Adventures in Amateur Translation, Part II

The most controversial word that Lorca uses in the "Oda" is "marica," which is closest to "fairy" in English and which Carlos Bauer translates as "faggot." The Ode's voice is a puzzle--a gay poet reaching across half a century to address another gay poet, only to bitterly accuse an amorphous mass of pansies of some vaguely awful sins.* The maricas first appear in stanza nine, "on the rooftops, / huddled in the bars, / coming up in gangs from the sewers, / trembling between the legs of chauffeurs / or spinning on the ramparts of absinthe, / the fags, Walt Whitman, are pointing at you." Why do they point? There's something accusatory, and threatening, and also something of the supplicant in that gesture, like Adam stretching out his hand on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Do they want to claim Walt Whitman as their own, when in reality he doesn't belong to them? And if not to them, then who?

What is "Walt Whitman" to Lorca, and what are "maricas"? Walt Whitman is sensual and elemental. He is the "Adan de sangre," he is alone on the seas, he is all man. But his sensuality has nothing in it of excess or debauch. He is the "enemy of the satyr, / enemy of the vine." His thighs are the thighs of a virginal Apollo. In spite of his supposed sensuality, there's something cold and rational about Lorca's Walt Whitman; he's more of a marble statue than a warm-blooded Adam. The maricas, by contrast, wallow in the muck of a Dionysian swamp, gyrating in a perpetual orgy. They will be buried alive in a bacchanal. They are incoherent; like cats and like serpents, they throw upon Walt Whitman's luminous beard "a multitude of cries and gestures." They are a hot mess.

In his introduction, Bauer writes that Lorca was preoccupied with something called "the homosexual question" (which one is that, now?) at the time of writing. He goes on to say, "What a few critics claim to be his ambivalence about homosexual love in Ode to Walt Whitman is rather a firm call for--or a return to--an all-encompassing pansexualism." He quotes Palo Umbral: "When homosexuality is locked up behind doors and concealed within the society that proscribes it, it then turns into something clandestine and sinful. It loses its grandeur, it becomes degraded."

I simply don't understand how Umbral can claim that Lorca deplores clandestine homosexuality in this poem. In fact, the only forms of love that "Oda a Walt Whitman" elevates are clandestine and even full of shame: "the boy who writes / a girl's name on his pillow, / ...the youth who dresses up like a bride / in the darkness of his closet / ...the men of the green gaze / who love other men and whose lips burn in silence." It seems that what really bothers Lorca about the "faggots of the cities" is that they practice homosexuality openly, that their true sexuality is a part of the identity they present to society, and that they are more or less accepted for it. Lorca deplores the gay scene he witnesses in New York because he thinks that practicing homosexuality openly robs it of all its romance and purity. When men can only love one another in secret, their sexuality retains its integrity, its complete otherness. Closeted gay men in Spain in the 1930s were non-participants in society--their real lives existed only at the margins, in dark spaces where enforcement couldn't penetrate. They were sexual conscientious objectors. They were cut off and guiltless.

In the America that Lorca portrays in his poem--a capitalist nightmare of mud, wire, and death where pulleys churn up the skies and a dance of walls will soon destroy the prairies--gay men living openly in the cities have bought in. They've assimilated, and what is for Lorca something pure and sustaining seems to have been perverted into a wearisome, endless orgy. He has a point--acceptance has its price, and who doesn't get off on forbidden love?--but his exaltation of secrecy and silence is also a longing for annihilation, and I think it's impossible not to perceive a note of self-loathing when Lorca writes, ""faggots of the cities / swollen flesh and filthy thoughts. / Mothers of lust. Harpies. Tireless enemies / of the love that bestows crowns of joy."

