M odern poetry s role as a vibrant genre in world literature

Transcription

1 Bringing Poetry to Life On the Work of Miguel Hernández An Interview With Translator Ted Genoways By Ray González M odern poetry s role as a vibrant genre in world literature has translators to thank for transforming it into a universal art form that ties cultures together. U.S. readers would have different views of poetry without the translated works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Bei Dao, Wislawa Szymborska, and others. In the vast array of translations, the Spanish poets of the early 20th century are crucial to an understanding of world literature. The poetry of Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti, Gloria Fuertes, Antonio Machado, and other Spaniards has been an influential and life-changing force for many people. Often left off this roster is Miguel Hernández, whose work may outlast the accomplishments of many other Spanish writers. He was born in Orihuela, Spain, in 1910 and died in prison in 1942, after Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, sentenced Hernández to death, citing as his crime only that he was poet and soldier to the mother country. Despite the fact that complete and accurate versions of his work in Spanish were difficult to obtain for nearly 50 years, Hernández went on to achieve legendary status. In the Spanish-speaking world, he is regarded as one of the most important poets of the century equal in distinction to Lorca, Neruda, and Mexican poet Octavio Paz. English translations of his poems have been sporadic and many have been out of print until now. The publication of The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández, edited by Ted Genoways, is a striking and long-awaited achievement that should give Hernández poetry a wider English-reading audience. Featuring tender and dramatic poetry on war, death, family, and social injustice, nearly half of the poems in the new volume appear in English for the first time. Arranged chronologically, The Selected Poems reflect Hernández emotional range as well as his evolution from the Romantic shepherd poet to a voice of the prison cell. Annotated and introductory essays illuminate his career and life. As one of Hernández earliest translators, Robert Bly has written a moving foreword to the volume, with a eulogistic essay by the late Paz framing the monumental work of a poet who remains in the hearts of many. To gather Hernández poetry in such a large volume is to bring one of the 20th century s most important poets to life again. Without Hernández, the world community of poetry would not be what it is today. The Selected Poems must be read if vital poetry is to continue another 100 years, with Hernández voice as a cherished example of why great poetry is timeless. Genoways is the author of Bullroarer: A Sequence, winner of The Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and the coeditor of A Perfect Picture of Hell: Eyewitness Accounts by Civil War Prisoners From the 12th Iowa. He is also an acquiring editor for the Minnesota Historical Society Press in St. Paul. This interview was conducted two weeks before the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Because of those events, Genoways views on political poetry and the example Hernández set when he paid the ultimate price for resisting tyranny take on a different light. The Bloomsbury Review: In the preface to The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández, you write about the frustrations of not being able to find many English translations of his work in print. Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda would never suffer that fate because of their popularity and impact on world poetry. Their books are available in many languages and millions of copies. Why did you choose to bring back the lesser-known Hernández? Ted Genoways: Part of it was by chance, as I explain in the preface. I sat in on a Spanish literature class being taught by Douglas Day, a professor at the University of Virginia. One day, he read the poetry of Miguel Hernández, a poet I had never heard of, and I was impressed by it. It was clear that Hernández power as a poet was equal to that of Neruda and Lorca. I started looking for books by him and discovered that I had to borrow out-of-print books from libraries and read a few Hernández poems in anthologies here and there. It took a long time to assemble what few poems I could find in English and discover what his career as a poet had been like. There was very little biographical information to help me as I gathered his work. I m not sure why Hernández has not been recognized in the same way Neruda and Lorca have, both by international readers and the large number of translators who have given us so many versions of their poetry. As I said, Hernández work has the same quality as theirs, and his story is as compelling as Lorca s. Both died during the Spanish Civil War, one assassinated and the other of tuberculosis after starving in prison. My guess is that Hernández work was successfully suppressed by Franco s regime for decades. Even copies of his poems in Spanish were rare, though pirated editions were available in Mexico and Argentina after his death. In the U.S., it wasn t until Robert Bly recovered and translated some of his work in the late sixties and published it in his magazine The Sixties that Hernández became available to English readers. TBR: Translators working alone often influence the kind of writers whose work is kept alive in different parts of the world. Even if complete books of Hernández were not available in English for decades, he had several translators devoted to his work over a long period of time. Do you think this underground commitment to Hernández helped in finally bringing this major collection together? TG: Yes, I do. One of the things that surprised me during my research on Hernández was the fact that William Carlos Williams was the first person to translate him into English. This was in the mid-thirties when the Spanish Civil War was still on and Williams had volunteered to help translate the work of Spanish poets who were fighting in the war or in prison. The editor randomly assigned the poets to the team of translators. Williams happened to land Hernández. Amazed by his work, Williams began a long line of great poets drawn to his poems. John Haines did some translations in the early

