Transcript: 005 – Translating with Rosa Alcalá
Rosa Alcalá – Charla Cultural – Transcript
Adriana: Welcome to Charla Cultural, a little chat about culture from Aster(ix) Journal and City of Asylum. I’m Adriana E. Ramírez.
Karla: And I’m Karla Lamb.
Adriana: Today we’re hanging out with Rosa Alcalá.
Karla: Rosa Alcalá is a poet and translator originally from Paterson, New Jersey who has published three books of poetry. Most recently, MyOTHER TONGUE, the editor and translator of Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vecuña, Alcalá has been the recipient of a NEA translation fellowship and runner up for a PEN translation award. She teaches in the department of creative writing and bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Yay.
Adriana: Today’s show is going to be a little different than our usual format because we’re actually going to be sharing with you the live performance from the City of Asylum International Literary Festival that we did.
So, I had the extreme honor of interviewing Rosa after her performance. And so, we’re going to play that as well. Karla, can you set us set this up a little bit? Tell us a little bit about, you know, what the festival was about and how this came to be?
Karla: Oh, yeah. City of Asylum’s International Literary Festival is the first of its kind and the first in Pittsburgh. City of Asylum just jumped on this really cool opportunity to take advantage of the virtual platform and connect with people, translators, and authors, just from a bunch of different countries. And it was a 10-day festival with two to three events every day and every event had to do with translation. So that’s how we got connected with Aster(ix) Journal and Rosa Alcalá because she’s a translator.
Adriana: I want to introduce tonight’s reader, Rosa Alcalá. And I want to first off thank Rosa for being a part of the Aster(ix) family. Rosa was actually in our Kitchen Translation; Kitchen Table Translation issue, which came out in 2017. It was edited by Madhu Kaza, shout out to Madhu. And Rosa is here to share with us her incredible work, and then to participate in an interview with me. And then to answer some questions from y’all. Welcome, Rosa, thank you so much for being a part of this event. And we’re so excited to hear you read.
Rosa: What I’m going to do is I’m going to read some translations of Cecilia Vecuña’s work. Some of the poems are part of a book that she wrote in the late sixties and early seventies, and it was a manuscript that was lost it’s called Sabor a Mi, a manuscript that was supposed to be published when she left Chilé in 1972 to go to England and it never was published. The coup intervened and it’s unclear what happened to the manuscript, but what’s left of that manuscript has been reconstructed by Cecilia. Cecilia didn’t return to Chilé after the coup. Not right away.
She went to Colombia after that and then New York. And there’s something about these early poems. I became her translator later on in the ‘90s. So, these early poems have always been very interesting to me as kind of an insight into her early poetics. So, I’m going to read some of those poems and then a later poem as well, that is more engaged with this sort of long history that Cecilia has with what one would call eco-poetics.
The first poem is called “The Dream Company”. So, Cecilia was very young, and you know, she was a teenager in her early twenties when she wrote these poems. So, I’m going to read the Spanish and the English. There may be some Spanish speakers out there, some bilingual speakers as well. So, this is called “La Compañía de los Sueños.”
“Avisos Económico”
La compañía tiene por objeto realizar
los suenos nocturnos del cliente:
Si usted
tiene un sueño, escribe la compañía
que se encargará de reunir a todos
los personajes del sueño en el
ambiente natural del sueño.
La compañía no garantiza
la total realización del sueño.
El azar no depende
de ninguna compañía.
La compañía no falseará los sentimentos
de ningún personaje
por medio de la instrucción
Si usted ha soñado que es besado
por un antiguo amante
en la cumbre de la montaña,
la compañia devolvera a su amante
a la cumbre de la montaña,
pero usted, ¿será besado?
And that’s 1970.
“The dream company classified ad”
The company’s objective is to fulfill nocturnal dreams for its client.
If you have a dream, write to the company who will see to it, that all the characters in your dream be gathered in a natural dream environment.
The company cannot guarantee total realization of the dream.
Chance does not answer to a company.
The company will not reeducate any character to falsify emotion.
If in a dream you were kissed by an old lover on a mountain top, the company will place your lover on that mountain top once again.
But you, will you be kissed?
This is called “Nuevos diseños eróticos para muebles”.
Isn’t that exciting? Like what’s going to come next?
“Nuevos diseños eróticos para muebles”
Soñando con un mundo vasto
hemos llegado a la certera conclusion
de que las posiciones del cuerpo
en el mundo civilizado
son demasiado limitadas
de modo que terminaremos
con la posición
“sentada en una silla”
para proponer distintos muebles
que ofrezcan multiplicidad
de movimento o situaciones corporals
al a conductora de sus propias carnes.
Esta idea será de fundamental interés
para las personas obsesionadas
y obligadas a permanecer
durante largo tiempo inmóviles
com son:
estudiantes
oficinistas
operadores de fábricas
asistentes a reuniones
Se crearón modelos para personas
que odien escribir sentadas
para que pueden hacerlo
hincadas, de boca, en cuclillas
o cabeza abajo
Estos muebles irán
en beneficio de la salud
y la belleza de todos los interesados
gracias a la peculiar irrigación
sanguínea y la repentina
turgenica de muslos y nalgas
que sin duda tengo planeadas.
That’s 1971.
“New erotic designs for furniture”
Dreaming of a vast world
we have come to the definite conclusion
that physical positions
in a civilized world
are too constricting
therefore, we would eliminate
the position
“sitting in a chair.”
and suggest instead, a different kind of furniture
that allows for a multiplicity of movements and physical situations
in line with each bodies specific wiring.
This idea will be of special interest
to those who obsessively
or by obligation
remain immobile for long hours,
e.g.:
Students,
office workers
machine operators
meeting attendees
Zoom watchers (because that’s basically how we’re doing everything these days.)
Models will be built for those
who hate to write while sitting,
allowing them to kneel,
lie on their bellies, squat, or hang upside-down
This furniture.
will promote the health and beauty of all its users
thanks to the peculiar increase in blood circulation
and inevitable protuberance of thighs and asses,
which are undoubtedly part of my plan.
