Translations of Poetry by Roque Vallejos and Clara Janes (Nadal)

               

Roque Vallejos was born in Asuncion in 1943, and died there in April, 2006. He was a forensic surgeon with the High Court of Justice.

He had served as President of the Academia de la Lengua Paraguaya.

Earlier, he had been part of the so-called "60 Generation" which opposed the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.

I gleaned this from the poet's rather exiguous Wikipedia entry.

I was reading several of his poems, and had begun sketchily translating several of them, but stopped because I didn't like how pointlessly bleak the poems were. Then, I realized all the poems I had printed from online had the same tenor of existential despair and atheistic lament.

Many existentialists are able to put a great positive spin on the freedom entailed in the death of God. Not so, Vallejos; the void is palpable, keenly felt.

This makes me think of the brother he had (I wonder if he knew) in French poet Pierre Emmanuel, and was reminded instantly of Emmanuel's poem "Nada," which is so like a dark Mass for God's death: "Mon dieu qui es absent infiniment / des montagnes et des fleuves et des arbres / de la mer et du ciel et des yeux qui les creent". ("Lord who are infinitely absent / from mountains and rivers and trees / from the sea and the sky and the eyes which create them..." translated by Fowlie). The poem ends impressively, "my eyelids are never walled up enough never / to contain the darkness of your void / Lord."

That's pretty much the drift of the poems by Vallejos that I found online. I don't know if they are representative of his body of work. If so, how depressingly narrow a focus! Didn't the poet enjoy sex or ice cream? Sabado Gigante?

Anyway, I didn't enjoy this poem as much as the one by Clara Janes, but here's what I came up with...I'll give the original first.



     POEMA


       A franciso y Ricardo Mardones


En polvo que rodando
se hará hombre
para iniciar de nuevo
su jornada
sin nacer otra vez,
rumbo a otro cielo,
desde su alta mar de ceniza.

Extraña fundación, parto vacío, resucitado
sueño de la arcilla. Dios
consumido por el triste oficio
e ser la llama de su propia hoguera.



    Poem


As rolling dust
becomes man
again, to inflict
a new dawn
without rebirth,
launch him skyward anew
from exalted ash expanse.

Strange base, stillbirth,
Lazarus sleep of earth. God
gone up whoosh in a dour service.
And to light his own tinder, to burn.



I vacillated between "tinder" and "auto-da-fe" for that last line. I think I realized instantly that was too heavy-handed. But then it makes quite clear that it is a man (or god) cremating himself. The phrasing I went with might leave that too ambiguous. If you prefer "auto-da-fe" there, let me know. But then "tinder" is better metrically, scans better of course. But scansion isn't everything, obviously.

Make no mistake, though. "Hoguera" in that context is definitely referring to a burning at the stake, but the word "stake" substituted for "tinder" just won't work. (A literal translation of the line would be "and to be the flame for his own burning (at the stake.)" So what would the "tertium quid" be here? Preferably good scansion, but a vocable that punches the breath there also?

"Ghat" is not universal enough. "Pyre" just doesn't work. "Bier" is too quaint and antiquated. "And to light his body's tinder, to burn." That? "And to light his own pyre's tinder, to burn." I prefer a subtler version. If the reader gets that he (either man or god) is lighting himself on fire as it's worded now, then no further changes will be needed. If not, then they will.

Okay, I think I'm second guessing myself too much. I do like the scansion and sound values now, and it should be apparent in context of the immediately preceding line and the fact that he's lighting his (own) tinder and then "to burn" as an infinitive phrase separated by the comma should leave the reader interpreting "burn" as an intransitive not a transitive verb. If so, the meaning should be clear. Self-immolation.

(YOU DO REALIZE THIS IS WHY THE WORLD HATES POETS, RIGHT? BECAUSE WE TALK LIKE THIS, AND THINK LIKE THIS? OBSESS LIKE THIS. IT'S AMAZING ALL OF US DON'T GO STARK RAVING THE FIRST TIME OUR MOMMIES PUT ALPHABET SOUP IN FRONT OF US.....MAYBE WE DO! THE ALPHABET SOUP THEORY OF POETIC INSANITY. DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE MEDS. JUST PUT UP ALL THE SOUP CANS. SAVE YOUR CHILDREN!)


Note: Okay, the following two attempts below at the Vallejos poem I added today...what you just read above was the last night...

Okay, what about this version...

    Poem


The revolving dust
becomes human
again, only to suffer
a new dawn
without rebirth,
launch us skyward anew
from our celebrated sea of ash.

Strange base, stillbirth,
Lazarus sleep of earth. God
null and void in a dour service.
To exist? Merely to bring fire for one's own immolation.


Or does Vallejos want more of a mocking tone. He seems to be mocking the Promethean the way Beckett would. So perhaps it's closer to go towards the Beckettian?...


