The translator Sarah Arvio bypasses Federico García Lorca's New York poems, focusing instead on what she calls his "moonlit earthbound Spanish poems."
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CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times
The poet and playwright Federico García Lorca is, after Cervantes, the most commanding figure in Spain’s literature. He died young, executed at 38 by nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War. This early death has rendered him a permanent political and cultural object of desire.
During his lifetime Lorca feared what he called “stupid fame.” It’s hard to say what he would make of the flourishing industry of works (ballets, operas, films, novels, pop songs, poems) that reference and adapt his life and work.
Lorca’s body was never found. This hasn’t stopped artists from figuratively pickpocketing it, hoping to nick a bit of his gravitas and spirit, and to import tragic frissons by association. His work is less read today than it is projected upon.
Lorca was a great explicator of duende, the idea that an artwork should brim with authenticity and death-awareness and skin-prickling and foot-stamping awe and soul.
He evoked duende perhaps most fully in his “Gypsy Ballads,” published in 1928. It’s a canonical book in Spain. Here was a highly cultivated poet reworking Andalusian folk culture and myth. The high-low effect was startling. It was as if Robert Lowell had made a murderous little book that drew its inspiration from Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.”
The poet and translator Sarah Arvio is here now with “Poet in Spain,” a new translation of Lorca’s poems into English. It is the first major undertaking of its kind since “Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition” (1991), the work of several translators and edited by Christopher Maurer.
Unlike Maurer, Arvio omits Lorca’s intemperate and political and Whitman-inflected New York poems, written after he visited the city in 1929 and 1930. (These were published after his death under the title “Poet in New York.”) She focuses instead entirely on what she calls his “moonlit earthbound Spanish poems.”
About Lorca’s New York versus his Spanish poems, Arvio writes, “To my ear, these voices are so different they could almost be the voices of two different poets.” The crucial word here is “almost.” The absence of these vital poems immediately renders Arvio’s book less necessary than Maurer’s in terms of seeing this complicated poet whole.
There are consolations. Arvio is a supple translator, and she has delivered a personal book. She has felt free to shift Lorca’s poems around in sequence, as he himself often did when putting together his books. Most notably she has shorn the poems of punctuation, as Lorca sometimes did in his drafts.
The spare effect can be riveting. Take this snippet of “Dreamwalking Ballad”:
Compadre can I swap my horse for your house saddle for your mirror knife for your blanket compadre I come bleeding from the Cabra passes If I could young friend the deal would be done But I’m no longer me my house isn’t mine
At other moments, the punctuation is missed. You feel Lorca has been tamped down. His poem “Cazador” (“Hunter”), for example, begins with these words: “¡Alto pinar!” Arvio translates this, with a vast diminution in energy, as “High grove of pines.”
Lorca wrote in an exclamatory style that gave his work a flamenco brashness. Witness the first stanza of “Árboles” (“Trees”) from 1919:
¡Árboles! ¿Habéis sido flechas Caídas del azul? ¿Qué terribles guerreros os lanzaron? ¿Han sido las estrellas?
Arvio renders this in telegraphic yet somewhat lobotomized fashion:
Were you once arrows falling from the sky What terrible warriors shot you Were they the stars
At other moments, Arvio’s translations are both less accurate and less felicitous than those in Maurer’s edition. The opening lines of “Reyerta” (“Brawl” or “Feud”), for example, read this way: “En la mitad del barranco / las navajas de Albacete, / bellas de sangre contraria, / relucen como los peces.”
Arvio gives us this translation: “Halfway down the gully / the blades from Albacete / glisten like fishes / flush with fighting blood.”
In Maurer’s book, it is: “Halfway down the gorge / knives of Albacete, / beautiful with enemy blood, / shine like fish.”
Beautiful with enemy blood. That isn’t just a gorgeous phrase, ripe with meaning, but it comports more exactly with Lorca’s Spanish.
The poems in this book include not only “Gypsy Ballads,” but the “Dark Love Sonnets,” with their death-haunted homoeroticism, and poems about the deadly goring of Lorca’s friend the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, among others.
Lorca’s poems from Spain are a poetry of dreams and journeys and glimpses from balconies, of sunbaked meadows and realms of erotic yearning. He went to the well often for the same elemental imagery: the sea, the wind, the moon, flowers and trees. His mind worked feverishly enough to induce hallucinations.
He completed 13 plays and nine books of verse between 1917 and 1936. This book includes one of those plays, a rich and gripping retranslation of “Blood Wedding,” written in 1932. It’s an unconventional choice to print it in a book of poems, but Arvio argues and then demonstrates that the language in it is of a piece with Lorca’s blood-warm verse.
The poet Ted Hughes, who once translated “Blood Wedding,” observed that “Lorca cannot be Englished.” Perhaps. But his life and work offer mysteries we’re still profitably untangling.