So those are some of the early poems. I’m going to read one of the later ones. This is… I’m not going to read the Spanish. I’m going to read the English.
This is more a, of a prose piece. And this is one that was written recently, or at least when we put the book together a few years ago.
“To hear is to strike gold”
A response to Pascua Lama:
Glacier is the origin of the word “cool” and the first “chill,”
The slow-moving ice of an inner music that dies when no one wants to hear it.
As it breaks the glacier moans, releasing a cow’s alveolar lament,
The nearly extinct condor is the glacier water messenger intermediary between two worlds.
Quari Paxa, the boy condor, guardian of the glacier was buried alive at the source of the Mapocho river, El Plomo’s glacier peak, to ensure the valley we now called Santiago would never lack water.
Buried and forgotten for 500 years, he was then discovered and torn from his sleep by miners in 1954. They located him only to dislocate him, turning him into a trophy and archeological object.
They called it mountain worship. And with that phrase, situated him in the past.
They called him El Plomo mummy and that name separated him from life, but the boy continues to sleep. And when someone listens to the water, his sleep is returned to the present.
The boy returns now to national consciousness. The glacier is at risk of being sold, contaminated, lost. He reappears at this moment when Chilé must choose between hearing and not hearing the music of an ancient connection between the earth and the glacier, the specific tone of a place. Place is sound and a form of hearing.
We have interrelations, interactions between people and land, the space of naming. To change the meaning of a name is to change the world. In Alto del Carmen, situated in the Huasco Province, land of Gabriela Mistral’s ancestors. Chilé must decide on a meaning.
Alto del Carmen could be the place Chilé chooses to honor its poetry above all else, where it could be the end of poetry. Today, shepherds from Baya del Huasco, descendants of the Diaguita are guardians of an ancient vision of the glacier as life-giving, as life-giving sacred.
We can choose to listen to the music of the place in all its potential or put an end to life by surrendering the glacier and the minds to neo-colonial powers.
But do we hear its voice, our own interior voice? Or do we hear the voice of a system that says the dollar is what counts?
What do you know? We are now the owners of these minds and cyanide is the new guardian of the waters. Water is gold. Manquemilla: gold condor, the blood of the glacier, listening to us.
The slow shifting is testimony to an ancient relationship with earth and water and ritual conservation of its fluidity is our true cultural patrimony.
The future inheritance of a music that sustains the earth and human life simultaneously.
In Australia, indigenous peoples have recovered their dignity and their land rights through poetry, the ritual conservation of their history and the landscape is their songline and Chilé, the condor, and the water of legends, the memory of the people, is the line of songs that enters the earth to fecundate it, the intangible quipu of our community.
~
It was written in 2006.
And then I’m going to switch over to reading some of my own poems that deal with ideas of translation. And there are quite a few of them. So, I just picked a few ideas of translation, but also my relationship to both Spanish and English, having grown up bilingual, the daughter of Spanish immigrants who never learned English.
So, there’s a lot of poems thinking about that. The first one I’m going to read is called “Paramour”.
“Paramour”
English is dirty. Polyamorous. English
wants me. English rides with girls
and with boys. English keeps an open
tab and never sleeps
alone. English is a smooth talker
who makes me say please.
It’s a bit of role-playing
and I like a good tease. We have a safety word
I keep forgetting. English likes
pet names. English
has a little secret, a past,
another family. English is going to leave them
for me. I’ve made English a set
of keys. English brings me flowers
stolen from a grave.
English texts me, slips in
as emojis, attaches selfies not safe for work. English has rules
but accepts dates last minute. English makes
booty-calls. English makes me want it.
When I was younger, my parents said
keep that English out of our house. If you leave with that miserable,
don’t come back. I said, god-willing
in the language of the Inquisition. I climbed out
my window, but always got
caught. English had a hooptie
that was the joint. Now my mother goes gaga
over our cute babies. Together
English and I wrote my father’s
obituary. How many times
have I said it’s over an English just laughs
and says, c’mon señorita, let’s go for
Chinese. We always end up
in a fancy hotel where we give
fake names. And as I lay my head
to hear my lover breathe
I dream of Sam Patch plunging
into water, a poem
English gave me
that had been given
to another.
~
And I’m going to share…this is my friend, the Colombian poet and Andrea Cote-Botero, friend and colleague, and she translated with a Chilean poet, Paula Paula Cucurella, my book, MyOTHER Tongue, this book here. And so, I want you to hear her reading the translation of “Paramour”.
El inglés tiene un pequeño secreto. Un pasado, otra familia.
El inglés va dejarlos por mi. Ya le hice un juego de llaves.
El inglés me trae flores
robadas de una tumba.
El inglés me manda textos, se cuela en forma de ??,
Me manda selfies, no aptos para cardiacos.
El inglés tiene sus reglas
pero acepta citas de último minuto. El inglés
hace llamadas nocturnas y el inglés me hace rogarle.
Cuando era más joven, mis padres me decían,
Mantiene el inglés fuera de nuestra
casa. Si te vas con ese miserable,
no vuelvas mas. Yo decía, Dios-mediante
en el la lengua de la Inquisición, escababa
por la ventana, pero me atrapaban siempre.
El inglés tiene un cacharrito
que es lo maximo. Ahora mi madre se dente
con nuestros adorables bebés. Juntos
el inglés y yo escribimos el obituario
de mi padre. Cuantas veces le han dicho el inglés que ya no el esta,
pero el solo se ríe
y dice la agua, pa pa pa por comer el medicina ???
Siempre terminamos
en un hotel lujoso, donde damos
nombres falsos, y al agachar la cabeza
para escuchar la respiración de mi amante,
sueño con Sam Patch hundiéndose
en el agua: un poema que el inglés me dio
que ya no era miya, pero otra.
~
I could listen to her voice forever. So, I’m going to finish with this last poem, and this is a more recent poem from a manuscript that I am finishing up now. And I’m just going to say, I’m finishing up to put it out to the universe. So that’s actually going to be finished. This is called “You amateur interpreter”.
