The sense of loss - a single line in 'Mere Road'

In 2008 Brines gave an interview in El País with the header: 'La idea central de mi poesía es el mundo como pérdida' (29.02.2008). The interviewer, José Andrés Rojo cites, as emblematic of Brines's life and poetic career, a single line (l.9) from his much anthologised poem 'Mere Road':
 

'y soy como algún hombre que viviera perdido en una casa
        de una extraña ciudad'

He connects Brines's early Wandejahre to the theme of impermanence in the poetry, adducing an observation from Brines that: 'En mi poesía hay un centro que lo devora todo ... y que tiene que ver con una idea: la del mundo como pérdida. En esto de vivir, lo que yo percibo sobre todo es la pérdida' ('In my poetry there is a core that devours everything ... and that has to do with one idea, the world as loss. In this business of living, what I perceive above all is loss'). Andrés Rojo concludes: 'La pérdida, de eso trata la obra de Brines' ('Loss, that is what Brines's work is about').

We came across this interview only after we had finalised our translation of 'Mere Road'. But while it did not affect our thinking about the poem at the time it does put a retrospective finger on some of the challenges of translating it. Much of the poem looks deceptively straightforward, a matter of constatation:

y yo los reconozco, detrás de los cristales de mi cuarto.
Y nunca han vuelto su mirada a mí (ll.7-8)

I can make them out, from this side of the window panes
      of my room.
And my gaze has never been returned

- to an extent that it is possible to fail to register certain key themes, among which is a pervasive sensitivity towards loss. If loss is indeed a centre of gravity in Brines's poetry (though Brines's analogy - 'un centro que lo devora todo' - is arguably gravity at its strongest, a centripetal force like a tornado or a black hole), in what ways does this manifest itself in the finest details of the verse, and how does translation find its equivalent? How, in our case, did we come to try to acknowledge more clearly the centrality of loss as reflected in the emblematic line singled out by Andrés Rojo?

Here is what we made of the line in five successive drafts:
1 I’m like a man who could be living lost inside a house of some foreign city (2004, first)
2 I might as well be some displaced person dwelling in a foreign city
3 I may as well be some displaced person dwelling in a foreign city
4 I may as well be a displaced person put up in some foreign city
5 I’m like a man who might be living lost inside a house of some strange city (2009, final) 

While deciding whether the city was 'strange' or 'foreign' was something we changed our minds about periodically, the real crux for us was the phrase 'un hombre que viviera perdido': literally 'a man who could be living lost' (version 1) - a translation we had doubts about accepting because it sounded prosaic, the rhythm too flat.
 
Versions 2-4 were clumsy for a number of reasons.The original phrase seems to lend itself to two overlapping but distinct interpretations: to (a) that of a man who happens to be in a particular situation by force of circumstance, and to (b) that of a man for whom this situation is more like a life sentence - what's exemplified is less culture shock than a sense of feeling almost like a 'desaparecido' ('disappeared'). At first we veered towards interpretation (a) and decided to emphasise contingency. But the English 'displaced person' in 2-4 was not a satisfactory equivalent and became a red herring. And since Spanish has a specific term for 'displaced person' ('persona desplazada'), as translators we were overstepping the limit.

While versions 2-4 highlighted an element of isolation and exile that is an undercurrent in the original, they were unsubtle, and read as if the speaker were wearing a sign on his hat saying 'alien'. 'I might/may as well be' also sounded lachrymose, verging on self-pity.

What's more, the rhythm in 2-4 was too quick and peremptory, compared with the measured deliberateness of the original. By condensing 'que viviera ... en una casa' as 'might/may be ... dwelling' we had shortened the line and robbed it of its ponderousness and fatefulness. The line needed to be allowed to stretch out, to enact the sense of the speaker's being lost within it, temporally and spatially. 'Put up' (version 4) connoted transitoriness and the grudging tolerance of the outsider but compounded the problem by going against the emotional tenor.

By version 5 we had moved towards interpretation (b) and the original literal translation of the line, coming almost full circle. By focusing (in 2-4) on the element of estrangement and isolation we had obscured the sense of loss as more than just a passing state. In the process the words 'living lost' came to be seen as the fulcrum of the line which, with the wisdom of hindsight, could be argued was staring us in the face all along in the Spanish.

What's in a (book) title?

‘Is this a title that makes sense before or after you read the book?’ This was the jist of  Brines’s question (posed in Spanish) to us, his English translators, during a telephone conversation when we first suggested, well into the project, using the Spanish-English title De purísimo azul | Of Purest Blue. The Spanish phrase was drawn from Brines’s introduction to his own Selected Poems (Selección propia, 1999) in which he talks about his native Elca and his family home as ‘situada en un ámbito celeste de purísimo azul’ (‘located in a heavenly region of purest blue’) (p.50). The first poem is, appropriately enough, called 'Elca', a recollection of early family life, in which 'Suben, / por el azul del cielo / las ramas del ciprés' (Up into / the sky's blue / climb the cypress branches') (ll.16-18).

