OPEN LETTER TO GUSTAVO FAVERON

Dear Gustavo,

In early 2011, while I was in the middle of translating your novel EL ANTICUARIO, you candidly asked me why I had taken the task upon myself, and at the time – as far as I recall – I gave you no concrete response. Now that the work is done, and now that we have received the good news that the translation will be published by Grove/Atlantic in 2014, I am reminded that your question has remained unanswered, for which reason I’d like to take a few moments to respond.

As you and I both know, though many readers may not, the first Faveronian writings I was exposed to were critical articles that you had posted on the blog you were keeping at that time, Puente Aéreo, which my good friend and your compatriot, Renzo Roncagliolo, had turned me onto. I was immediately drawn to the unabashed way you were dissecting shaky arguments in literature and popular culture, showing up politicians and pundits for the falsity they tried to sell as fact, and turning common misconceptions on their head with a caustic yet good humored critique that I had not seen elsewhere and that I wanted to share with non-Spanish-speaking friends, colleagues, and readers in general. This led me to start by translating a few of those articles and posting them on my own blog, The Smelting Process, as well as on The Daily Kos.

When I saw on your blog that EL ANTICUARIO had been published, I immediately started scouring the internet for reviews. My curiosity was boiling over as I wondered what a novel would be like at the hand of a critic like you. When I got my hands on a copy and started to read, I was immediately struck by the opulent language you had employed – a narrative feature that in Gringolandia is generally frowned upon, or that at least, has been abandoned since Hemingway & Co. made their proclamations of the economy of language. This was the first seduction. I knew that a version of EL ANTICUARIO in English would need to go against the grain, would be justified in recreating that opulent linguistic ambiance, and the temptation to take on that task was already hard to endure; but this did not convince me completely.

As I continued my reading of the novel, letting my mind give in to the whirling, tantric prose and haunting vignettes that, together, create a maelstromesque narrative – perfectly in harmony with the labyrinthine structure of the city and asylum of the tale – I could not help but think that what I was reading could be genealogically traced to the Gothic narrative of Hawthorne, Poe, and Kafka. This hunch was confirmed through a couple of our conversations which revealed to me the deep influence that these writers, especially Hawthorne, and that genre have had on your aesthetic sensibility. And as I pondered this fact, I started to try to recall what U.S. novelist has dared to follow those footsteps and done so successfully. I could think of none. This was the second seduction. It became clear to me that a translation of your novel would need to be situated in the Gothic tradition without falling into the trap of anachronism. It would need to possess a new sensibility. EL ANTICUARIO is (and THE ANTIQUARIAN must be) Gothic and modern at the same time; though its language is complex, to say it with Vallejo, the sensibility “is simple and human and, at a first glance, could be taken as ancient or does not call into question whether it is modern or not.” It is, in this sense, the new sensibility of your book that motivated me to translate it. Having realized this, I was closer to an affirmative decision, but was not yet convinced entirely.

Nearing the end of the novel and discovering the method by which the mystery is solved, a perverse smile rippled across my face as I realized what a great challenge it would be to translate the linguistic acrobatics of the original without allowing the translation to drift too far away from the Spanish. This is perhaps the most selfish part of the art of translation; anyone who has translated even a few pages of literature will agree that the more complex and perplexing the source text, the more challenging and illuminating the process of translation. It is not just a matter of rendering incomprehensible language comprehensible, but of translating oneself to the matter that the text is talking about. Since I am the type of guy who usually lives in the dark, I try to situate myself in the vicinity of luminous things. (After all, “home is where is the hearth is,” right?) I do not wish to go into detail about how I translated the resolution of your novel or what these acrobatics concretely consist of – since this discovery, I believe, should occur in a reading of the novel itself and not here, or at least not now – but I will say that this feature of the narrative structure was the determining factor of my decision. When I saw the way your resolution had been carefully, technically, and humorously formulated, I knew that I wanted to face that challenge and translate your novel.

That being said, Gustavo, I only humbly request that, after you read my translation and have compared it to your Spanish version, while bearing in mind that the most loyal translation is never the most literal, you do not refrain from unleashing your most critical hounds.

Strong best,
Joseph

SOLICITUD AL DIRECTOR DEL INSTITUTO CERVANTES

Esta mañana recibí un correo del poeta, Bahia Awah, miembro de la generación de amistad saharaui, y yo quisiera compartir dicha correspondencia con ustedes, los escritores, artistas, e intelectuales hispanohablantes  en mi red social, dada la justa solicitud que él y sus compañeros están por enviar a Víctor García de la Concha, el recién nombrado director del Instituto Cervantes. Me adhiero a esta carta en solidaridad con los saharauis,  y les invito a hacer lo mismo, teniendo muy en cuenta que el desarollo social en cualquier país, no es ni será posible sin la responsable educación del pueblo:

