| |
Review by Erica Mena
Lorca’s Cante Jondo is a tapestry woven from the threads of Andalucia, steeped in the history of Gypsies, Jews, Moors and the centuries of pointed saetas that are both prayers and arrows piercing the heart of the listener. And this new translation, coming twenty years after Carlos Bauer’s version for City Lights, is a refreshing revision of this song in English. Those who have already fallen in love with Lorca will reencounter the nuanced rhythms and metaphors that permeate this work, while new readers will discover Angel’s graceful translation which absorbs the complexities of Lorca’s song, and renders it into sensual, vibrant English.
While the infatuation with death and suffering, that is the power and the pleasure of cante jondo, risks sentimentality when brought into English, Angel trusts Lorca’s straightforward intensity and passion, and in doing so, brings the reader face to face with the power of the Spanish language and its song. Few readers need to be told of the necessity of this work of Lorca’s, the power of which is so great, it was banned by Franco for forty years after the poet’s death, and still, seventy years after, resonates with unflinching clarity. Simon writes in the introduction “Deep song is nothing if it does not companion the night, no matter how long the darkness might last.” In this new version, we are given our companion anew, in the precise language and sensuality of the original.
Despite the rich clarity of the language however, some context would have been helpful, especially for readers encountering Lorca, or cante jondo for the first time. Greg Simon’s introduction, while a beautiful reflection on deep song and Lorca’s interest in it, falls short of the explicative but dry Bauer introduction which iterates the various tropes of deep song with which Lorca plays. Of course, devotees of Lorca’s will search elsewhere for the history of his infatuation with cante jondo and students of cante jondo will have other sources for study. In giving a text life between languages, the context is only as important as the text requires it to be, and in this work Angel has been pierced by the same movements of language, the same melding of life and death that gripped Lorca.
“It seems that we’ve lost our way,” Amargo says to the unnamed Horseman in “Dialogue of Amargo the Bitter.” We have been lost, and lost our way, groping in the dark for answers or ways to make meaning of this past century of blood and war, and of the coming unknown. And perhaps it is poets who can lead us through the dark, who can illuminate our time and show us the truths in the underlying rhythms of life. But Lorca refuses this, finding instead beauty in the depth, in the sorrow and loss that suffuses the world. The only destination is death; “The world’s a big place./And so very alone.” This is a poem of exploration, not explanation. But we are not alone: “Death, crowned with/withered orange blossoms,/travels down a road./She sings and sings/a song/with her ancient white guitar” and Lorca sings with her so that we may travel by her side. Across the distance of language and time Lorca does not guide us, but beckons us to search for ourselves the “Dry land,/quiet land/of night’s/immensity” and find our own duende. Lorca quotes his companion in the territory of deep song, saying “Manuel Torres [said] ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there is no greater truth. These dark sounds are the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art…” How necessary it is now to be reminded that there is no guide to follow, but that we must search within the solitary darkness for our cry that transforms despair into hope.
While performing an act of translation this complex, this steeped in history and rhythm, is heroic, Angel’s translation at times does not achieve the full expression of Lorca's poetry. No translation is devoid of the translator’s hand – it would be both impossible and undesirable – but there are times when Angel seems to overtake Lorca, and this becomes painfully obvious in the awkward English phrasing of some beautiful Spanish lines. In “Juan Breva” Angel complicates the rather simple, active phrase “Juan Breva tenía/cuerpo de gigante” (literally “Juan Breva had/the body of a giant”) into the passive “Juan Breva was possessed/with the body of a giant.” He does this again at the end of the poem, slightly altering the meaning of the final lines: “His voice was possessed,/a trace of the sea without light” rather than “His voice had/something of the sea without light” as it reads literally. In elevating the tone in English, Angel is editorializing, adding an interpretation rather than allowing readers to come to their own. As one who believes that there is no definitive translation, the very act of translating requires it to be done and redone, it is not a condemnation that Angel leaves room for future refinement of Poem of the Deep Song. Neruda believed that through translation his poems could be improved, and though this reader’s preference tends toward the super literal, “word for word, phrase for phrase” to quote Charles Simic, the necessity of departure in order to echo the original intent, if not the words, is clear. Of course, these are minor qualms with an overall brilliant work of translation, in which some slight deviation is necessary to reach the tone of the original. “After Passing” is demonstrative of the small alterations from the original that Angel seemingly instinctively reaches for to make the English seem effortless. It is short enough to quote in its entirety:
Children
look into the distance.
The oil lamps are extinguished.
Blind young women
question the moon,
and spirals of crying
rise into the air.
Mountains
look into the distance.
Rather than use more literal lines: “a point far, far away,” “Some blind girls,” or “and through the air rise/spirals of weeping” as Bauer does, Angel carries the images in language that is both natural and sharp.
While Angel cleans up some of the bulky phrasing of the Bauer version, Angel’s verse at times sacrifices meaning that is essential in the condensed intensity of the Spanish. Sometimes this may be forgivable. In “El Paso de la Siguiriya” – a title that Bauer had as “The Passing Stage of the Siguiriya” and Angel tightens to “Siguiriya’s Way” – Angel salvages the clarity, the concise staccato of the poem: “She’s tied to the tremor/of a rhythm that never arrives” in place of “She is chained to the tremor/of a never arriving rhythm.” Though he loses the more faithful “chained” for “tied” he retains the important measure of these lines, necessary to the poem as a song. Sometimes, however, for this reader at least, it’s difficult to understand the reasoning behind these alterations. In “Poem of the Saeta” he adds the phrase “to the sea” in “Guadalquivir, open to the sea.” Although it is implied in the original, as the river opens to the sea, the opening is left as an implication and Angel’s decision to explicate it for English readers is unnecessary and undermines his careful handling of trickier lines in the poem. Perhaps most curious are his omissions from the Spanish. In “Cave” not only is the pronoun missing in the parentheticals, but in the third verse “The gypsy/calls forth the distance” ignoring that in the literal Spanish “The gypsy evokes/remote lands.” The subtle difference between “the distance” and “remote lands” or even “distant lands” is perhaps negligible in the grander achievement of this poem, but the missing pronoun abstracts the vital relationship between the stanzas and the parentheses, the colors and the images they embody. This is a loss in English that is hard to reconcile with the exacting nature of the poem.
Angel, despite these minor problems, handles the difficult ordering and breaking of lines deftly. In “Night” Angel reorders the last two lines of the third stanza, preserving the meaning while accentuating the metric vacillation of the original:
Small gold windows
shudder,
and crosses
sway upon the dawn.
What results is a darkly luminous English version of an important and necessary work. With his new translation of Cante Jondo, Angel has succeeded in bringing to a new generation of English readers the precision of language, the faith and the despair and above all, the duende that is Lorca.
|
|