In the event we were given a remarkable degree of latitude by the poet in choosing the final title. To what extent were we listening to his quiet inner voice as well as to the one on the other end of the telephone? Was this a title which would make sense, and if so, how?

As translators we would like to think that the only effective answer to the poet’s question is that any title should make sense both before and after reading. One would like to think that this sense is open to change, enlargement and enrichment through the process of attending to, or living into, the text. Of course, a title should capture the reader’s interest and maintain it. Equally, where the element of choice is present (with a selection of poems or prose not titled as such in the original) questions arise about the extent to which the title should aim to (a) strike the right note, and (b) explain or interpret the original text. For instance, Edwin Honig’s translation (1988) of Fernando Pessoa’s prose is entitled Always Astonished. Is this a description of the perpetual variety of Pessoa's personas, his (their) capacity for wonder, or a claim relating to the translator's and reader's response? Or all of these? Lawrence Venuti in The Translator’s Invisibility (1995) cites at least one example where knowing the allusion in the title of a poem may not necessarily help to fix the meaning of the text itself (p.284).

If we alter the before/after analogy above to one of inside/outside we gain a different perspective on some of the issues at stake here. Here the spatial concept of ‘paratext’, a term coined by Genette (1997), may be helpful. The paratext includes those things both within the book (peritext) and outside it (epitext) that mediate the book to the reader: the author’s name(s), the title and subtitle, foreword or introduction, cover blurb, epigraph, notes, and so on. Genette states in a more formal way what most potential book openers will sense instinctively: how a book is ‘framed’ can invite readers to step inside or to turn back. Peritext and epitext may often be perceived as liminal features. To translator(s), however, they are central, not only because we are called upon to translate these elements but also because we may have a hand in adding to them. Indeed, these features may be among the professional claims staked by the translator(s). (In our case we had decided at the outset to translate the English elements of the peri/epitext into Spanish so that the book was truly a dual language version.)

Applying Genette’s categories to our own translation, the peritext includes at least one poem whose title nods in the direction of the collection's title – ‘ El azul’ (‘The Blue’). In addition, there are several references in other poems to the blue of (Mediterranean) sea and sky and in one poem ('Muros de Arezzo', 'Walls of Arezzo') to the blue sky of the frescos of Piero della Francesca. By contrast, those poems of Brines written during his sojourn in England during the 1960s, which formed a core of the poems chosen for this translation, are distinguished by autumnal and winter darkness – the predominant tones here are ash-grey, brown, black, and copper. These poems might then be perceived as the odd ones out, the translators accentuating a dynamic between the unclouded South and the gloomy North that is present in the poet but handled in more subtle ways. At the same time, the consistently elegiac tone and tropes of Brines’s work seemed to fit well with the title. In the background of our thinking here was also the ‘serene irony’ of Mallarmé’s ‘L’azur’ (1864) as well as the final lines of Philip Larkin’s ‘High Windows’ (1974), suggesting that a fascination with celestial purity is not an exclusively Southern concern.

Having settled on the running order of the poems with the poet and the cover artwork (like Piero's fresco), we constructed an epitext that supported - arguably justified - our choice. Given that our initial aim had been to create a book of translations complemented by original artwork (see previous post) it seemed appropriate that the visual should come into its own in shaping our choice.

An absent presence

Our Brines poetry translation project was to have included work by the Spanish artist Alain Roselló (see 'About the title artwork' above). Just before his untimely death in May 2005, Alain had been working intensively on a series of artworks in different media (collages, engravings, drawings, sculptures) which were intended to be photographically reproduced in the book, and to complement the themes of the poems selected. The photo here was taken in the artist's studio as he left it, the chalkboard showing the list of artworks. (The figures refer to the dimensions of the published book.)

Silla (chair)

ROSA (ROSE) NEGRA VERDE AZUL (BLACK GREEN BLUE)
CORAZÓN (HEART)
TARJETA (CARD)
CORTINA (CURTAIN)
PLUMAS (FEATHERS)
NIDO (NEST)
CRÁNEO (SKULL)
CUCHILLO (KNIFE)
DIBUJO AGUA (DRAWING OF WATER) CUADRADO NEGRO (black square)
HUMO (SMOKE)
ÁRBOL (TREE)
ALA (WING)
MARCO (FRAME)
seguido (one after the other)
10'5 x 17'5

Photo: Steve Cranfield