---- Robert Guillaume, Emmy-winning actor from TV sitcoms "Soap" and "Benson," has died at age 89.
Robert Guillaume
Google:羅伯·紀堯姆
此姓竟然沒收入"法語姓名譯名手冊" (新華社， 北京商務，1996，約1187頁)
# Painting_day # Titian
The genre of the portrait occupies a significant place in the work of Titian. "Portrait of a Young Woman" (circa 1536) is executed from a model that the artist has repeatedly depicted: so, from it was written the famous "Venus of Urbino."
Blooming Venetian, personifying the femininity and charm of youth, in general terms corresponds to the ideal described in the work of Agnolo Firenzuola "Discourse on female beauty." For example, in a beautiful woman, "the skin should be slightly reddish from the bloodstream," "shoulders should be wide, ... no bone should protrude on the breast." The perfect breast rises smoothly, imperceptibly to the eye, "" the forearms must be white. "
Virtual Academy. The Italian Renaissance in the Hermitage. The Art of Venice - http://bit.ly/2v9iwe9
Жанр портрета занимает значительное место в творчестве Тициана. "Портрет молодой женщины" (около 1536 г.) исполнен с модели, которую художник не раз изображал: так, с нее была написана знаменитая "Венера Урбинская".
Цветущая венецианка, олицетворяющая собой женственность и прелесть юности, в общих чертах соответствует идеалу, описанному в сочинении Аньоло Фиренцуолы "Рассуждения о женской красоте". Например, у красавицы "кожа должна быть слегка красноватой от кровообращения", "плечи должны быть широкими,... на груди не должна выступать ни одна кость. Совершенная грудь повышается плавно, незаметно для глаза", "предплечья должны быть белыми".
Виртуальная Академия. Итальянское Возрождение в Эрмитаже. Искусство Венеции - http://bit.ly/2v9iwe9
Visiting Richard Howard in his Greenwich Village apartment, I brought with me a photograph I’d discovered of the two of us, taken not long after we’d met, thirty years ago. What’s startling is to look up from the picture to the man in…
THEPARISREVIEW.ORG
2011.1.2
Richard Howard 及一些台灣的大譯家
上周四 辜振豐和明智周
辜先生的時尚考要出增訂版/ 明智周新書談日語中的敬語
辜先生談 Richard Howard 他們對於我知道這為名譯家有點驚訝
其實查Wikipedia 的他
就知道他1982年獲法國騎士獎章In 1982, Howard was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France.
我讀他的Barthes英譯 收穫最多
(Major Translations (French to English)
企盼有機會讀讀他的文集 The Rustle of Language The rustle of language - Google 圖書結果Roland Barthes,Richard Howard - 1989 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 373 頁
Essays discuss science, mythology, language, style, history, semiotics, literature, and meaning In the 'The Rustle of Language' almost all the essays in this ...
***
昨天傍晚 我在超市前遇到瑞麟
我跟他說 胡適紀念日中午去他那兒 未遇
他說現在花很多時間在附近的佛堂
所以我說歲末 Simon U 的人應該聚會 (他說月娟日前打過電話問起這)
去年只為HOWARD和 永安辦過一次讀書會
(欣寧的文字收納室:梁永安：嚼飯授人之事)
他說現在在家的時間少
多可惜
就用幾個文字向各大譯家賀新年
現在在等梁永安翻譯的dhl 短篇小說和櫻桃園文化出版的初戀
Richard Howard first appeared in The Paris Review in our thirteenth…
THEPARISREVIEW.ORG
Richard Howard first appeared in The Paris Review in our thirteenth issue—from the summer of 1956. Since then, several of his poems and translations have found their way to these pages, and in 2004, J. D. McClatchy interviewed him for our Art of Poetry series. In our Summer 1989 issue, George Plimpton spoke with Howard about translating Proust.
GP
The first line of Remembrance of Things Past is one of the most famous in literature. How does your version differ from the others?
RH
Three versions of Proust’s first sentence—“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”—have been published. The Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” James Grieve (an Australian professor): “Time was, when I always went to bed early.” And mine: “Time and again, I have gone to bed early.”
GP
And what is the thinking behind your version?
RH
To begin with, “time and again” seems one of those cell-like phrases which sums up a meaning of the whole book, as long-temps does in French. I admire Professor Grieve’s “time was”, but it doesn’t have the notion of recurrence that I wanted. It seemed to me that what was needed was not only an opening phrase which would reveal the book’s meaning, but one that would begin with the word “time”, which would be the last word in the book as well, as it is in French.
GP
Were there other considerations?
RH
Roger Shattuck has an essay about this, and Alfred Corn has explored it in his essays too: in the whole book, the only use of the passé composé occurs, to all intents and purposes, in the first sentence. Oh sometimes characters use this tense in speech, but the narrative is virtually never in the passé composé (je me suis couché). So that one hears a deliberate little jolt there; I wanted to echo that...
