One of my favorite pages on the internet contains eight back-to-back translations of “Au Lecteur,” the first poem in Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal,” all in English. I have visited this page many times to compare the different versions of the last stanza. Initially, I was shocked that each rendition of the last line (“— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!”) is unique. Most end with the phrase “my brother,” but “mon semblable” generates more variation: my fellow, my twin (several times), my likeness, my like, fellowman, my double.
That last interpretation, which I like for its echo of the French word, comes from Robert Lowell’s translation. Lowell also makes the choice that most delights me on the page, translating “C’est l’Ennui!” not as “He is Ennui!” (William Aggeler) or “It is boredom!” (Wallace Fowlie) but as, surprise, “It’s BOREDOM.” The caps transpose all that emphatic energy from the exclamation point onto the word itself, a move with the casual flair of genius, yet faithful to the original. I’m not sure the choice would have struck me as much if I hadn’t read it next to seven others.
I once heard someone quote the end of Rilke’s “Portrait of My Father as a Young Man,” in Stephen Mitchell’s translation (“Oh quickly disappearing photograph/in my more slowly disappearing hand”). I found those lines so moving I was nervous it would show. Years later I read Edward Snow’s translation: “O you swiftly fading daguerreotype/in my more slowly fading hands.” I vastly preferred the Mitchell — much more natural and immediate, and “fade” seems so weak, in reference to one’s body, one’s existence, next to “disappear.”
This liking it less taught me something profound, not just about translations, but about words, and choices, in general. I love this feature of great poetry in other languages, the way it spins out mutations. I love to see how different minds find (hugely or minutely) different solutions to the same set of problems. An array of translations is decision porn.
The Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), like Rilke and Baudelaire, attracts many translators, as Margaret Jull Costa notes in the introduction to her new translations, THE ETERNAL DICE: Selected Poems (New Directions, 144 pp., paperback, $16.95). This is because “translators are naturally, and possibly masochistically,” she writes, “drawn to the difficult.”
I suspect poetry is always hard to translate, but if Vallejo is especially so, it’s because of his linguistic ingenuity, an innovative style that adheres to a complex worldview. When you’re reading Vallejo, it may seem the rules of grammar don’t obtain, but nor do the laws of physics — the self of his poetry is godlike, outside time, and anything is also its own opposite. These are poems about the constancy of suffering, as in “I’m Going to Talk About Hope” (“My pain is so deep, that it has neither cause nor absence of cause”) and “The Nine Monsters” (“Never … has health/been more deadly,/nor has migraine extracted so much forehead from the forehead!”). They speak to the death always present in life, the dying of living.
Vallejo published two volumes of poetry in his lifetime. The second, “Trilce,” is now considered a masterpiece, but was not considered much at all when it appeared, in 1922. The title is one of his neologisms. He had a penchant for nonce words, those non-words used once, often combinations of two words that could fairly be mistaken for typos. The title does not require translation (lucky break), but may be, Costa writes in a footnote, “a fusion of triste (sad) and dulce (sweet).”
Another theory, offered by Henry Gifford and expanded on by Clayton Eshleman, is that it’s a fusion of trillon (trillion) and trece (thirteen). This is somewhat more supported by the text, since “XXXII” (the 77 poems in “Trilce” are all titled with Roman numerals) ends with the line “Treinta y tres trillones trescientos treinta/y tres calorías,” translated by Eshleman as “Thirty-three trillion three hundred and thirty/-three calories.”
Note how the hyphen in “thirty-three” appears after the line break, corresponding to the Spanish y (and), an example of Eshleman’s fidelity to detail. Eshleman spent decades translating Vallejo’s full body of poetic work, and his notes offer plentiful context and justification. Ah, the finicky joy of seemingly disproportionate attentions.
Given my addiction to obsession over tiny decisions, I’m disappointed that Costa doesn’t delve more deeply into some of her own choices. She is a prolific and decorated translator, but not a poet, and her line breaks sometimes differ inexplicably from the original. Or she’ll seem to use more, or fewer, words in English than the line requires, as when she translates “mi padre es una víspera” (literally “my father is an eve”) as “my father is the eve of something,” and “el mío es más bonito de todos” (close to “mine is the prettiest of all”) as “mine’s the best.” She changes the meaning and the volume of language, something we both see and hear. That’s allowed if you have some philosophy about it. However, because this is Vallejo’s poem, not Costa’s, I wished for a reasoned defense.
If the “untranslatable” poem is so appealing, it’s odd that Costa sidesteps some of the challenging parts of the work. She often translates the neologisms as though they had a simple correspondence. Take the phrase “rebocados sepulcros” from “XI.” Eshleman notes that by misspelling revocados (whitewashed) Vallejo layers on bocados (a mouthful or snack). The “translational challenge” is to find a similarly suggestive misspelling of an English word, hence his choice of “bitewashed sepulchres.” Costa chooses “whitewashed tombs.” Another example: “la dura deglusiόn,” an alteration of degluciόn (swallowing) that evokes ilusiόn (illusion). Eshleman translates this, clumsily, as “hard degllusion,” while Costa avoids awkwardness, but doesn’t solve the problem, with “hard gulp.”
Now some more pornography, through three translations of “Intensity and Height” (from “Human Poems,” a manuscript Vallejo wrote after leaving Peru for Europe in 1923, not published till after his death). Vallejo’s first line is “Quiero escribir, pero me sale espume.” Costa’s version: “I want to write but only foam comes out.” (I notice she omits the comma, but inserts a comma in the second line, which doesn’t have one.) Eshleman keeps the most unexpected word at the end: “I want to write, but out comes foam.” Another translation, by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith, adds an anagram — a flourish I find irresistible: “I want to write, but forth comes froth.”
Only Eshleman attempts to preserve the rhyme scheme, and the misspelling toz, for tos (cough), which he renders as “coughv.” Vallejo’s “quiero laurearme, pero me encebollo” becomes “I want to be crowned with laurels, but I’m stewing in onions” (Costa) and, less wordily, “I want to laurel myself, but I stew in onions” (Eshleman). Only Gianuzzi and Smith’s makes a good line in English: “I want to be laurel- but am onion-wreathed.”
For the last words in the last line (“vámonos, cuervo, a fecundar tu cuerva”), Costa and Eshleman both opt for “your mate.” Again I find Gianuzzi and Smith’s choice the most inspired: “let’s go, crow, and fecundate your crow-hen.” They managed to find an English word that is feminine and contains crow-ness, two familiar syllables that together feel marvelously rare — a fix so poetic it really needs no explanation.
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