2 sixties, then James Wright was encouraged by Bly to join him in translating Hernández. Philip Levine and Willis Barnstone are also key poet-translators of his work. Despite this, many of those early attempts to gather Hernández work were sporadic and generational, with many of these poets working at the same time without younger translators following in their footsteps. This created long gaps where newer generations of readers and writers had little or no exposure to Hernández. This is certainly not the case with Neruda, with new translations of his work appearing every year. If anyone comes into poetry today and begins to study and write it, they can t help but find dozens of Neruda titles in bookstores whole shelves containing what is available in English. TBR: Many American poets who love Spanish poetry and have been influenced by Lorca or Rafael Alberti or Antonio Machado seem to reserve a special place in their hearts for Hernández. What do you think makes him special and perhaps different from other Spanish poets? TG: One unique thing about Hernández is his background. He was a goatherd in the countryside and did not have a formal education like many of the other Spanish poets. He educated himself by finding books in the library of the church in his village of Orihuela. This kind of education in the Spanish language gives his poetry a kind of 19th-century diction and vocabulary. Later in Madrid, when he met Lorca and Vicente Aleixandre, another great Spanish poet, they shaped a whole generation of writers. Hernández approach to poetry stood out from the others with its blend of surrealism and rural life. His images and turns of phrase form an older-sounding Spanish that is different than that of Lorca or Aleixandre, even Machado. In English translation, this creates a captivating, moving poetry whose voice is gentle, compassionate, and fierce. The result is a poet who shows many writers the possibilities of where poetry can go. TBR: Once you decided which portions of his work you wanted to include in the book, how did you go about selecting the various translations by different, respected translators? TG: Some of it was by necessity. I started by assembling all the translations I could find, most of them consisting of versions by the American poets. A few of his better-known poems have been translated multiple times. In those cases, I selected the ones I thought were the most compelling in English. I also had to weed out weaker versions of things to come up with the original manuscript of 125 poems, which was cut further to just over 100 pieces. When I isolated the first 50 poems, I had to fill in some of the gaps from his early career. Many of them were only available recently, even in Spain. They appeared in the Spanish publication of his Collected Poems in 1992, released on the 50th anniversary of his death. Most of the translations of Hernández had been done before the release of the complete poetry. This volume was invaluable in finally allowing me to fill those gaps and get a better picture of what would be essential to include in The Selected Poems. TBR: After working on The Selected Poems and overseeing and reviewing what was available by different translators, do you feel you are presenting a whole new portrait of Miguel Hernández in English? TG: My hope is that I have presented him as a person and not just a poet. One thing that has been missing is a clear chronology of his work and how he developed as a writer. This was the first compilation in English that shows the arc of his career and how he experimented with different kinds of poetry. The biographical information I included in the book was essential to show how some of the archaic images and surrealism came from events and places in his life. It helped to clear up some of the vague references in his writing, such as the poem about a dead child that came from the death of his own boy. Many critics have said that Hernández used too much symbolism to hide the harsh reality of his life, but a careful study of his complete work shows his poems were very autobiographical. TBR: What did you learn about the translation process as you translated some of Hernández yourself? TG: I learned how difficult translation is. Hernández was wonderful to work with, and the early poems are filled with puns and double meanings. A great deal of work was required to transform them into good poems in English. Much of what we value in English poetry are metaphors that allow us to see the connections in things. Rich metaphors work because of the multiple meanings they bring forth, but these different layers of perception don t always coincide between two languages the original and the one the translator is using as a tool to create a workable poem. Hernández early poems were tough because it was hard to find the right words in English that would carry the levels of meaning he found in Spanish. His use of older Spanish idioms and phrases required lots of research into the evolution of that language. I used several dictionaries, including a turn-of-the-century one and a 1927 dictionary of Spanish that approximated the kind he would have used. Contemporary Spanish dictionaries often contained changed meanings for words from early in the century. Having to slow down the poetic process that much became a challenge and a delight because I came to know his vocabulary and diction quite well. I probably know his poetry better than I know any poet in English because I have never had to slow down the understanding of poetic language in English the way I was forced to with Hernández. TBR: Gregory Rabassa, the noted translator of Latin American literature, says that translation is transformation into something that was never there before. How does a book of Hernández poetry add something new to Spanish poetry in English? TG: Rabassa is right, and the true task of any translator is to value the second language, the idiom he or she speaks and writes in, so that poetry of integrity is transformed into that second language from the first. It is not good enough to say, Here is an approximate version from the Spanish and, if you knew Spanish or any language of origin from a poet you are translating, you would really appreciate it. That is poor trans-