And I think this captures maybe the experience of many of us who are children of immigrants whose parents didn’t speak English. And we had to sort of as interpreters. This is not my first poem about this subject.
“You amateur interpreter”
POEM.
You would have told yourself as your mother sat in the dentist’s chair, had you known who Wittgenstein was then, “I have to imagine pain which I do not feel on the model of the pain which I do feel.” You would have considered whether deep nerve pain was more akin to an arm scraping against pavement, or to the head struck by a slipper flung from across the room just after breakfast. But that wouldn’t have solved the problem of translation: first build the model, then describe its components in another language so that the model falls apart and becomes another. Meaning, could you have described your mother’s pain to the doctor in English, even if you felt it in your own jaw? You’d watched your mamá’s teeth being pulled or a mold made of her mouth. Dentures have to fit perfectly or they hurt. You did your best telling her to bite down hard into the wax. You can’t remember your parents with a full set of teeth. When you had yours pulled—the wisdom and the one dead at the root—you had nothing to interpret but the ether. So you lay back in leather and let the dentist, like a lover, blow smoke into your mouth, until the chair began to swirl, a tipsy teacup at the church bazaar, and whipped your hair around. Later, you got a well-paid gig at Avon’sr international awards dinner, and you were placed with the top Latin American sellers, and, oh god, you were hungry and didn’t have half the words for the cosmetic industry. But the agency never bothered to ask, so you faked it and brought home leftovers. Those ladies deserved better than your parent-teacher conference training, anyone in the kitchen could have done the job. In high school when you tried to test out of Spanish and were asked to spell out numbers, you thought, qué fácil—but ended up in the same group as the metal chicks from the suburbs. When you were a baby, Papá’s first English swung into the back of the restaurant with each stack of dishes, and with a box of diapers under each arm, he’d come home singing, “Happy Birthday, para mí. Happy Birthday, para mí.”
Thank you.
Adriana: Thank you. That was, I have, I have so many questions and so much to say. That was amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us.
Rosa: Did I go over time?
Adriana: Oh, time is but a construct. Don’t worry. So, I wanted to ask you, I think what might be like an obvious question, but something I’ve always wanted to know, which is how did you become Cecilia Vecuña’s translator? How did that, was that, did somebody place you, or did you stumble upon, or how did it go? Just tell me about that.
Rosa: So, I was doing my MFA at Brown and I knew someone who was in in ethnomusicology, who was also a student who was the, who was a friend of Allen Ginsberg, accompanied him on guitar and Allen Ginsberg and Cecilia Vecuña were doing something at the St. Mark’s poetry project in New York. This friend of mine brought back her book. He told her about me. She put her address in the book. And I wrote her a letter because this was pre, or, I mean, it was like right at the cusp of email, but nobody really used it that much yet. And so, I wrote her a letter saying I’d loved her book.
And then I invited her out to Brown and then I went to visit her in New York when we would go home to New Jersey. And so, we, we started to just form a relationship and then it just happened to be that I, right after I finished my MFA, I moved to Scotland, to Edinburgh; there was a relationship involved.
This is, you know, one of these things where I thought I was going to move there permanently, but I didn’t, but I was good… she was also going to be there to do an art installation.
Adriana: Oh, that’s kismet.
Rosa: Yes. And then, so my boyfriend at the time was going to do, he had a small press, he was going to do a book of her work to accompany the opening of the show.
And so, I was there, I was bilingual, I was a poet. And so, I translated her and that’s sort of how it started, you know, I think that sometimes these things just happen this way. Right. We meet people you’re, you know, and something, like you said, it’s kismet, it’s just, something just happens and you’re there, and then, you know, you couldn’t have predicted that was going to be a sort of a lifetime project and relationship that you developed. Yeah, so that was it. And I really didn’t, you know, I had done some translation, I mean a lifetime of interpretation for parents and sort of always serving that role, but I’d done some literary translation as an academic exercise. And that’s just about it.
Adriana: No, that resonated so much with me when you were talking about sort of like PTA translation. Yeah. So, I wanted to ask you a little bit about, because there’s an intimacy to translation, right? You worked with Cecilia Vicuña and you, you kind of have to get her voice in your head. Do you ever find that creeping into your own writing? Like have you ever written a poem and gone oh, am I being Cecilia?
Rosa: It’s hard to be Cecilia, you know? I mean, it’s like…
Adriana: Yes.
Rosa: It’s no, I mean, her particular way of approaching things and being in the world is so particular to her. It’s really, really hard to imitate. So even when I did Spit Temple, which is the book on her performances, this is focused just on her improvisational oral performances.
There are transcriptions of performances here, along with like a critical study and some other things. I’ve never, I’ve tried a couple of times to read those performances, like off the page, like from the transcriptions and it falls very flat. So, it’s kind of almost difficult to embody anything she does.
I found, I mean, I can read the Spanish and those early poems are a little bit different, but I find that there’s something about the way she reads and also the way she approaches writing that is so different from how I am in the world. So, it’s interesting that I could be her translator, but that’s very different from being her.
Adriana: Yeah.
Rosa: It’s, it’s almost like that distance is necessary. I think sometimes for a translator or for any of us, who are doing like that, there has to be this kind of distance, even when you’re writing between the thing you’re writing about and the writing. So, I don’t find that she slips into the poems; into my own poems.
I, like I said, I write a lot about translation. The topic of translation comes in and I’m still trying to find a way, because the last poem that I wrote is a sort of poetic memoir of sorts. And I keep thinking, I want to write about our relationship. Our twenty-five-year relationship in the form of a poem. I have yet to do that.
So maybe that’ll happen. What does happen though, is occasionally I hear her performance voice in my head, or I’ll just hear like a little cadence in my head. So, that kind of sticks with me; like that little cadence is there in my ear. It’s so present in my head. But it doesn’t often slip into the poems.
