Hi, everyone.
Buenas tardes.
I'm so excited that you're all here for this colloquium
on translation with our readers of last evening,
Lila Zemborain and Rosa Alcalá.
And I know I saw a lot of you guys at the reading,
So I just how wonderful it was.
And I for one, am really interested in hearing more
about the dual poem that you read.
I was talking with someone after the reading Julian Etienne,
who's in the Mexican consulate.
And he said that he could hear and understand
both sides of the poem simultaneously.
I thought that was so cool.
I know that you guys probably have questions as well
and we're just going to turn the mic over to Lila and Rosa.
And thank you both for being here.
So thank you so much for having us again,
talking about our work.
Yes.
So I guess the idea for the colloquium
was we were going to have a dialogue.
And the reason we thought of having a dialogue
and asking each other questions because our process
of translation has been in the form of a dialogue.
We collaborate when I translate.
But because Lila is living and when you translate dead people.
[LAUGHS]
I mean, you can talk to dead people.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's a little harder to get a response.
So with Lila we've had this ongoing conversation
about her work and that helps me to translate her.
And I imagine that it also helps you
to think about your own work when those questions are asked.
So I'm going to start off with a question for Lila
and then we're going to go back and forth.
And hope that something emerges that could
be useful in sort of opening up a discussion about translation.
So when I started translating Lila's work,
gosh I was probably in my 20s.
Yeah, I was in my 20s and I really
hadn't translated that much.
So I really credit Lila for teaching me how to translate.
Because she put her trust in me and she allowed me
to sort of work through some of the questions of translation
and sort of start to create my own approach to translation.
I had read some translation theory,
I knew what I liked and didn't like in poetry.
I mean I didn't have zero tools with me
but she allowed me to hone my skills as a translator.
And in the process of translating her work
I've asked her so many questions.
And I think that it's very difficult as a poet,
because I'm also a poet to answer questions
about your own work.
So someone will ask you, well, why
do you have that image there?
And you're like, I don't know.
I mean you're really the least articulate person usually
about your own work.
And so I wanted to ask Lila I mean, was it--
is it difficult and I say was because hopefully we'll
continue collaborating.
I know that lately I haven't had as much time as I'd like to.
[LAUGHTER]
But I wanted to ask you how has it
felt to have to respond to all of these questions?
To have to come up when I say to you, why is this here?
What does this mean?
Why are you putting this here?
I have to understand the context of it.
Is it difficult to enter your work in that way?
And do you actually learn something about it?
I know that sometimes you sort of have left it vague
and given me the opportunity to interpret it myself,
which I think is extremely generous.
And allows for maybe even a more complex translation.
But I mean, how does it feel to be
put on the spot on your own work in order for it
to be translated?
Well, first of all, I don't think
you were inexperienced at all when you started.
Because she had already translated the work of Cecilia
Vicuna, which is very complex and because the mix
of languages, and the structure of quechua.
And Cecilia's work is very complex.
So already when we began working together
I completely trusted you.
So I didn't have any mixed feelings, you're a beginner.
I didn't even think about that.
So I think the process of the dialogue
that we have is always very good for me.
In the sense that these are so precise
questions that she generally does.
That you have to explain what does it mean?
Certain part of the work that it makes you
think a lot of what you are doing.
And the other part that I was thinking about
is that in my writing and in every writing,
there is always a secret.
There is something that is hidden
and something that we are not saying through those words.
And this is my case, one of my books
is called Guardians Of The Secret.
Maybe poetry is for me a secret very well guarded.
So in the process of translation that secret has to be revealed.
So the translator can understand what is going on in the work.
So I always thought as a translation--
no actually I thought it about half an hour
ago when I was trying to think about the questions
always at the last minute.
And I think about translation now
as a kind of a detective work.
Because you're trying to see all these kind of clues
and to understand so deeply what is going on in the text.
That I see your work as a kind of detective work.
And so my question to you was, do
you have the sensation of a detective when you translate?
Trying to unfold these kind of secrets
that the work is trying not to reveal.
That's a good question, do I feel like a detective?
I don't know if I thought of it in terms of detective work.
