s appraisal feels timelessly prescient. In the excerpt of Paz’s poem “Between the Flower and the Stone,” the line “Oh esplendor vengativo,” which has a fairly straightforward translation to “Oh vengeful splendor,” becomes, in the Mallan text, “O love that barely blooms and dies.” Mallan’s decisions on how to render the texts for US readers often seem to be driven by neither fidelity nor interpretation; it feels as if he is fundamentally changing the poems, not only in terms of the language but also the structure. His excerpts of Paz significantly truncate stanzas and skip over entire sections of the poems, and his translation of Huerta’s “Poem of Scorn” imposes a rhyme scheme that is both sporadic and nonexistent in the source text. Moreover, with both authors, he makes a habit of rearranging the syntax and enjambment of the poems in ways that alter the rhythm and emotional impact of the lines. In short, Mallan takes these poets he describes as “new,” “outstanding,” and “startlingly original,” and makes them something they are not. Sadly, this too is an act of translation.
There is no such thing as a perfect translation because translation isn’t just a matter of conversion from a source to its exact equivalent. I’m not sure I believe that there is such a thing as a “right” translation, but I have found myself reading and thinking to myself: “This is a wrong translation.” I suppose we’re more sensitive to these kinds of translations when our language, which becomes our history, our community, our home, is being translated by someone who isn’t one of our own. When our words become the parts of home that we can carry with us from the ocean to the plains, like bricks we pull out of the walls or seedpods and mangrove shoots we stuff into jars, it feels strangely awful to have someone paw those precious belongings and tell you that your brick is brown and not orange or that your baby mangrove is, in fact, a stalk of bamboo. It makes you want to say, “Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my house and why have you rearranged all my furniture?”
Perhaps the question isn’t one of translations that are wrong so much as translations that feel wrong. But what is it about a translation like Mallan’s that makes it feel this way? I think about translations that don’t feel this way, and I think of Cristina Rivera Garza and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, who translate their own work into bilingual texts, resulting in a duality that feels authentic and embodied, wholly realized as itself. And when I read Norma Cantú’s translations of the poems of Alfonsina Storni from the fall 1979 issue of Prairie Schooner, the English versions read as if they are in comfortable conversation with the Spanish, like the new words and revised lines are as at ease occupying the space as the old ones. Part of me wonders if this is because Cantú is a Mexican author translating an Argentine poet, if it is her own lifetime lived in a shared language that makes the translation feel more natural, less forced to fit into a shape that it wasn’t originally written into.
But I don’t think the tent is so small that it fits only those born into it. Translation can and should be a work of invitation, a widening of the tent, an open door to practice greater appreciation of another person’s home, to learn its accent walls that fill the light with eccentric colors and the odd corners and weirdly placed closets that were built and hidden and repurposed over decades and centuries. Translation doesn’t function only as a renegotiation of the self, it can be a recognition of another. Maybe what makes a translation feel “wrong” is the difference between understanding another and explaining the Other.
Prairie Schooner would publish Paz in translation again in the international issue in the summer of 1962. Bruce Cutler’s translation of Paz’s poem “The Broken Jug” would be better (though not quite as good as the translation by Tim Reynolds printed in the winter edition of Arion in 1969)—which is to say the translations would feel better, would feel more like a hand reaching out toward understanding, rather than one trying to mold the words and forms they touched.
In the eighty-three years since Mallan’s feature on Paz and Huerta, the journal has published numerous Spanish works of prose and poetry in translation, including an eclectic, dynamic, and vital selection of eight Mexican poets admirably translated by Marlon Fick in the summer of 2002. The journal has honed its ear for Spanish writing over the decades, and this progress, too, is an act of translation.
As much as I like the idea of a journal as a living, breathing entity that gestates and grows and evolves with time, as a writer on one side of the submission queue and an editor on the other, I know better. I know that a magazine is its people; the copyedited pages that get sent off to the designers and typesetters and printers are proof of our tastes and our prejudices, our identities and the pliable limitations of our understanding. I don’t know who was in the room editing the Schooner in 1943 or 1962, and even if I wrote each of their names here, it’s one thing to read someone on the page and another thing to know a person.
I do know the people in the room now. There are Nebraskans in here, none of whom I would describe as driven insane by this place, all of whom I would attest to having a fierce desire for understanding. But there are also children of Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, and Trinbagonian immigrants, first-generation hyphen Americans who have brought their homes with them to the plains and the Prairie Schooner editing suite. Brick by brick, they share their own languages and read with an ear attuned to hearing and understanding more.
In 1961, the year before Prairie Schooner would publish its second translation of Octavio Paz’s work, a very small three-year-old child named Miriam Acosta arrived in Miami from Cuba with her sister and their parents. None of them spoke English, and the flat expanse of a young American city in transition and on the verge of a chaotic growth spurt was a drastic uprooting from the mountains and fields of Jaruco, the town some sixty kilometers outside La Habana that they were fleeing in the wake of the revolution. The girl would learn the language and the city, she would learn about love and self-destruction, she would marry and divorce, and marry and divorce, and marry and die. She would have a son, which is me, and she would speak to me in English and curse at me in Spanish and teach me to feel in two languages, which has always left me with a longing curiosity to feel more.
Three generations in translation and I am still trying to refine my own sense of what translation is. Sometimes I think translation is as kaleidoscopic as what we have the opportunity to translate and sometimes I think translation is a kind of rebirth. Sometimes I don’t know what it is, I just know what it feels like. So perhaps it’s best to find another definition, this one from a special issue of Prairie Schooner on Latino/a writing from the winter of 1994. In an essay titled “Translating Translation: Finding the Beginning,” Alberto Alvaro Ríos writes, “We try to do what people want, but they have to know what they’re asking for. That search for understanding is often itself a search for, and an act of, translation as well.”