Adriana: Yeah. So, shifting a little bit to language. I mean, you know, you have this kind of “c’mon señorita, let’s go for Chinese.” Right? But, you know, and you read it in this very like awesome little accent and all that. And then when she read it, it was, you know, Vamos, guapa, vamos a comer un poquito de comida China.
Rosa: I know, it’s totally different.
Adriana: Right. It’s so different. And so, it got me thinking about a couple of things, which is one, different Spanishes, you know, my dad’s Mexican and my mother is Colombian, and we cannot agree on the word for peas. You know, “ejotes,” you know, like it just gets, it gets wild in there.
Rosa: Right. Aguacate. Palta. I mean, it just like goes everybody has a word.
Adriana: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the word for corn man, like it depends how you’re making it. Mexicans are like 80 words for corn.
Rosa: Totally. Totally.
Adriana: So, you know, so I was wondering, thinking about language choices. How does it affect you? You know, the, the poet to hear somebody else have such a wildly different interpretation of your line. And also, how does that kind of as a translator. So, I want you to answer as poet and then as translator. How you kind of respond to thinking about the way that meaning can change in translation.
Rosa: Yeah. I was just thinking a, a few, maybe a couple of months ago. I watched something that Andrea Cote they put together with Carolyn Forché and some other poets, and these poets had translated Carolyn Forché and they asked her this question, like, how does it feel to be translated?
And she was like, oh, it feels like such a miracle. And it’s so beautiful. And I was like, oh, I am the person who approaches, like, receives everything with anxiety. So, a lot of it just produced anxiety in me, but I think that also has to do with it having a very sort of problematic relationship to both English and Spanish.
Like I have a vexed relationship to both, which is I don’t, you know, I always feel like I don’t quite belong in either. So, when I hear something trans, well, I’m like, well, what I was trying to, and I also know too much, like I know Spanish really well, and I know English very well. So, I think that if you, if you’re being translated, like I was translated into Portuguese and someone’s translating me now into Montenegrin.
Adriana: Ohh…
Rosa: I know. And I’m like, that might, that actually might be relaxing to me because I can’t read the translation. There would be something about just be like, it is what it is. Cause I can’t read it.
Adriana: You just kinda let it go and trust.
Rosa: There was a little bit, there was a little bit of that anxiety of like, well, this is what I would do, but again, I don’t have the distance with my own poem.
So, at some point I just had to say they are translators, and Andrea Cote has, you know, translated Jericho Brown, has translated Tracy K. Smith, you know, like she is no slouch in the translation department. So, I had to relax and allow her to make choices and to know what she thought would work in Spanish because she writes primarily in Spanish, and I don’t.
So that was it. And then something like that line of like, come on, señorita, I’m like you can’t really, what is the equivalent there? The equivalent is like some guy, you know, trying to like a Texas draw. A guy trying to pronounce Spanish, but he can’t, you know, it’s like, there’s, there’s a lot going out there about that relationship between, between a man and a woman that represent different ideas.
Right. And, and is that going to be conveyed in, in Spanish? And if it isn’t, then maybe it’s just better to kind of do something else, right. Instead of trying to replicate it and it not be having any sort of context in Spanish.
Adriana: Yeah. I mean, it is kind of fascinating to see the Spanish word Señorita translated. Right. Cause you would think they’d be like, oh, that one’s done.
Rosa: Right.
Adriana: But I’m just kidding. I know it’s a lot more complex.
Rosa: No, no, but it’s the same thing. Right? What did she do? Did she write? She said guapa, right?
Adriana: Guapa, Yeah. Yeah. And it made me, I was like, oh, is that a Colombian guapa? Or is that a Spain Spanish huapa?
Which, you know, there are, there are Spanishes and there are Spanish is kind of the way English is. Right. We don’t think of English this way because you know, we’re Americans and we enjoy our monoliths. But there is, you know, British English and Australian English and New Zealand, English, and there’s all the slang and all of the variety and not to mention dialects within the U.S. And Spanish is just as, if not more, varied, and I think a lot of people don’t realize that when thinking about translation and so, you know, Cecilia being a Chilean poet, right. Did you ever have any stumbling as somebody who came from a more Spain-Spanish background.
Rosa: Well, you know, yes. I mean, there are a lot of Chilenismos and there’s a lot of things that she kind of invents and they’re just Vecuñaismos, you know, that I’m translating.
But yes, my, my parents are from Spain. They came to the U.S. In 1968. So, it was a year before I was born, but I grew up with so many different Spanishes and in fact my references are so complex. And so, when I was thinking about the huapa, I was like, well, what, how does huapa function in there? Because what, but does sound very Spain, Spanish?
Whereas my friend says Spain-ish, it sounds very Spain-Spanish, but I wonder if that’s the huapa is different from the Spanish that’s used in the rest of the poem, just like señorita is, like, does that indicate somebody using a sort of, you know, diction, that’s not his at that moment.
Adriana: The colonizers diction.
Rosa: Yeah, exactly. Or that they, they read it somewhere. You know what I mean? Like they read this, like, that’s how, that’s how you approach a woman, if that’s what you call a woman or, you know, address a woman. So that was kind of, you know sort of interesting to think about that. I guess I hadn’t thought about till you asked, but the other thing is, you know when we were doing the test run in the beginning and I played this, I didn’t share it with the audience here, but it’s a poem that uses text to voice technology and you can choose the voice that is going to voice your poem.
And I had a choice of all these different Spanishes. Like Spanish accents. It could be in the voice of a woman, a man I could do like all these different things. And I decided to use I think her name was Laura. You know, she had like a Castilian accent. But, you know, when I hear her, she doesn’t sound the way I do in Spanish because I grew up in New Jersey.
Cause when I go back to Spain, everybody’s like where are you from? Are you Mexican? Or are you Argentinian? Like it depends. Seriously. I go back there every day. I would get asked. Where, you know, nobody thought I was Spanish.
Adriana: I understand. I laugh because I know that pain so well.
Rosa: Yeah. And having to explain like the whole thing. And then sometimes I’m like, yeah, soy de Argentina. I just don’t want to have the conversation.