I mean, I think that there's a way when I'm reading it.
In my process normally when I'm translating is that
sometimes it almost feels like sort of automatic writing.
That I'm reading the work and also
trying to find the English equivalent with the other hand.
And that's a very, very sort of rough early draft of it.
But there's something for me because I am bilingual.
Is that the rhythm of Spanish and particularly Lila's.
I mean, if you've read Mauve Sea-Orchids,
it's this thing where it's this wave, these long lines,
the syntax is incredibly important to the work.
And so when you're reading it you
feel like there's this unfolding in it.
And you have to give yourself to that unfolding.
I mean, that's part of the secret
too because it's not the meaning of the words.
It's this kind of undertow.
It's this thing that's kind of pushing through the work
that your body has to give in to.
Just like the body of the speaker
gives into the movement in the water, or the love glands,
or this way where we don't have control.
There's this kind of chemical processes going
on that keep us from having logical or sort of rational
control over our bodies.
Thank God.
But I think poetry does that too.
It kind of sort of has this driving force underneath that
pulls you in, that's about the sound,
that it's about the tone, that's about the music, that's
about a suggested meaning.
And I think that's the first part
that I try to give myself to before doing the detective
work.
Because if you do the detective work immediately
you're trying to find the clue.
And sometimes the clue is there in something
that is not a clue.
Like you're looking for well, where's
the secret key under here?
But the thing is that everything else might be just as important
and it's just this kind of sensation
that you're trying to gather.
And I've often pointed to the syntax as the first thing
to getting to the meaning of the work.
When you're translating as you might imagine
is the syntax might change because you're trying to make
sense in another language.
So you might have to rearrange word order.
So it sounds natural in the English.
I sometimes try to create lines that
don't sound natural in the English,
in order to retain that syntax.
Because first of all, her poetry doesn't always
sound natural in Spanish either.
I mean, do you know what I mean?
It's not necessarily just a conversational Spanish,
it's poetry.
I mean, she manipulates the language in a certain way,
and she causes a certain cadence, and a certain movement
in that Spanish.
So that I try to replicate that in the English.
I mean, without it turning it into senseless order.
But trying to create that so that one thing
leads to another.
And in the last part that I translated,
the body that is moving through water
as it's moving its head from one side to another
is seeing different things.
So it's seeing rocks, I'm sorry, it's seeing the ocean,
then it's seeing the sky, it's seeing the sun.
That word order is specific because we're following
the movement of the body.
If you don't have the word order you
don't see the things specifically in that order
and that's what I was trying to retain.
I know that doesn't answer your question because I thought
of myself as a detective.
But immersing yourself in that I guess,
is kind of like being a detective.
Yeah, no well, maybe I was not thinking
in that particular poem when I was asking the question.
And because it's true that what I
find very difficult about translating
is that when I write it's like entering
into a state of a certain rhythm.
In the moment that I enter in a rhythm,
is the moment that I feel that I'm really writing.
So for me it is very amazing also that you could capture.
That that's the thing that most attract me about your work.
That you could capture the rhythm of my writing.
I don't know how to explain it because as she explained also,
it's such a bodily thing.
It's almost like when I'm writing I'm almost moving.
I don't write in the computer, I write in notebooks.
So when I feel this rhythm is the moment of the writing.
But the other amazing thing also with Rosa's work
is that she translated first Guardians Of The Secret.
Now we had that experience.
First you translated something else.
But in Guardians Of The Secret the poems are very short,
some of them.
And many times I did bilingual readings.
And always there is a problem about yourself reading
in English and in Spanish.
It seems like you're reading in Spanish and then in English,
and then you have to do the same thing, the same emotion
in the other languages.
It's very weird to do it oneself.
So with Guardians Of The Secret.
I decided to read one poem in Spanish,
and another one in English, and another one in Spanish.
Or maybe a longer one in English and a shorter one in Spanish.
And make a mix of both languages.
Not as yesterday, i know I was doing it myself.
And in Rosa's translation, there is not for me
a sensation that I'm changing the language.
Which this is very amazing.
When I read in both languages, especially short poems,
I don't feel like there is a change of the rhythm.