3 lating. If you have to do too much explaining, the translation is not working. My hope is The Selected Poems will show us things about Hernández we did not know before his family life, his love for the countryside, and his devotion to freedom for the Spanish people. The book should be a complete picture of the person and the poet as the poems tell the story of his life and tragic death. TBR: In your preface, you compare the styles of some of your translators and point out how some render Hernández into English, while others translate. What do you think happens to a Spanish poem when it is being changed into English? TG: With so many translators working on one poet, there is a great deal of triangulation going on multiple styles of approach toward the original language in order to bring new English poems into being. Bly s translations are different than Barnstone s, for example. Bly is very interested in the muscular diction of Hernández and always tries to compress the language into tight, imagistic versions. Barnstone is more interested in the formal aspects of Hernández work. He wants to preserve the meter and the rhyme, especially in the sonnets. Having different translations side by side tells me none are complete pictures of Hernández by themselves. As an editor, it was a gift to have several gifted poet-translators whose choices finally put the puzzle together to find the whole Hernández in English. As for the transformation of a Spanish poem, I found that the inherent musicality of the language disappears when you move it into English. This is true for just about any Romance language, and Spanish contains so many internal rhymes that simply don t exist in English. In Robert Pinsky s introduction to his recent translation of Dante s Inferno, he talks about how he discovered that every other word in Italian seemed to rhyme. This is almost true in Spanish with its feminine and masculine endings. It brings many near rhymes, another characteristic of Romance languages, which doesn t happen that often in English. It is up to translators of Spanish to try to replicate the musicality of the language. It is possible, as Bly insists, if you stay close to the diction of the original. As you look for rhymes in the first language, it can lead you to possibilities for attempting the same thing in English. You have to use the original poem to make your word choices and can never really get away from it. What is the general rhythm of the line? Which echoes in the poem can resonate in English, though it is a different-sounding language? If you have a list of synonyms and are struggling with finding the right words to make meaning in English, often the sound of the words in Spanish will lead you toward effective words and phrases in the second language. I was trying to spell all this out in the preface to the book and borrowed from Seamus Heaney, who has stated that the key elements in translation are tone and tune. In other words, the challenge is to keep the gravity of the poem on an equal basis with the sound of it. In the long run, translators might find it is easier to preserve the tone than the tune because the two languages are so different. Some of the poet-translators I included were stronger in one area, some in others. Again, it was a complex gathering of periods of his career and various poems to illustrate the complex art of translating the Spanish Hernández and achieving a powerful English Hernández. TBR: Hernández died in one of Franco s prisons during the Spanish Civil War. Many of his poems are about love of family, but also about the enduring light of freedom that fascism couldn t take from him. The political subjects are not common in American poetry. Why should an English reading audience be interested in this kind of poetry? TG: Philip Levine addressed the question of political poetry in an essay on Hernández he published in The Kenyon Review many years ago. His argument is that Hernández most successful poems were the personal poems and not the overtly political ones, and I agree with him. Levine used Lullaby of the Onion, perhaps Hernández most famous poem, to make his point. Its success is driven by the tragedy of his starving family, but goes beyond that to make a larger statement about resistance to tyranny. The poem is centered on his son not having anything to eat but an onion, yet Hernández manages to encompass the entire history of oppression in one poem. It is set late in the Civil War when Hernández is already a political prisoner in one of Franco s jails and can t help his family. There is a distance between the narrator and the starving son, but the prison walls can t separate the true heart of the poem that shows that Hernández work sustains a union between the personal and the political. This may be his greatest strength as a poet and why so many of us read his work and single him out as a special poet among many. The way he brings both worlds into his poetry makes him a poet who can touch American readers. But you are right about American poets. It has been at least a generation since the Vietnam War created a unified subject for many writers. The political aspect in many American poems has faded over the years, yet the most successful poems today have a political aspect if they challenge the reader to look at things differently. It also has to do with the times we live in and how we evaluate the power of the poet. Look at the 1860 edition of Walt Whitman s Leaves of Grass. It was banned in Boston because of its political content. Today it can be read as harmless. The things that were threatened by Whitman s poetry were the social fibers of the country at the time. Whitman knew how to use poetry to shake society, though it reacted to the power he found by trying to silence him. In Spain, it was a lethal kind of silencing. Look at what happened to Lorca and Hernández. I do hope there is a place for a stronger political poetry in America, even if it is more social than overt. TBR: In a famous 1933 letter, Lorca described Hernández as having the blood of the poet. Reading and translating the Spanish poets involves immersion in histories and tragedies that created great poetry out of poetic blood. Why do you think so many American poets keep turning to these poets when their worlds were so different from ours? TG: Their work is so compelling because poets like Lorca, Machado, and Hernández force us to ask so many questions about what poetry is all about. It is moving to read how