Artists Facing Politics – César Vallejo

Today commemorates César Vallejo’s 120th birthday, and I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight one of the attributes of this writer that I most admire: his ability to articulate the role of the artist within the realm of politics. Many reductionist readings of Vallejo will attribute his politics of the socialist ideologies that prevailed in Europe between the two World Wars, while other even less informed readings will ignore his politics altogether, preferring to focus on the less contentious and more easily accessible texts, in order to

ONE SENTENCE OF TUNGSTEN

The opening sentence of César Vallejo’s social realist novel El tungsteno reads: “Dueña, por fin, la empresa norteamericana “Mining Society”, de las minas de tungsteno de Quivilca, en el departamento del Cuzco, la gerencia de Nueva York dispuso dar comienzo inmediatamente a la extracción del mineral.” The precariousness of rendering these lines in English may not be immediately apparent to a reader of the Spanish or a translation thereof. I would argue, however, that the translation problem here is at least twofold, in the syntax and semantics, and is revealing of the author’s agenda in this, his only complete novel. In the following, I want to complicate one line of Tungsten in an attempt to shed light Vallejo’s idiosyncrasy.

Nuevas traducciones al español de Pierre Joris

Hace unas semanas recibí copias de algunas revistas que han publicado traducciones de poemas y ensayos de Pierre Joris, realizadas por Mario Domínguez Parra y por mí. El primero de ellos se llama “Nembrot en el infierno” (El perseguidor, 23 junio 2011), un ensayo fundamental en el que Joris se aproxima a la práctica de traducción como una modalidad poética, protagonizando a Nembrot, figura bíblica y dantesca, que habla todos los lenguajes y, a la vez, ninguno de ellos. “Mi padre era curandero y cazador”, empieza Joris: “¿Sorprende a alguien que yo me convirtiera en poeta y traductor?” Para quienes desean leer esta traducción, les invito descargar el PDF aquí.

THE FINAL JUDGMENT – César Vallejo

It’s rare that we think of César Vallejo as anything other than a poet – granted, “poet” is usually accompanied by some qualifier, like unprecedented or idiosyncratic – but it must not be overlooked that,  if one sifts through the Vallejo papers, one finds that the poetry astonishingly accounts for only about one sixth of the whole. This reading of Vallejo exclusively as a poet, admittedly more common in the North than in the

Reevaluating the Poetry of Pablo Neruda

The poetry of Pablo Neruda is no secret to English language readers. His has been more extensively translated than that of any other South American poet. And while this is usually to the poet’s favor, certain popular collections (for example, the 20 sonetos de amor…) have been groped by translators and reconfigured with the same whimsical prattle that prevents us from reading in English translation the works of someone like the Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi. On the other hand, Neruda’s political poems are not so easy to be groped and exchange romantic nostalgia for a more “blood coloured

I, AND OTHER VICIOUS CIRCLES – Jorge Plaza

Spanish poet, native of Murcia, Jorge Plaza has not long ago published Yo, y otros círculos viciosos (Idea, 2010) in Arrefice, Lanzarote, and he would like us to read it as poets, so much he says in the introduction: assuming the I that he has put forth, as itself. While I was reading these poems and starting to think about I, and other vicious circles, I was struck by the strange tonality of a chord that was ringing through several poems in a confluence of intimacy and desolation, and it then occured to me that, to assume the I of the poem as a poet, I would have to translate. So, here is a reading, I mean a writing, in compliance with the author’s wishes.

VISIONS FROM THE FRAME – Roberto García de Mesa

In 2008 Roberto García de Mesa published a fascinating book of “microcuentos” or “flash-fiction,” titled Visiones desde el marco (Idea) [1]. The eighteen brief texts point to new territory in the trajectory of his narrative. As he is largely known as a poet & playwrite, García de Mesa has ventured a type of narration that attempts the greatest amount of brevity as possible while at once questioning the effectiveness of its own principle device. In Visions from the Frame, as in much of García de Mesa’s poetic and dramatic writing, we again are met with a perspective from the place that marks the brief intermediate space, between the real and unreal, between the gesture and the movement that gives meaning to transition. Copies of the book can be obtained here. And I encourage you to visit García de Mesa’s blog, Los espacios intermedios.

APOLONIA – Mario Domínguez Parra

Apolonia (Idea, 2006) is a book of poems by Mario Domínguez Parra, poet & translator from the Canary Islands, Spain. Other poems from this collection have been translated by Maureen Alsop and published in the 2010 Autumn Issue of Poetry Salzburg Review. Born in Alicante, in 1972, Domínguez Parra has translated into Spanish works from British, American and Modern Greek authors (his most recent translation, Rastreadores del fin by N.G. Lykomitros).

Here, we have Domínguez Parra’s poetic debut. A complex book of cantos filled with Mediterranean salt and space, an emptiness & a grittiness, in a crumbling world. The poet, like an archeologist having uncovered deteriorated ruins, recreates & yet updates the structures with the brutal syntax of language in torsion. An examination of the fault-lines & a measurement of the techtonic movement in both macro and micro kosmos, convene in this poetry of perserverence, languaged by barbaric tongues.