Poets on Translation: Mystery and Pluck

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

This fantastical visit and discussion about translation with the great Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), takes place on a park bench in the Carmen de los Mártires, in Granada, Spain, a hilltop locus of flowers, domesticated peacocks, and tranquil fountains. My poet-sage arrives, late as usual, a gentle but insistent human breeze.

Cyrus Cassells: My first callow attempts at translation were clumsy versions of your hypnotic “Dreamwalking Ballad” and your shimmering, deeply erotic tale, “The Faithless Wife”: “Her starched petticoat / sounded in my ears / like a swatch of silk / rent by ten knives.” In high school, my most memorable teacher, Concepción Jorba Ugarte de la Peña, had set my teenage mind and ear on fire by introducing me to key poems from your Gypsy Ballads, one of the most influential poetry best sellers in Spanish history. I was determined to share its brilliant sparks in a new tongue.

What tantalized me in both of your indelible ballads was the entrancing music, the surreal strangeness of the Andalusian landscapes you describe, and an enigmatic feeling you point to elsewhere: “only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.” Your soundscapes contain elements of both tangible healing and great suffering, which beguiled me, and, because I felt unable to capture, after countless attempts, your distinctive genius, I considered myself “a failed translator.”

With the exception of W. S. Merwin and my friend Sarah Arvio’s translations in Poet in Spain, I’ve been unimpressed with most English versions of your work: the music so evident in the Spanish is missing. In my homage to you, “The Magician Lorca” (translated into Spanish by Buenos Aires–born poet Daniel Lipara), I speak of being “a tagalong” and express humility and gratitude for the gift of “unabraded fire in my hands.” In adapting your lyric artistry, how do you suggest that I “transfer the fire,” how do I find an equivalent English?

(Imaginary) Federico García Lorca: First, let me say, I’m thrilled to learn my Gypsy Ballads set you on your adult path as a translator of Catalan poetry. Crafty artisan, word-cobbler, what are the rhythms in nimble English that enthrall, that hypnotize? Follow the able New World music in your mother-tongue that repetition, alliteration, and artful silences offer. In the alchemy of translation, stick to the spirit of here goes, transporting melody and fire from one dynamic culture to another. Aspire to a death-defying trapeze artist’s pluck and daring.

CC: Of all the poets I’ve admired, you seem the closest to childhood; your poems evince that sense of wide-eyed wonder and unfailing curiosity. The vibrant world of your earliest poems, rooted in the countryside beyond Granada, the Andalusian vega of your youth, is tinged with a fairy-tale quality. You consistently transform the humdrum and familiar into something primal and magical.

At a puppet theater venue in San Telmo, the oldest district of Buenos Aires, I recently found a 1934 photo of you holding up an impressive puppet with a villainous black cloak, created by a local Argentine craftsman and puppeteer, Ernesto Arancibia (1904–1963). The two of you collaborated on a play, “Los Títeres de Cachiporra” (“The Club-Stick Puppets”), written especially for the theater.

How did you, and how can I, keep singing far into adulthood?

FGL: When does the child in us stop rummaging around?—asking questions, If the earth is round, why is a pond flat?—some of them annoying, some of them earnest and brilliant? The answer, dear poet, is never! Keep foraging, stay ever-alert, like Inspector Sherlock Holmes on the hunt for clues. Even when your bones creak, and your voice starts to get hoarse, forge ahead! Sing like the swart-skinned street-sweeper in the gypsy quarter of Sacromonte sings, above his trusty broom, until the old tune becomes a revelation.

CC: Verde que te quiero verde (green, how I love green), the opening line of (“Dreamwalking Ballad”), is one of the most seductive and beloved lines in all of Spanish literature. In one of Spanish director Carlos Saura’s acclaimed flamenco-centered films, first accomplished adult dancers, then a gaggle of talented, agile children dance a musical version of your most famous ballad, as the Andalusian landscape, suffused with green (“Green wind. Green branches.”), grows ever more hypnotic.

How did you conjure such a timeless and contagious green?

FGL: Consider this, Cyrus: Ballads allow poet and singer freedom from constricting narrative or workaday logic. Here is the anointing green of closed lids and inchoate longing—like a nighttime shibboleth or a sorcerer’s open-sesame—with an alluring siren’s music added to enhance the spell, the five words a fantastic passe-partout: Verde que te quiero verde. Passionate, essential green.