Tag: spanish

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In the Fray

A prose translation in the style of Jack Spicer of Federico García Lorca’s “Reyerta,” part of a larger project I’m working on, but felt appropriate to share now:

In the fray: Deep in the trenches, the switchblades made in Albacete shine like fish, beautiful in the other side’s blood. A hard, playing-card light cuts through the acrid green, the frenzied horses and their riders’ silhouettes. Two old women cry into an olive-wood cup. The fighting bull climbs the walls. Black angels bring handkerchiefs and melted snow: angels with huge wings feathered with switchblades made in Albacete. Juan Antonio, the one from Montilla, rolls dead down the slope, his body full of lilies and pomegranates at his temples. Now he climbs the fire-cross and sets out down the highway of death. Now the judge approaches through the olive grove, National Guardsmen accompanying him. Spilt blood screams a muted serpent-song. Here, officers! The same thing has happened as always and four Romans and five Carthaginians are dead. An afternoon of crazy fig-trees and hot rumors falls on the wounded legs of the cavalry. And black angels fly through the air following the setting sun: angels with long braids and olive-oil hearts.

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Thinking About Audience

What follows are my remarks from today’s webinar, Writing Outside the Academy. I didn’t have time to give the remarks after the second set of three asterisks, reflecting on public writing/public medievalism and yesterday’s events, but referred to them in the discussion. 

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My topic this afternoon is audience and how my role as a teacher shapes how I think about writing for the public and how I envision that public — in other words, how the pedagogical part of my job helps to shape my writing outside the academy.

I am currently working on a book-length project for a general audience on the past and present of the Spanish language, a project that has very much grown out of my teaching. It has been shaped by redesigning a class I had inherited from a retired colleague on the history and dialectology of Spanish, and by the ways in which students come into college and into my class thinking about language in very conservative and limiting ways, often shaped by introductory language pedagogy and popularly available resources about language in general and Spanish in particular. My students often come in to my class as strident prescriptivists, because that is how they have been taught Spanish and taught about Spanish, regardless of whether it is a learned language for them or whether they are heritage or native speakers, and so they end up very judgmental about the language as it changes over time and even about their own Spanish.

Continue reading “Thinking About Audience”

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1071 — Emily Dickinson

I’m participating in a translation workshop this month (more on this soon). It’s mostly Spanish and English, with some French, Italian, and a little German, as well. One of the first exercises was to translate and analyze three existing translations (including one by Silvina Ocampo)  of a poem by Emily Dickinson. It would never (at least not now, maybe in the future) occur to me to translate into anything other than my native language. (There’s that great quip of Gregory Rabassa’s, that when someone asked him how he knew his Spanish was good enough to translate Spanish texts into English, he replied that the question was never that, but always whether his English was good enough.) But for an exercise, for a first try at translating out of English, Dickinson’s agramaticality is very liberating.  There’s lots I’m not sure of in what I’ve done, but here’s the poem and my attempt: 

Emily Dickinson, 1071:

Percebir un Objeto cuesta
precisa su pérdida— 
Percepción en sí — Ganancia 
Replicando su precio— 

El Objeto Absoluto — nulo —
Percebir adjusta
y luego reprende cierta Perfección
Que sitúa tan lejos—

  

Perception of an object costs
precise the Object’s loss —
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to its Price —

The Object Absolute — is nought —
Perception sets it fair
and then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far —

 
   
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Translation Notes: Salchichas

Before I put my translation project aside to #FinishYourDamnBookAlready, I had started blogging a set of (mostly) lexical quandaries that I was facing. Now that I’m back to the project, I think I’ll resume the notes, too. So first up in Translation Notes 2.0, salchichas.

I know the word. I’ve heard it a million times. But I still had to look it up to see what its English counterpart is. And I realized that one of the consequences of translating Spanish literature while keeping kosher is that I have a whole battery of Spanish food vocabulary for which my internal definition is simply: can’t eat that.