Tag translation

modifying with ángel gonzález

José Angel Araguz 4 Comments

This week’s poem comes from Spanish poet Ángel González. It speaks of the ways words modify and change what they are attached to. It’s the kind of poem that if you speak too much about it, it flies away, like the butterfly in the poem.

I offer my own translation from the Spanish with the full awareness that the act of translation itself lives in this territory of ephemeral, shifting meaning.

I offer it also as a belated valentine to Ani, as we happened to be apart last week. What’s in the date of a holiday, really?

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A veces, un cuerpo puede modificar un nombre – Ángel González

A veces, las palabras se posan sobre las cosas
como una mariposa sobre una flor, y las
recubren de colores nuevos.

Sin embargo, cuando pienso en tu nombre, eres
tú quien le da a la palabra color, aroma, vida.

¿Qué sería tu nombre sin ti?

Igual que la palabra rosa sin la rosa:
un ruido incomprensible, torpe, hueco.

*

Sometimes, a body can modify a name – Ángel González
translated by José Angel Araguz

Sometimes, words pose themselves over things
like a butterfly over a flower, and they
cover them in new colors.

Nevertheless, when I think of your name, it’s you
that gives the word color, aroma, life.

What would your name be without you?

Same as the word rose without the rose:
an incomprehensible, clumsy, hollow noise.

*

Happy modifying!

José

* in solitudarity with dulce maría loynaz

José Angel Araguz 6 Comments

LXV

Pasaste por mi corazón como el temblor de luz por la colmada red del pescador.

LXV*

You poured through my heart like the shimmering light that streams through the fisherman’s loaded net.

*

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This week I have been spending time with the work of Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz. As can be noted above, the conciseness of imagery and sensibility in her prose make for stunning moments of lyrical insight. Haiku-like, Loynaz’s prose captures a fleeting moment in language, and grounds it in human immediacy.

In the poem below, one can see Loynaz engage with the concept of solitude, one of the major themes of her work. Solitude becomes its own presence and antagonist in her work; in many ways, solitude is the medium through which Loynaz understands the world and channels the work of her poems. In poems charged with its pangs, Loynaz provides the reader the experience of what it feels like to engage with solitude on a level where it imbues the world with its color and meaning.

*

XLIII

Tuve por tanto tiempo que alimentar la soledad con mi sangre, que tengo miedo ahora de encontrarme sin sangre entre tus brazos… O de encontrarte a ti menos en ellos que lo que te encontraba en mi ardorosa y viva soledad.
De tal modo te he fundido en ella y yo contigo, de tal modo le he ido traspasando anhelos, sueños gestos y señales, que tal vez nuestro encuentro sólo sea el de dos nubes en el cielo o dos desconocidos en la tierra.

XLIII

I have fed my solitude so much blood that I’m afraid of feeling nothing when you hold me in your arms. Or maybe I’m scared of finding you less in your embrace than I did in my fierce and fervent solitude.
I have dissolved you into my solitude, and myself into you, in such a way that I have given my solitude my desires and my dreams, my gestures and my traits, and now I wonder if our meeting has been anything more than two clouds passing in the sky, or two strangers passing on earth.

*

Happy solituding!

José

P.S. Should anyone else be interested in receiving a monopoem, feel free to send me an email [ thefridayinfluence@gmail.com ] between now and next Monday, and I’ll have one sent your way.

*All English translations are from James O’Connor’s book of Loynaz translations, Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems (archipelago books).