It's because I think that the poem's address is not only outward, but inward, that I've translated "marica" as "fag," where Bauer uses "faggot." While faggot is a word that straight men direct at gay men (and at each other), "fag" is a word that gay men use--sometimes playfully, sometimes derisively--among themselves. When straight men use the word faggot they are taking aim directly at homosexuality (and indirectly at women), but when gay men use the word "fag" in a negative way it means something else, something closer to "slave" or "bitch." It carries an implicit criticism, an anxiety--stop making the rest of us look bad. Stop being such a fag. It's a complicated word, like Lorca's attitude in this poem--it doesn't have the direct brutality of faggot and its meaning shifts depending on context. Bauer's translation was published in 1988; a faggothetical exegesis of the type that would be able to say with confidence that "faggot" and "fag" were used the same way 20 years ago is totally beyond me. I can only avow that the way the word hits me in Bauer's Ode accords with his notion that Lorca was criticizing, not homosexuality in general, but "socially proscribed homosexuality." The "I" of Bauer's poem is on the outside looking in, is essentially living as a straight man. I hope that, by addressing "the fags" in my version and not "the faggots," I've conveyed a more turbulent, conflicted Lorca, both crying out against capitalism and industry and tormented by self-loathing, by an Apollonian ideal of silence and restraint that's killing him.


*I don't believe that the the "I" in the poem can be ironically distanced from Lorca. Not that the "I" is Lorca, because that would be silly, but that the poem was written in the sincerity of a mood or a moment--it's not the studied performance of someone else's point of view.

Adventures in Amateur Translation: Part I

As with many translated things, the original text of Lorca's “Ode to Walt Whitman,” appears on the left-hand page, while Carlos Bauer's corresponding English lines are printed on the right. When I read the poem in English, I kept a very casual eye on the Spanish text, since my Spanish is, lately, little more than casual (hell, my English is going the same way. I'd tell you about the absolutely ordinary English word that I couldn't remember yesterday, but I've forgotten it*). My understanding of Spanish isn't a sophisticated one. I can count the novels I've read in Spanish on one hand (one of them was about this unspeakable badass), let alone novels from Spain. Though I've read some Lorca, I'm not in touch with his literary burden.

I know a little something about English poetry. I know that "In a Station of the Metro" is the closest thing in the English language to a perfect image: a phrase so potent and evocative that reading it causes a violent existential shock. And despite my hobbled Spanish, I had a strong aesthetic reaction when I read the line, "gotas de sucia muerte con amargo veneno," and found that it had been translated as, "drop by drop, the bitter venom of a foul death." It seemed a wimpy and unnecessarily long-winded rendering of what should simply be "drops of dirty death with bitter venom." I wasn't offended on behalf of Lorca, or the "Oda." I was offended on behalf of the English poetry that I read through the Spanish words--the poetry that was the merest literal translation of what I had read, but which gave me escalofríos, cold stairs climbing up my spine.

Why did the translator, Carlos Bauer, forgo the relentless, rhythmic alliteration of "drops of dirty death?" By separating his drops from the death they bestow, Bauer suggests that the foul death is held in reserve and meted out drop by drop, as from a medicine bottle, and that this ministry is bitter venom. Perhaps he did it this way to eliminate the awkwardness of the hanging tag, "with bitter venom," which has an uncertain function in the more literal translation. The bitter venom is given alongside the drops of dirty death? It just sort of inevitably comes with it--combo number four, a side of bitter venom with your dirty death? Though that last bit may be vague and un-rigorous, I think it's made up for by the shape of the sounds, and by the elemental quality of the line. Dirty drops--like sooty rainwater, semen, or the swirl of blood in the syringe.

My strong feelings about this line prompted me to try to translate the whole poem with only conversational Spanish, an online Spanish-English dictionary, a Roget's Thesaurus, and a copy of Leaves of Grass. My translation is inferior, by several orders of magnitude, to Bauer's. It has a rushed, awkward, inconsistent quality. Overall, it doesn't hit its stride as a poem. But I was pleased with one or two lines, and the process brought up questions about the Oda and about translation in general which I found interesting--it's always fun to bump up against an opinion you didn't know you had. The poem itself is quite long, so I've posted it as a separate entry. The original is here. I wish I could provide you with a fair-use copy of Bauer's translation, but I just can't. It is heavily excerpted below.

