Sílabas de viento / Syllables of Wind

Xánath Caraza.  Sandra Kingery, translator. 

Mammoth Publications: Lawrence, KS.  2014.

$18.00 US

170 pages

Review by Don Cellini

Published in issue 40 of The Ofi Press 

In a recent conversation with poet Xánath Caraza, she told me that each of her books has its own personality.  This one is the rebellious son of the wind – it does what it wants and goes where it wants.  The poet?  She just smiles and asks “What can I do?”

I would suggest that Caraza is being modest.  She is an accomplished poet who controls each of her poems in the collection.  There is, however, a powerful sense of movement throughout the collection as she travels from Mexico to Europe, lingers in Spain, then returns to Kansas City with other stops along the way.  This sense of movement is not just from the poems themselves, but because she has carefully included the date and location of the poem’s origin at the end of each.

Her themes are timeless: life, death, and what happens between.  Her style is lean and direct.  Simple, colorful language describes what she sees and feels on this whirlwind trip.  There is only punctuation in a few of the poems, and then only minimal.  Each line begins with a capital letter.  These techniques challenge the reader to follow her lines carefully.  These are also the kinds of devices which pose particular challenges for a translator.  But Caraza and Kingery seem a match made in heaven as the translator has created lines that are to equal their originals.

Those who formally study translations have devised various scales to differentiate various types of translations.  Without providing a detailed summary of the degrees of difference, for our purposes, let’s only consider the two extremes.  At one end of the scale is literal translation.  A good example would be the use of a computer to translate a text.  If you’ve ever tried, you know that the computer may handle simple prose satisfactorily, but generally produces a poem that is unintelligible.  The opposite extreme from this literal translation would be a recreation of the poem by the translator, sometimes in a form that is quite different from the original.  Two translations of movie titles will serve as examples:

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was translated into Spanish as Mr. Smith Va A Washington.  Even those who do not read Spanish can guess that title.  This would be an example of a very literal translation.  The Sound of Music, on the other hand, became La novicia rebelde (The rebellious novice) in Latin America and Sonrisas y lágrimas (Smiles and tears) in Spain.  These titles may have helped box office sales, but are far from the original title and, perhaps in the case of the rebellious novice, far from the theme of the film itself.  These titles would fall into the category of more creative interpretations of the original.

Kingery’s translations are closer to Mr. Smith than to the rebellious novice.  She carefully follows Caraza’s lines and vocabulary, deviating only occasionally for poetic purposes.  Consider “La casa de los pájaros” / “House of Birds”

Aleteos ligeros de aves de marfil

Arboles amarillos en el centro

Lluvia musical los agita

Aves de coral de lapislázuli y jade

Aves ciegas de aletear incesante

De plumaje de palabras

De plumaje de humo

Aves de andar vacilante

Aves en el texto silencioso

Con frondas colmadas de viento

Esa casa me recibe

Música escurriendo de las hojas

Aves de alas extendidas

Con el alma transparente

(Ciudad de Oaxaca, México, enero de 2013)

Fleeting fluttering of ivory birds

Yellow leaves in the center

Rhythmic rain rocks them

Birds of coral, lapis lazuli and jade

Blind birds of incessant flapping

Of feathers of phrases

Of feathers of fire

Birds of faltering steps

Birds in the silent script

With wind-filled foliage

The house receives me

Rhythm dripping from the leaves

Birds with wide-spread wings

With transparent souls

(Oaxaca City, Mexico, January 2013)

A quick skim shows that, on the page, the poems look very similar in terms of line length, number of stanzas, etc.  And certainly, “Aves de coral de lapislázuli y jade” easily find there equivalents in “Birds of coral, lapis lazuli and jade”.

In the following stanza however, Kingery exercises her poetic license with the phrase “de plumaje de palabras.”  A literal translation would be feathers of words, but she has carefully substituted “phrases” to achieved the same alliteration as the original.  In the following line “de plumaje de humo” (feathers of smoke) she changes smoke to “fire” for the same alliterative effect.  And in the final line of the stanza “texto silencioso” becomes “silent script” to once more take advantage of the alliteration in English.

In addition to the above techniques, which the translator uses throughout the text, she has also maintained some words in their original, especially words of Nahuatl origin.  Context helps the reader guess the meaning. This preserves a taste of the original, without sacrificing content.  Three of the poems, in fact, appear in their entirety in their Spanish original with both English and Nahuatl translations following.

The reader of English can be certain that the translation they are reading is very faithful to the poet’s original.  At times, however, I would like to nudge Kingery to move another step toward a more creative work.  For example, the four-line poem “Venus en la luna” / “Venus on the Moon”

Firmamento negro

De centellas lleno estás

Venus en la luna

Mi corazón en altamar

(Barcelona, España, verano de 2012)

Black firmament

Full of sparks you are

Venus on the moon

My heart on the high seas

(Barcelona, Spain, summer 2012)

While “Full of sparks you are” is faithful to “De centellas lleno estás” it would be more fluid in English to say “You are full of sparks” a simple deviation from the original with no loss of content.

Sílabas de viento /Syllables of Wind is a fine work of poetry by an experienced poet and an equally talented translator.  It’s a great read in both languages.