1. DIVIDED ATTENTIONS (Consequences of Video Conferencing on Co-Translation)
Which naturally arose from the creative efforts of two translators (young/old, Spanish/American, bi-lingual educator/erratically multilingual poet.) Our process was conducted through video conferencing. So, my attention constantly moved between paper drafts on my desk in front of a large screen monitor connected to a MacBook. Never lost awareness that I was relating to my co-translator only through electronic imagery, her digital shadow. So, my attention is to the computer screen – often displaying a “screen share” with our early versions of the same Orozco poem (see poem below) in side-by-side columns. Would we have reacted to our first drafts in a different manner had we worked in the same physical space? Would there have been more confrontations, or more rapid diplomatic accord about our differences over our translations? What if we had shared identical reference books when questions surfaced? What if the attention she brought to our meetings (evenings after a long workday teaching) weren’t so different from that of my mornings since our differing time zones resulted int different qualities of attention between us?
2. DIVIDED ATTENTIONS (Fear? Or Triumph Over Sense of Futility if Unpublishable?)
A confession: I fell completely in love with Olga Orozco’s poetry at first sight. And avoided thinking about whether permission might ever be granted by the Orozco Estate In Buenos Aires (run by one literary critic well schooled in Argentinian literature along with a member of the poet’s family), Celia, my co-translator, said it didn’t matter to her if our translations were ever published. But I couldn’t read the depth of her comment on my monitor. Certainly, I hoped they would be published, particularly since only a single slim book of Orozco’s translations, Engravings Torn from Insomnia, by Mary Crow is currently available. Crow’s translations are dazzling and were done in Argentina in consultation with the poet, but represent a very miniscule sample of Orozco’s oeuvre, a few dozen rather than a few hundred poems. My nagging anxiety circled around whether these translations would be approved for publication by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable publisher. And what if the Orozco Estate didn’t grant publication rights to our publisher? My correspondence with the Estate left me unclear about how interested they were in seeing a new book of Orozco translations in the marketplace.
These worries suggested an overarching question: Who were the Orozco translations intended for beyond us as translators? Did the Estate really believe that Orozco’s future reputation depended heavily on Anglophone readers? How many readers of modern poetry by Latin American women poets in translation would welcome Orozco in translation? And Orozco couldn’t be easily packaged by a publisher in boxes labeled “feminist,” “magical realist,” “LGBTQ+, or” politically engaged,” although these qualities, along with many others harder to label, drift through her writing as tinges, as frequent colors.
3. OROZCO’S OWN DIVIDED ATTENTIONS
Her closest affinity to a literary school would be to the French surrealists (particularly Andre Breton) and to a famous quartet of 19th century French masters, Nerval, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Lautremont) But she was never welcomed into Breton’s circle, and along with her close reading of these French poets, and equal, if not even a larger source fueling her poetic imagination the occult, particularly Tarot, Astrology, I-Ching, Alchemy, Aztec and Egyptian mythologies.). All of which she refused to take completely seriously as alternative spiritual systems. “Reading Tarot cards gave me a certain illusionary omnipotence,” she informed one interviewer. Note the flavor of “illusionary.” Her playful engagement with the occult was a launching program surfacing autochthonous poetic imagery and multi-layer metaphors. But contrary to this assertion, I recall seeing an Argentine public television documentary showcasing interviews with Orozco in her Buenos Aires home filmed shortly before her death in 1999. She handles a well-worn deck of fortune telling cards, recalling doing serious fortune telling readings for her friends until a nightmare warned her to cease doing so, a dream command she apparently swiftly obeyed. But it is Impossible for me to read her face while she speaks. Is her serious attention focused on the spiritual essence of the Tarot and cartomancy imagery she repurposed in her poems – or upon her literary transformations of fortune telling card imagery summarized by a legacy of Argentine surrealism exotically seasoned with occult flavors? And, an acknowledgement of T.S. Eliot’s importance to her poetry, given his reference to “A wicked deck of cards” in The Waste Land. And how this documentary could only skim the surface in less than an hour of the bridges she constructed throughout her career to mediate her own divides. Sicilian and Celtic roots vs. lifelong Argentinian residence, “One of the boys” – the only woman! – in a burgeoning Buenos Aires poetry scene/a solitary shaman or crone of the Pampas. Journalist for a quirky Argentinian woman’s magazine for whose readers she regularly penned a monthly advice column. And an intellectually challenging poet who read her poems publicly as if singing torrid tango lyrics in a back-alley club.
4. ATTEMPTING TO BE ATTENTIVE TO MUSICALITY IN OROZCO’S POEMS.
There are several websites offering the experience of hearing Orozco read her poems. There’s an attractive tone in her delivery. A commanding gruffness. An old tango vocalist’s torchy polyvocality? Or intimations of an emerging death rattle heard in Billie Holiday’s last recordings? I want to bring that tone into her opening lines of Section 14 of her Cantos a Berenice. Cantos a Berenice is a fourteen-part poem presenting her dead cat Berenice. This is not a conventional poetic elegy. Orozco treats Berenice as the true author of the poem, vividly alive – but alive in an unearthly realm.