    Poem


The rolling dust
pointlessly recycles us,
just to repeat
an idiot dawn,
a mockery of rebirth,
to fling us towards an nth heaven
from our beloved sea of ash.

Strange game, stillbirth,
Lazarus sleep of earth. Gods
are eaten up, or drunk in our shibboleths.
Fire they bring they set to straw at their own feet.


Okay, I think I like that version. I needed to shake the cuffs of the literal off there. I think I finally got it when I realized Prometheus was the secret mover in this poem...perhaps Sisyphus as well. Maybe even Ixion. Those three mythological figures are all brethren in imagery. Prometheus was the shadow figure I couldn't see behind the screen at first. The "mathematical" form of this poem would be the pained circle.




Clara Janes (Nadal) is a rather fascinating figure. Check out her Wikipedia entry, which is much more fleshed-out than that of Roque Vallejos.

She's a rather prolific and well-respected poet, and a prodigious, prize-winning translator from many languages. She sort of reminds me of a Spanish Rosmarie Waldrop. I'd love to hear a colloquy between the two!

Clara Janes Nadal was born in 1940 in Barcelona (What a great city! It's on my agenda. It's one of the two cities I want most to visit in Europe.)

She's translated many writers I admire immensely, like Marguerite Duras.

Here's the Spanish text for her poem "Paralajes." The only versions of this I could find online all had a typo in them. One line reads thusly: "que em en cpmfin del no ser / el puro ser custodiaba."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that it was meant to read "que en el confin del no ser / el puro ser custodiaba." That's actually a splendid line: "that, within the confines of non-being, pure being conserved." I hope I got that right. If you look where the fingers are placed typing, it seems to back up my educated guess....the "p" and the "m" are adjacent the "o" and the "n." While "confin" doesn't seem to be a hugely common word in the Spanish language, it would fit the bill and would fit grammatically and every other way. If anyone has any information contradicting this, please let me know!



    Paralajes

Vimos el cometa
que pasa cada seis mil años.
Las palabras despertaron.
Los oídos se embriagaron
con su clamor sigiloso.
Los ojos fueron cautivos
de su incesante manar,
que entretegía coronas en el aire
con las hebras del misterio.
Y nos recorrió un jardín
de quietud abarcadora
que em eñ cpmfín del no ser
el puro ser custodiaba.
Vimos el cometa,
lo vimos y lo vemos
porque somos materia
de una estrella muerta
y la luz es su secreto.
¿Oyes esa música
que cruza como la luz la oscuridad
mientras la oscuridad gira
y yo con ella?
¡Con qué fuerza
se abre paso
y llega incluso
a mi lugar más remoto
cercado también de sombras!
Pero el latido
que brota allí
nadie lo oye.
Nadie, como yo, sabe
que existo
y creceré
y amaré
como aman esos brazos
que me sostiene
porque no sé andar aún…
Pero escucha, escucha:
todos los árboles se mecen
en la música.
Y en mi interior
donde un secreto sol
me hace adivinar
el sol secreto
da la oscuridad.


The poem is supposed to be formatted with each line centered on the page, but with the HTML I do not have the patience, for which I apologize. I'm too perezoso to do that right now. You can see it displayed correctly by Googling it.


     Parallaxes


We saw the comet
that passes every six thousand years.
Language awoke.
Our ears were intoxicated
trying to drink its stealthy arrival,
our eyes captive
to its ceaseless flow
that unfurled rings of light
composed of mysterious tendrils.
A garden spread over us
its arch of stillness;
though planted in void
pure being nurtured it.
We saw the comet...
which we saw, which we see
because we are atoms
from a dead star,
whose secret is light.
Do you hear this music
that crosses the way
light crosses darkness
while the darkness turns,
and I turn with it?
With what force
it makes its way
and arrives even here
into my remoteness
hemmed by shadows!
However, that throbbing
like a heart
that unfurls there,
nobody hears it!
Nobody, as I do, knows
that I exist,
that I will grow,
and will love
as these loving arms
that support me
because I do not know how to go yet...
But listen, listen:
all the trees rock
to this music.
Just as it happens
deep inside me,
where a secret sun
gives me a glimpse
of the secret radiance
of darkness itself.



I'm sure I'll play with this one some more.

I think it's cool the way ABARCADORA and ABRACADABRA are only separated by two letters. WHEN O BECOMES AB OR BA BECOMES O, IT'S ALCHEMY. AND BLOOD TYPES. obobobooboobobobo abobaboa .....BAOBAB! WHICH SHOULD MAKE YOU THINK OF....

THAZZ RIGHT...LE PETIT PRINCE!

Now I want to invent a language composed of only b's and o's because they look and sound great together.

But it can't be binary.

It has to be something-elsary.