4 Hernández chose not to use the connections Neruda had set up to get him out of Spain during the war. He did not want to abandon his country and his village where his family lived. The alternative for Hernández was the cause of freedom against Franco s fascist forces and to keep writing poems that challenged what was going on in the divided country. The result was death in prison. The poems written about these fast-moving events heighten our understanding of how far poetry goes to change people s lives. One reason I think we read the Spanish poets over and over again is because we have not been challenged in these ways. In the U.S., we have not seen the fatal consequences of choosing poetry over injustice. At some point, every writer has to confront such questions. If there was someone or some force actively trying to stop me from writing, would I keep writing? Would American poets find ways to write and smuggle poems to outsiders and family members? The flip side of that is that American poets are not a threat to anyone the way Hernández was to Franco. Poets in this country are basically ignored, and no politician is going to look at American poetry as a cultural force that needs to be stopped or erased. As we know, it is a different story in other parts of the world. We can t imagine what it must have been like for Joseph Brodsky to be exiled to Siberia or Anna Akhmatova silenced for almost 30 years by the Soviets. We are drawn to the Spanish poets because of a certain bravery that heightens the tension in the poems, though we know the price for that tension was often fatal. The charge against Hernández was writing poetry against the state. Another thing that draws us to Lorca, Neruda, and Hernández is the fact that their audiences gave poets and poems a great deal of power. They were empowered by their readership, and I think American poets envy that. Hernández was hired by the Loyalist side in the war to go to the front and read his poems to the troops before battle. We can t imagine what that would be like because it gives poetry a dimension American poets can t have. TBR: Willis Barnstone says Hernández was a poet of the shadow and the light. In reading The Selected Poems, I realized Hernández voice was not only being revived in English, but his vision of the darkness of man, and ways of going beyond it, had a great deal to do with his love for life, family, Spain, and most important of all, poetry. As a poet and translator, what have Hernández and his shadows and light brought you? TG: Hernández has given me a great deal. There is more light in his poems the darker the situation around him became. There were certainly poems written out of despair in prison, but many more fit into what Neruda called Hernández: the nightingale. It almost became his nickname because of the lyrical intensity of his voice. Even in the more despairing poems, there is hope and an energy no one could suppress. Some of his last poems were written on scraps of paper and smuggled out of prison by people who came to visit him. That necessity didn t take the power out of his writing. The last words he wrote were scratched into the prison wall above the cot where he died of tuberculosis in Hernández tells me that, even in this country where the audience for poetry is small, a well-made poem as an object of the imagination and of the lives we live can endure. It will redeem us all. TBR: Hernández once wrote, I believe all theatre, all poetry, all art should be today more than ever, a weapon for war. For war against all the enemies that persecute our body and spirit. As you stated earlier, poetry as lethal defiance is something our history has never called for. Is the price Hernández paid for his poetry part of a totally alien experience meant for other cultures? TG: Perhaps, and it might be one reason why there has been such a flowering of interest in translating and finding poets all over the world. World poetry as an art has come alive. In the last 20 years, look at the impact Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, and other poets have had. Today, poets from other countries are influencing American literature more than they have in any other time in our cultural history. When Heaney writes about the history of violence in Ireland, there is an immediate frame of reference. In his poem where he writes about a woman being tossed into the bog 1,000 years ago, there is an echo of the present because this kind of vital poetry carries the message across time. These poets are uncanny in the way they bring the political realities of their countries to a worldwide audience. We don t have anything like that, and it s not that I wish our political state called for it, but that kind of immediacy is lacking in our country s literature. TBR: As a poet yourself, did translating the work of others affect your own writing? TG: I do a great deal of formal writing and found translation to be the ultimate form. The poem, content, and structure are decided for you ahead of time. What you are left with is word choice as you bring it into a second language. Translation highlighted the fact that word choice has a ripple effect on every single aspect of a poem. W.D. Snodgrass has a captivating new collection called De/Compositions where he takes classic poems throughout the centuries and shows how word choice turns them into simple, modern writing. He rewrites many classics, and it is amazing how altering word choice changes the masterpieces into poems that are not as good. Translation is the same thing. You are aware of and looking at how words change over time. Hernández was a good example of the changing uses of language. In English, I am now better at looking at composition, word choice, and how I make the decisions I do in writing my own poetry. TBR: We often talk about the voice of the poet. After so many translators take on one poet, plus the facts of his tragic life, how does the singular voice of the poet survive? TG: The true testament and power of Hernández poetry for me is the fact that there were one dozen of us working around his voice, sometimes in collaboration, most of the time separately. In the end, his voice always came through no matter how we approached the translation of his work. It was unmistakable, and is right there in the new book so many images of darkness and light, and torrents of blood and bulls, lions and a very masculine, almost biblical imagery. As a translator, I was swept along with it and tried to get it right in English. If we stayed true

5 to Hernández voice, the reader will know it and discover that he is alive. REVIEWER: Ray González is Poetry Editor at TBR.