Adriana: Oh no! I have personal vendetta because of soccer against Argentina.
Rosa: So, I won’t say Argentina from now on. Ok, but, yeah, sometimes it was like, you don’t want to have to explain all of this stuff, but I realized that my, that my accent is confusing and displaces me and people when they listen.
So, even that Spanish person voicing my voice sounds like this very prop…my parents from the South, se comen las palabras, they’re like, you know, very different from me, even that like, you know, electronic voice. So, the original question was about approaching Cecelia. I think that one of the things. One of the things I think attracted me to working with her and also working with Lourdes Vázquez who’s an Argentinian poet who lives in the same building as the Cecilia who I met through Cecelia, and also a Puerto Rican poet, they all lived in New York and there was something about working with women who are also put in the position where they’re not just; they’re speaking among people who speak different Spanishes and different Englishes, there’s something about working with that, that you know, I didn’t think it through early on it wasn’t like, this is my plan for being a translator, I’m gonna do this. But I think there was something there about our position, like who we were with within this majority-English speaking place, you know, and what role we played.
And so that was one, and then two, I think I’m very adaptable because I grew up in New Jersey among…
Adriana: All immigrants are to some degree. Like, I feel like every immigrant kid I know is like I can code switch left and right.
Rosa: Totally!
Adriana: Speaking of which we, we could talk forever.
Rosa: Are there people who have questions?
Adriana: Well, it is, it is time in the schedule.
Rosa: It went so fast.
Adriana: I know, I know! It’s because…it’s because we’re having a great conversation.
Yay. So, okay. So, here’s some questions that are coming through in the chat that have been curated for us by the amazing Karla Lamb.
Rosa: Okay.
Adriana: Have you ever wanted to translate a single poem more than once? Ooh, like, did you change your mind? Yes. Oh, sorry. I’ll keep reading the question. More than one version of a single poem in order to allow for multiplicity of meaning that a single choice in a single translation won’t allow. That’s a great question!
Rosa: Yeah, it’s a great question. Yes, all the time. I mean, you know, my fantasy at some point and maybe it’s still, my fantasy is to have a book or situation, I think the internet is probably that thing, but where you could enter different versions at different points, right? So, you have, you have you know, the, the translation that never ends and that you could, you know mix and match different things because I think sometimes I feel that I have to make a final choice and I’m a bad decision maker.
So, I feel like there has to be the single version. So often I think, oh, what would happen if I could keep this? Or these two, you know, these two versions of this line and then the three versions of this line, but, you know, ultimately there’s, there has to be a final version.
So yes, but, in the New and Selected I returned to translations I did in the 90s when I was still sort of, you know, a baby translator sort of thinking myself, wow, a little baby translator. I was a baby translator and I, and I returned to them really wanting to clean them up and perfect them. And I found that my knowledge of translation had increased my ability to use…English had increased. My vocabulary had increased, but there was something about my foolishness in my 20s that allowed me to just be wild in some of these translations. And so, I try to not tamper with it too much. I tried to sort of allow some of that messiness to remain and then make, you know, make revisions in places where it made sense.
So, I wanted to keep the wildness, but also, you know, where can I fix it and still do that. So, yes, but I did have that opportunity to do that. And I, and even when I was reading translations for, in preparation for today, I was like I would have taken out that I probably would’ve rewritten that like, you know, Yeah.
Adriana: I know. I mean, that’s a, that’s a wonderful, it makes me think of yeah, of you know, how in music composers get to do like variations, you know, and they can be like variations on twinkle, twinkle little star, and then you can hear, you know, a loops and loops as they’re working kind of through the melody. And it would be so delightful to be privy to that work that a translator does.
Oh, sure. I wanted to ask in looking at the issue of Kitchen Table Translation and the poems that are in here. There was a word there that was “obra.” And then you translated it as “text.” And I was really thinking about that and it’s, it’s a one-word choice. Right. But I was like, oh, I wonder what kind of sparked the difference between, you know, the literal translation, which is “a work.” right. And then you, you went with “text” and I just thought that was so fascinating just on the word level. And so, you know, rather than addressing like that specific choice I’m just curious, like when you’re faced with word that has multiple meanings, or that you can go different ways, do you just kind of go with your gut or do you just, you know, kind of consult with the writer or, you know, what avenue do you pursue?
Rosa: Yeah, I mean, that’s always, that’s always a tough choice. I can’t, I can’t remember the poem you’re referring to, but I think that some, sometimes I consult with Cecilia. I often ask her many, many questions. Oh yeah… she’s, she’s writing, she’s writing that isn’t she?
Adriana: Yeah, “…una obra secreta.” Right. “Que nadie jamás conocerá.” Right. So, “…the gypsy has been writing for many years a secret text. No one will ever read.” I mean, I just thought it was such a wonderful choice, right. It was a clarifying choice in some ways because the word “obra” could go in so many different ways, right?
Rosa: Sure. And it could be, you’re right, I mean, you could say “la obra de un autor.” Right. You could say “a writer’s work.” “Obra” right, if we want to be fancy. But that’s right. But I think, you know, that’s probably a good example is a word can have multiple meanings that those multiple meetings may not translate into the target language. So, if you’re going to pick one, which is the one that’s going to support the overall intention of the poem.
So, what’s the overall thing that’s happening here, where one has to, one thing has to be, because sometimes you just have to make a choice. Right.
You know, there, there’s always the possibility of putting footnotes. If it’s, you know, worthwhile. Having the reader enter that nuance or that multiplicity, I don’t think this one was this [where] I would have felt justified putting a footnote.
Adriana: Well, that’s risky because it breaks the flow too. Right?
Rosa: It does break the flow, but I think there are, there are good reasons to do that. Right. There are good reasons to also maintain the original word again. This isn’t, I don’t think a case for that. But I think there’s a reason to put the, leave the original word and have a footnote to explain sort of how this word functions, but that to translate it. It’s like the example, this is maybe an overused example, but the word, “duende” doesn’t really have a translation in English. So, it’s always used in “duende” and it’s always kind of misunderstood. Honestly, I think most of the time it’s kind of misused, but nonetheless, it’s kind of a word that is seeped, or steeped, not seeped, but steeped in a cultural context and a history.
