19. She who translates is not lost

[From the translator’s journal]

I love this poem. Everyone loves this poem. It’s a bit of a mystery, because it seems so sad, dark, troubling, mournful. What is it about people? Why do we all seek sadness at the same time as we’re looking for love, hope, a glint of joy? Why can’t we just follow a path that makes life worth living? I ask, because I’m one of the worst. So I work with this poem, trying to mould it to fit English, insisting it’s a simple task and failing at every step. It never fits, and I never stop trying, but if I give up, what will be left?

Allow me, then, to continue to search, going back and forth from one language to the other, insisting against what is resisting, sometimes forgetting to care that I can’t find it, that it can’t find me, and singing the translator’s lament but I’ll be damned if I’ll quit. Here’s the reason I choose this pain, so similar to another poem in which the nail driven into the heart is preferable to the nail that is withdrawn and no longer hurts except through its absence.

Emptiness might be the greatest pain/gift of all. Silence may be golden/dark. Nothing. Absence. Words and words alone:

Cando penso que te fuches,

negra sombra que me asombras,

ó pé dos meus cabezales

tornas facéndome mofa.

Cando maxino que es ida,

no mesmo sol te me amostras,

i eres a estrela que brila,

i eres o vento que zoa.

Si cantan, es ti que cantas,

si choran, es ti que choras,

i es o marmurio do río

i es a noite i es a aurora.

En todo estás e ti es todo,

pra min i en min mesma moras,

nin me abandonarás nunca,

sombra que sempre me asombras.

Anybody who has taken the time to read that poem, even without understanding what it means, is forced to take something away from it. Sounds that echo like later poems by José Bergamín echo. Repeating syllables, vowels, those things language has to offer. Suggestions of rule-following rhymes, deviations that drag us along with them. Invisible breakages that meet up again somewhere.

Here is what I’ve been able to do, feeling clay in my pen and despair in my conscience, clasping at the concepts in the original Galician, saddened by my clumsiness. Every draft is rough, no version is final, I think as I toss out the ill-fitting words:

When I think of how you abandoned me,

Dark shadow who is my shadow,

Cuddling on my pillows,

You return, taunting me with malice.

When I think you’ve gone away,

You’re back, with the same sun where your face glowed

And you’re a bright, shining star,

And you’re the wind that is wailing.

If there is singing, you’re the one singing,

If there’s weeping, it’s you who weeps,

And you’re the whispering river

And you’re nighttime and the sun rising.

You’re everywhere and you’re everything,

You live through me and you live within me,

You will never leave me,

My shadow who forever shadows me.

This is only one version. The others have shrunk into the background or have been discarded. One of the versions is better than the others, but I cannot say which it is. Nor do I dare judge the theories of how this poem by Rosalía de Castro is an offshoot of Aureliano Aguirre’s poem:

Dime, tú, ser misterioso

que en mi ser oculto moras

sin que adivinar consiga

si eres realidad o sombra.

…..

con la noche y con la aurora

y a todas partes me sigues

……

y en todas partes me buscas,

y en todas partes me nombras

y estás conmigo sin velo,

y si duermo, en mi reposas,

y si suspiro, suspiras,

y si triste lloro, lloras…

Tell me, mysterious one

who lives hidden inside me

…..

with the night and the dawn

you follow me everywhere

…..

you search for me everywhere

you say my name everywhere

and are with me unveiled,

and if I sleep, you rest within me,

if I sigh, you sigh too,

if I cry from sadness, you cry…

…

Yes, there’s a resemblance, and maybe Rosalía was mourning for a young man who drowned, but I can’t prove that one way or another, except to say she seemed to honor his memory by her words that flow from his. There are also poems that flow from hers, as if bent on paying homage. Do I know for sure why the later writers took up “Negra Sombra” and wanted readers to drink from the same brine? No, and it’s not my concern. So many have thought they could give shape to the dark shadow through verse and analysis. I don’t care about all that. I just want to get it right.

This is why I don’t really need to learn about Xoán Montés Capón the composer, who set the shadow to music so it could be listened to by emigrés in Havana. I mean, what did they think when they heard it? Maybe for them it expressed the absence from home, a sadness almost never cured. They were entitled to those opinions, but I am different. I’m a translator and my reaction to the verses is far different.

What’s lost or gained in translation? That’s the old question, maybe never to be answered, but that gain (or loss) in crossing linguistic boundaries is never treason on the part of a translator. Maybe I can explain. Linguistic features and context - historical, political, geographical - might disappear, but something is gained. For me, that is as fllows:

I gain a deeply sensual submission to language, not submission in an antifeminist way, but submission in the sense that as I do the word work I’m allowing myself to be carried by something stronger, something not me or narcissistic. It is a kind of pure pleasure of starting to touch the words with tongue and fingers, inhaling them until I forget I’m supposed to be translating, being a bridge, keeping new readers in mind. I just want it to be all for me, even as I succumb to it. Still, it’s not narcissism, I must insist.

I also gain historical and cultural knowledge that requires passionate motivation and unquestioningly. Nothing else in this world matters as much as I learn to read the land that is untranslatable, because paisaxe in Galician is only paisaxe, not scenery, nature, or anything English. You know, the old you have to go there to know there as a Woman of the Harlem Renaissance wrote.

I know these little things, these words that are in limbo because they won’t come across the language bridge, aren’t little; they link to so many others, struggling to cross oceans. They are strong, yet are but a misty web of words, a world that holds the past and its heart while challenging the tongue and the body that prefers May sun to winter choiva, or a cocoon, a room of one’s own, a focused dispersion so appealing to a brain with a deficit of measured attention.

And there, I’ve said it: I am nothing if not atypical. Translation is what my brain had always told me I had to do: focus and disperse. I already knew that, maybe in 4th or 6th grade. The extremes that made me uneasy, embarrassed, ashamed, but they were there and had to be dealt with, like poems. This is why I translate.

As you can see, I’ve gotten lost in translation, or some might think so. It’s the fault of a black shadow that some would say is anything from depression to uncertain sentimentality. A lost-too-soon lover (Aguirre). A women’s weakness or worries. An existential crisis. The fear of death. Nobody is equipped to deal with all that when trying to bring two worlds together, two languages that belong to separate cultures and centuries.

However, I am a translator and know where I am. I know it’s where I should be, even when I’m lost for words, unable to bring one reality over into another. They talk a lot about something being lost in translation, but to me lost is a space too, just like a shapeshifting-rosalia-de-castro-sombra is a space. It’s there and we might never find a way to express it in any other language, but we can find a right answer if we know the place to look.

P.S. I know what the dark shadow is.