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.