Adriana: You mean it in the Lorca way, not in the… Under a bridge.
Rosa: Right, right. Exactly, exactly. And that’s true too. You may, you know, and in that case, that’s such a great example in that case if it is the troll under the bridge, right. Or if it’s just a troll then you want to translate “troll.” There would be no reason to; I think if you keep “duende” in English, the “duende” is going to be understood as Lorca’s “duende” because “duende” has become so co-opted by the English-speaking literary establishment. Rights, it’s like kind of used now.
Right? So. But if you put “duende” as troll, it’s going to be misunderstood as that cultural concept. That Lorca talked about? So, yeah.
Yeah. I apologize for the under the bridge part, I, I actually translate my son’s books at night and reading him the Three Billy Goats Gruff, and I struggle so much because I’m like, okay, Billy goat, just gonna go with goat, you know, and gruff “gruñon” is what I went with, kind of grumpy, but I was just thinking to myself, I was like, well, it’s a duende who lives under the bridge?
Rosa: So, are you a tre…So, it’s just the English version?
Adriana: Yeah, so I have the English versions of the books. And because I want him to speak Spanish, I tried to only speak Spanish to him.
Rosa: There’s a translation of it.
Adriana: Oh, I’m sure. I just don’t own it.
Rosa: No, because I have it. My daughter is my daughter’s going to be 12 in August, so we don’t read it anymore and we may even have given it away. But I remember reading that in Spanish and English and having the same thing, be like, Billy Goat, oh never, never had to say Billy goat in Spanish. Oh, that’s really interesting. Yeah.
Adriana: You’re not, you’re not like chivo Guillermo.
Rosa: Chivo Guillermo is so good.
Adriana: It just means William goat for those of you who do not even know.
Rosa: Chivo Guillermo. This is how us bilinguals get our kicks.
Adriana: It’s really true. No, but it’s real. I mean, I got a kick out of so many things listening to translation. I mean, just “no apto para cardiacos,” hilarious. Right? But how do you translate NSFW? You know? And so just always dealing with culture and translation is so fun.
Rosa: Or hooptie. Actually, that was an easy one.
Adriana: Really?
Rosa: Yeah. And actually, I just remembered because we were talking about how huapa sounds more like Spain Spanish.
But when she.. “catcharito” is very Colombian she says, “mi catcharito,” so, but “catcharito” sounds like sounds so hooptie-ish in Spanish. Like, it sounds like it really; I get to say my catcharito for hooptie. But hooptie was one, like how was she going to transport, you know, He had a hooptie that was the joint, like, and even join isn’t really used anymore. It’s so like 1980s.
Adriana: Or even earlier I would say, right? Like we’re going to the joint because I mean, there’s the joint, yeah, prison, but then there’s like the joint, like, whaddup! So yeah, no, definitely. And you can, I mean, as I was listening to her, I, you know, my mother being Colombian and costeña, you know, there’s definitely a certain flavor of language to Colombian coastal Spanish that is very distinctive. And so, it’s one of the things that made me think of like, oh, like how does that roll with you? You know? And how does it feel as a Spanish speaker to hear something that is not quite in your Spanish?
Rosa: Yeah, exactly. I’m looking at here, like how would you translate “fulano”.
Adriana: Mannn.
Rosa: I mean, fulano de tal, is almost like John Doe, right?
Adriana: Like a so-and-so.
Rosa: So, and so, but you wouldn’t say John Doe as much like that, so and so fulano de tal, that guy.
Adriana: Yeah. He’s that guy, but I mean it’s also like you go to Colombia and people will say, I mean, there’s a way that English has bled into Colombia. So, you’ll see people being, like, ay, ese man, no me gusta, you know, like ese man.
Rosa: Yeah, I don’t know.
Adriana: And so, I always, I don’t know. It’s like, or like me gusta full. Yeah. That’s a very coastal Colombian expression.
Rosa: Like fool, like “lleno” or “fall”?
Adriana: Yeah, like f-u-l-l. Like me gusta full. Like I like it soo much, it’s a misuse of full and yet, it flows. It flows really well. And so it’s easy to catch on. And then, you know, I find myself using it. Yeah. So, but language does that, right? Yeah, there’s that whole like prescriptivists versus descriptivists kind of tension in translation too. Right? Like people who are like you need to translate it exactly for what it is. And then there’s the kind of like, nah, you just need to get into like the feels of it.
Rosa: Well, and you know, the thing is, I think, especially if you grew up sort of always moving between languages is that you also have a relationship of inventing or sort of creating things to fill gaps.
Adriana: Right.
Rosa: I come into translation thinking that there’s also the possibility there. That it isn’t, we’re not just sort of trying to create a perfect replica, but if we allow ourselves, like when we’re writing poetry, to allow for inventiveness, there’s always possibility there. And I like the potential of that, of like creating words for concepts or things that don’t exist or creating something that is a mixture of the two.
Adriana: You know, I would add that one of the things that I love about, particularly Latin American Spanish, because it’s not as like stuffy, there’s no Royal Academy of Latin Americans Spanish. There is a Royal Academy of Spain-Spanish.
Rosa: Right. La RAE.
Adriana: Which is, you know, but there’s the grammar lends itself to playfulness. And so you can suffix your way, like in and out of things. Like, one of my favorite Mexican expressions is like, it’s absolutely silly, and yet in context it makes perfect sense. You know, tienes de dos sopas, o lo haces o lo haces. Right. You’ve got two soups, or you do it or you do it, it doesn’t translate the same way. Like it doesn’t carry the same punch, you know? And so, I always, I don’t know. I really enjoy listening to like Spanish radio and DJs who say silly things and invent new words and, you know, growing up in south Texas, especially. And so, Karla, te busco, te busco, y no te busco.