The poem opens with:
Jugabas a esconderte entre los utensilios de cocina
como un extraño objeto tormentoso entre indecibles faunas,
The bounding energy of kitten play seems better served by repetitive “a” vowels rhythmically resounding in the Spanish word “Jugabas.” But I need the English word “play” since the entire poem enacts Berenice at play – even after death! But death transformed her into “objecto,” a thing unhinged from life. But this lifeless thing is still energetically alive – “tormentoso” – “turbulent” – much as I prefer the sound in English of “tormented.” At by the third line of the poem she has simply vanished – like the cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland?
Orozco’s poetic lines are long and unrhymed. Sinewy. My attention is dartling as I’m inwardly hearing a zigzagging sax solo by Coleman Hawkins that is followed by a likewise twisting solo in response by Sonny Rollins. But there’s zero evidence Orozco was influenced by jazz. So, does she pivot sonically, sensually, like a tango singer or dancer? And is my inner jazz soundtrack faced with translating this poem’s opening seeking an easy deflection from where my attention should have been? What is the most encompassing music of this poem in English that can be accomplished? How serious was Orozco when she casually told a fellow poet that her favored poetic form was the tango?
Then I resign myself to how much of Orozco’s musicality can’t be carried into an English version. And anyway, doesn’t her powerhouse strength come most vividly through her machine-gun-like rounds of surreal imagery driving her poems forward into terra incognito?
5. CAN MY CAT’S POTENTIAL ATTENTION TO OROZCO’S BERENICE ENABLE HER TO BETTER TRANSLATE BERENICE’S POEM BETTER THAN ANY HUMAN TRANSLATOR?
If you can accept Orozco’s insistence that her deceased cat delivered the poem to her, the ideal translator of Cantos a Berenice would be an interspecies translator.
Ideally, my cat could be attentive to the spirit-form of Orozco’s “Berenice.” This translation of Cantos a Berenice would be a form of experimental sound poetry that would not embody Spanish or English. There is a precedent for this in Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras composed in “beast language.” The first poem in McClure’s book opens with “GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOOOR!” What sounds would Orozco’s cat offer from the other side of this life as an engaging poetry of her new life? A life with at least seven more lives to experience, as Orozco found inspiration in the myth of the Egyptian god Atum-Ra who transformed herself into a cat who consequently gave birth to eight more cats, creating the foundation of the belief that a cat has nine lives.
5. MAY I PLEASE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION AT THIS POINT?
Here is the rest of the fourteenth section of Orozco’s Canto a Berenice
o a desaparecer entre los complicidades del follaje
con un manto de dríada dormida bajo los velos de la tarde,
o eras sustancia yerta debajo de un papel que se levanta y anda.
Henchías los armarios con organismos palpitantes
o poblabas los vestidos vacíos con criaturas decapitadas y fantasmas.
Fuiste pájaro y grillo, musgo ciego y topacios errantes.
Ahora sé que tratabas de despistar a tu perseguidora con efímeras máscaras.
No era mentira el túnel con orejas de liebre
ni aquella cacería de invisibles mariposas nocturnas.
Te alcanzó tu enemiga poco a poco
y te envolvió en sus telas como con un disfraz de lluviosos andrajos.
Saliste victoriosa en el irreversible juego de no estar.
Sin embargo, aún ahora, cierta respiración desliza un vidrio frío por mi espalda.
Y entonces ese insecto radiante que tiembla entre las flores,
la fuga inexplicable de las pequeñas cosas,
un hocico de sombra pegado noche a noche a la ventana, no sé, podría ser,
¿quién me asegura acaso que no juegas a estar, a que te atrapen?
Our collaboration resulted in this translation, offered with the hope that it holds your attention (undivided and divided) for a spell:
Cantos a Berenice Songs to Berenice – XIV
You played hide-and-seek among kitchen utensils
like a strange turbulent object among unspeakable fauna,
or vanished in complicities of foliage,
with a mantle of a nymph sleeping under the veils of the afternoon,
or you were a stiff substance under a piece of paper that gets up and walks.
You filled closets with pulsating organisms,
or you populated empty dresses with beheaded creatures and ghosts.
You were bird and cricket, blind moss and wandering topaz.
Now I know you were trying to mislead your pursuer with fleeting masks.
The tunnel with hare ears was not a lie,
nor that hunt for invisible moths.
Your enemy caught up with you little by little
and she wrapped you in her fabric in a costume of rainy rags.
And you emerged victorious in the irreversible game of not being there.
Yet even now, a certain breath slides a cold glass down my back.
And then that radiant insect trembling among flowers,
the inexplicable escape of small things,
Night after night there’s a shadowy snout glued against my window, I don’t know,
Could it be? Could anyone assure me that it isn’t you playing at being, at again being caught?
–Olga Orozco (1920-1999) Translated by Norman Weinstein and Celia Gil Llamas