I assumed that the literal, bare bones approach that I took with "gotas de sucia muerte" would inform my choices throughout the poem, but this was far from true. I had no consistent approach whatsoever, and my motivation for picking certain words or phrases over others changed from line to line. I was often swayed by the sounds of the words in English, and I was likely to overlook closeness of meaning in favor of verbal musicality. I had originally translated "manadas de bisontes" in the third stanza as "flocks of bison," before it occurred to me on a re-read that bison do not fly. I was tempted to leave it, since the bison in question descend from the sky, but I felt it would likely be perceived as a mistake.

I also saw that it would be necessary to alter the punctuation of the lines--English doesn't have the same capacity as Spanish to pile clause on clause. Sentences that are perfectly correct in Spanish are run-on in English when translated literally. Thus, "los muchachos cantaban enseñando sus cinturas" becomes "the boys were singing, showing off their waists." Mostly I just added a judicious comma here and there, but in one place I was moved to set off a phrase between two em dashes. Where Lorca writes, "tus muslos de Apolo virginal," and Bauer has "your thighs of a virginal Apollo," I decided to fuck with the very structure of the line and this is how I did it: "your thighs--like a virginal Apollo--".There's something more intimate about this clause as an aside, as if Lorca were moved to whisper it in a fit of reverence for Walt Whitman's thighs (and I relate to that).

So, a few places where I was especially pleased with my choices, and some places where I had to accept that Bauer had already gotten to the best possible phrasing. In stanza eight, I had originally translated carbón as graphite, because it sounded architectural and urban, but it didn't flow well, so I went back to coal. In stanza nine, I was excited to translate "Macho" as "Big Guy." I think it's best to avoid anachronisms when translating (so "mantastic" would have been inappropriate). But "Big Guy" is subtle enough, and besides, Walt Whitman is the Big Guy in American poetry. Where Lorca has "girando en las plataformas del ajenjo," I prefer "spinning on the ramparts of absinthe" to Bauer's "flitting about on the platforms of absinthe." But I found it difficult to find an English phrase that would satisfactorily encapsulate everything contained in Lorca's phrase, "os cierren las puertas de la bacanal." "Os" is the reflexive form of the pronoun vosotros (which basically means y'all), and "os cierren" implies that the action of "cerrar" (to close) is directed towards the y'all that Lorca is addressing (about whom more later). Not only are the gates of the bacchanal to be shut, or, more nearly, sealed, but they are to be shut on somebody, somebody is to be shut inside. In Spanish this is conveyed so simply and efficiently by adding the pronoun; I couldn't find an equally elegant formula in English. I grumpily settled for "shut you up inside the bacchanal" and looked to see what Bauer came up with: "slam the doors of the bacchanal in your faces." Pretty good.

The poem's fifth stanza is its most mysterious and harrowing. "Cuando la luna salga / las poleas rodarán para tumbar el cielo; / un límite de agujeros cercará la memoria / y los ataúdes se llevarán a los que no trabajan." Ataúd, which means coffin, is probably my favorite word in Spanish. It doesn't sound like other Spanish words; its origin is Arabic, but it lacks the give-away "al" prefix (almohada, alambre, alcatraz). It sounds like what it means--hollow and wooden, a dry scraping sound. I've translated the stanza like this: "When the moon comes out, / the pulleys will churn up the skies; / a fence of needles will encircle the memory / and coffins will carry away those who do not work." The Spanish verb "cercar" is a cognate of the English "encircle;" Bauer has "enclose," which is probably more like the sense of the word in Spanish, as the related word "acercar" means to draw near. I've chosen encircle because of its nearness to the sound of the Spanish verb, and because of the image of a hoop of needles, binding the skull like a crown of thorns, the points facing inwards.

To be continued (next time: Lorca and faggots).

*oh yeah: it was "palindrome."