And just how difficult. Yeah, I mean, but I agree with Karla’s, Karla’s, making a little note here, you know, there’s attitude and slang that really can’t be translated the same way. And so you’re, I imagine you, you got to figure out how to tap into the culture. That you’re translating into as well.
Rosa: Yeah. I think that it’s always a wordplay, colloquialisms are very hard to translate, and then something that is very invisible for the most part. I mean, you know, poets have tried to make it visible in their writing our accents in particular ways or how things are pronounced and it’s often difficult and sometimes problematic to try to do it this way, that you kind of try to pin down the way a community speaks, particularly people in the community speak.
But all of those things that have to do with the way that individuals, and particular groups sort of put their mark on a language, are the most difficult to translate because you don’t have the same conditions in the target language. You may not have the same conditions. Maybe it’s a whole different language, but also the cultural context may be completely different.
So how do you get all of that? Right? Yeah.
Adriana: One last lightning question. Cause I know we’re out of time. Okay. Which is, do you ever choose to leave something untranslated? Okay.
Rosa: I’m sure. I think I’m gonna say yes. I can’t think of one example off the top of my head. There may have been things, I mean, I know that there are words that I leave in the Spanish or in the Quetchua or in whatever, like, you know, if there’s a particular word that and not just like proper names, but just particular words or concepts that we, you know, refer to, like duende, they can’t be…I will, I will leave it.
Adriana: Okay.
Rosa: But I try to find some solution, even if it’s not the perfect one for other things that fall outside of that context, right.
Adriana: It’s a delicate balance between, you know, doing the labor of translation, which is making sure it’s accessible to people in different places, while kind of honoring the author’s work. Oh, what a delightful dance. Well, Rosa Alcalá, thank you so much for talking to me today for and for sharing your work and your translations and shout out to Cecilia Vecuña who was a huge part of this reading. And yeah.
Adriana: Wow. That was such a great event.
Karla: It was one of those events that made me want to buy her book. Like I need this book immediately. I want to dive into her work. And also, yeah, her Vecuña translations and I looked up Cecilia Vecuña’s, you know, body of work and she’s just like a visual artist. She has like site-specific artwork and audio and poetry.
And it’s just like this hybrid form that kinda just is beyond my scope of what is poetry that I just, it really made me question what I’m doing. I’m still like a, a page poet, but…
Adriana: That’s wonderful. So, she showed you other possibilities.
Karla: Yeah, exactly. And like permission too, and then just also permission in the, in the smaller sense to like, talk about like, kind of just daily life in poetry. It can mundane, you know, sipping on tea, looking out the window, thinking about some lover that left.
Adriana: Yeah. Yeah.
Karla: You know, like those things that I want to write about, but I don’t write about, so, yeah. And then just, so much permission, like Rosa Alcalá really just is a pioneer of laying down the groundwork for other baby poets, like me, to just explore.
Adriana: Yeah, I can see that. I mean, by unearthing Cecilia Vecuña’s work, Alcalá opens, you know, an entire pathway, right? That’s something that we don’t talk about enough. Like what translators do is they also, I used to have, I used to have this idea that translators like that some editor was like, oh, we need to translate blah let’s go find the right translator for it. And that happens part of the time. But what I learned from Rosa is actually that, you know, it’s a lot more organic and it’s about a writer falling in love with their translator and their translator falling in love with them and their work and seeing if it works together.
And it’s a lot more relationship oriented than I think I realized it was. And so, I thought that was so cool. The intimacy. And so, in a way it’s like her intimacy with Vecuña’s work is allowing you to access something that maybe you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Karla: Oh, absolutely. Access.
It was really cool. She was the closing event of the literary festival – Lit Fest – as we like to call it featured poet and translator for Gander and Mexican poet [Coral] Bracho.
And I had never heard of her before, but it turns out she is like huge in Mexico and during their conversation. So Forrest Gander is Coral’s translator, but Coral has done some translations herself from into Spanish. And then they joked about like, oh, what if Coral all of a sudden becomes Forrest Ganders translator?
And then it’s like reciprocal translation, you know, really cool. Which would be really cool. I don’t think it’s been done before, honestly, when talking about like translator, author relationships and, and related though, I remember being young and translating Shakira lyrics to English and then showing those to like my crush at the time and being like, look what I wrote, but it really wasn’t. It was just me…
Counting, counting on…
Adriana: The ignorance of others.
Karla: Yeah, actually that too, definitely.
Adriana: I love it. Yeah. So, you have a little experience translating, huh?
Karla: A little bit. And have you had any work translated?
Adriana: Yes, actually, I had an essay I wrote for LitHub, be translated into an anthology in Argentina.
Karla: Oh, amazing.
Adriana: Of all places. And then I had some poems that were translated into Flemish weirdly enough. And so that’s my two experiences of being translated. And it’s really funny because I am a fluent Spanish speaker, but I chose to have my work translated by a translator because Argentine Spanish is so different from Mexican Spanish.
And I didn’t, I know they use the vosotros tense and a lot of things that I just colloquially do not use. My Spanish is very colloquial. And so, I had to kind of be like, okay, like I’m gonna, you know, seed this. And then when I got it back, I read it. And then I sent it to my dad to read. And we talked about like the words we disagreed with, but how, you know, Argentinians.
So, we just kind of let it be, but it was really interesting to kind of think about, you know, the choice to have my work translated instead of doing it myself.
Karla: That’s an interesting choice.
Adriana: Well, letting the expert be the expert to some degree and also being lazy, I didn’t want to sit down and do it. So, somebody else was willing to do it. Yeah.
Karla: And did you, did you get a relationship with that translator?
Adriana: Sort of, but it was, it was mitigated through the editor. Whereas my Flemish poems, I actually sat down and met with the woman. Katjia? Oh my God, it’s been a few years now, four years. But she was lovely, lovely, lovely.
We actually hung out in Belgium when I went to Belgium later and she was, I mean, it was all part of the same deal, right. It was because of Pasaporta that the poems got translated. And so, she was the person they connected me with, but she was like; she called me up and was like, I don’t understand these words when you translate them into like colloquial expressions.
And so I was like, okay. And then we both spoke French. And so, her English was bad, my French was bad, but we somehow were able to kind of meet in the middle with all the language and I’d be like, well, it’s kind of like in French they say, blah, blah. And she was like, oh, okay. I could see how to now think of the Flemish version of that.
But it was, it was really, yeah, it was really an interesting experience to realize also how much I was relying on aphorisms and colloquialisms and to some degree clichés for people to understand certain shorthand.
Karla: Interesting. Yeah.
Adriana: And so, there are certain things that you’re like, oh shoot, how would I translate this?
Karla: Yeah.
Adriana: You know, and so yeah. Thank you for that question. I hadn’t thought of that actually throughout this whole thing, I hadn’t sat down and been like, but you have been translated. So yeah.
Karla: And it’s really making me think of that phrase “lost in translation” but like the filter that is like, say I was translating you, and the filter of me and then like my interpretation, and then you as the author and your intention with the work and then yeah is culture, and like you said, vernacular a part of it?
Adriana: Right, right.
And I couldn’t sit down and translate my own poem necessarily either without taking it somewhere else. And talking about, like the poem wants to do this other thing. So, I also didn’t realize how being translated was kind of rare for a lot of poems or a lot of my peers and a lot of people because, I was lucky enough for one of my poems to be translated in Mexico City.
Karla: This magazine called, “El EX”.
Adriana: What a great name.
Karla: Yeah, I really love it. I really…
Adriana: It’s so punk rock.
Karla: Yeah, and it is, I feel like it is like a kind of a DIY anarchist outlet.
Adriana: So more of a zine.
Karla: But it’s actually a really, really well-produced and it’s online and it’s and it’s a physical, you know zine for sure. And it kind of had to stop because of COVID and things like that.
Adriana: How cool is that experience? Did you work with your translator?
Karla: No, they basically, they sent me like, okay, this is what I have, do you like it? And I was like, yeah, I like it. And it was really interesting cause like I never really developed a relationship with a translator. What ended up happening is the editor basically said this is what we have, let us know. And I was just so taken aback by someone else’s interpretation of what I was trying to say. Even beyond that, that translator called it a remix. They didn’t call it a translation. They called it a remix, even though it was from English to Spanish, but the Spanish version had a couple of extra lines that I guess is what made it a remix.
Adriana: That actually might be more accurate than translation in some ways. Oh shoot. We are running out of time, Karla. So, let’s very quickly do what we’re reading and some stuff for the road. So, I’ll kick us off.
I am achieving a lifelong dream tomorrow and I am auditioning for Jeopardy. Yay. So, in order to do that, I am reading a book called Game Show Trivia which is just lists of facts. And I am pretending that I have the ability to memorize these facts. So that is what’s happening with me.
Karla: Wow. That’s so so cool. I love Jeopardy.
Adriana: Alright, your turn.
Karla: I am re-reading Richard Blanco’s City of a Hundred Fires. Yeah, I just kind of, I’m unpacking from my move and this book just kind of jumped out at me, even though I had like, definitely read it before.
Adriana: Former U.S. Poet Laureate.
Karla: And I think he was teaching at my MFA program, and we had a chance to meet. So, I think Richard Blanco has such an interesting cadence when he performs that I can just hear his voice as I’m reading these poems.
And yeah, these poems are just incredible, like place poems and like missing home and identity. And I love the Spanish kind of sprinkled in there and yeah, Richard Blanco, shout out. And that’s what I’m reading currently.
Adriana: Nice. That’s awesome. I will scope that out too. I don’t think I’ve read that one. And I actually had the chance to meet him at a reading for Pulse back when AWP was in Florida. So back in Tampa, I got to meet him, and it was just amazing. Okay. So, for the road, anything fun?
Karla: Oh my gosh. City of Asylum is getting back into in-person events.
Adriana: Whaaat!?
Karla: Yes. So, we’re excited and nervous and just a lot of just coordination and lift…
Adriana: Hit me up with it. What is it? What is it?
Karla: I don’t know. It starts in June. We have a tent, so yeah, I think coming up the first week of June, there’s a tent on Sampsonia Way. And there’s a bunch of events at city-of-asylum-dot-org. If anyone out there is interested.
Adriana: Pittsburgh. The summer of seeing people again if you’re vaccinated and safe. What what! We here at Charla Cultural believe in science and promote science.
Karla: Yes. Yes we do.
Adriana: We believe in science. We’ll let me see, for me, Eurovision just ended. And so, there was a huge void in my life that I’m trying to fill with trivia. But the winners were this incredibly, incredibly attractive, like that Hansel he’s so hot right now. So hot. Those Italians, that one Eurovision mano skin, they have a Danish name up, but their song is called, “Ziti y boni” which means essentially like shut up and behave and be good.
Karla: I love that!
Adriana: And it is like true, like rock ‘n’ roll; Italian rock ‘n’ roll. And they’re like 22-year-olds and they all look like they should be in like Vogue, and they are phenomenal, and they just won Eurovision, a little scandalously and it is totally fun and worth checking out. And if we had any budget, I would buy the rights to that song and play a little for you right now.
But we don’t. So, we’ll put it in the links for the show. Yay. Karla this was so much fun, and this was… And let’s do it again in two weeks. Sound good?
Karla: Yes, Adriana, hablamos pronto.
Adriana: Besitos besitos! Okay.
Alexis Jabour: City of Asylum builds a just community by protecting and celebrating creative free expression.
Aster(ix) is transnational, feminist literary arts journal cofounded by Angie Cruz and Adriana E. Ramírez. Committed to social justice and translation placing women of color at the center of conversation
Adriana: Charla Cultural is hosted by Karla Lamb and Adriana E. Ramírez. Voice of goddess is Alexis Jabour. Editorial support by Clarissa A. León. Production design and brand management by Little L. Creative. Our theme song is Colombia Folk by Luis Alfonso.
And thank you as always to our sponsors, Aster(ix) Journal and City of Asylum.