That's why I can continue.
And of the syntax as you mentioned.
So it's all like a flow.
So I think that it's fantastic about work.
I don't have a question about that.
I'm just expanding about what you just said.
[LAUGHS]
Well, I have a question for you because you're
talking about translating and the kind of things the way
a translator might interpret or inhabit your work
or see your work.
So my advice was Mauve Sea-Orchids
was translated by two people, by myself and Monica de la Torre.
I think the reason for that was I had translated a section
and then I was writing my dissertation,
or moving to El Paso or something.
Some major upheaval.
And I said, I really can't work on this now.
And you found Monica who's an amazing translator.
I don't know, she was here.
But I was desperate In that moment.
You were desperate.
Because you tell me I cannot do it.
I know.
It was like a breakup.
[LAUGHTER] No, I wasn't.
It was tough, but we worked it out.
No, it was really--
I mean just as an aside I form relationships with people.
I mean, you don't translate someone's work the way
that you cash someone's check at the bank.
I mean it's not just this kind of exchange that ends once.
At least for me I've formed real personal relationships
with people.
So I consider Lila one of my dearest friends.
And so there's this kind of--
And it's interesting because after a while
it helps to know that person.
And I find it a real privilege to be sort of completely
part of their creative process.
And so at that moment that I couldn't do it,
it was difficult to say no.
It's always difficult to say no to Lila
because she makes it really easy to work with her to tell you
the truth.
So she found Monica de la Torre.
So the question is--
Monica de la Torre has translated amazing people
and is a very good translator, a very good poet.
She was here.
I don't know if any of you have seen her.
She was here and she translated the first part.
So it's curious to me how you found the process differ
from translator.
Do you think that you learned different things
about your own work from what she saw, from what I saw?
Did you have certain expectations
of what a translator does and then you
had another translator?
I'm just curious.
Yes.
With Monica was interesting because also
because of Mauve Sea-Orchids, it's
a book that for me has different tones in each part.
So the first part of the book has that pedantic tone
that was mentioned yesterday, which is true.
But is more like mocking intellectual tone that I
was using in that moment to create
like a theory of perception completely invented.
And I don't know having fun with it
but using the tone of an academic paper.
Which didn't turn out completely like that, no.
But all the, like --nexos, cómo se dice--
the word that you, los nexos?
The connecting words.
All the connecting words are like, however,
and this, you know, de esta manera.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember what it is.
Here I am the translator, I'm like I
don't know how it said in English, I have no idea.
I can't remember.
I was teaching a composition to people writing in Spanish,
so I had to teach them all these kind of words.
And so I was tired of those but I use all those words.
And Monica is a very bright and intellectual person
who really connected with this kind
of it's not a joke because it's not funny
the way that I wrote it.
But she connected very well with this kind
of pseudo intellectual thing that I was doing.
Mixed with at the same time, something very intuitive.
And I think that was great that she was doing
the translation for this part.
And the second part is like a more prophetic,
let's say kind of prophetic writing in Malvas.
And I was afraid that it was going to look very new agey.
[LAUGHS] So for that Monica was very good in that sense.
Because always when you are in the process of translation,
which is also for me a process of writing.
Because sometimes when I'm writing
they are doing the translations at the same time.
Because I have a reading or something.
And I need to translate this work.
And so then no desperately calling.
It was like, I need this by Monday.
It's Sunday Lila.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes.
So then it gives you the opportunity
to completely rethink of what you are doing
or maybe this is awful.
What did I do?
When you see the translation what did I do here?
So then you have to go over it, and correct it,
and it was a very good experience.
Also Monica mentioned me also that for her it
was really hard to get into the rhythm of my Spanish
from Argentina, which is completely
different from the rhythm of the Spanish in Mexico.
So for her it was like a challenge
to get into the rhythm because she
puts certain accents in different places
of the sentence.
And so when I went over the translation
I was reading it in English with her
and I said, and it didn't go in the moment.
I got a little bit lost sometimes
in the middle of a sentence because it
didn't went with the rhythm that my Spanish has.
And she did an amazing job with that
because it got completely like smooth and she could do it.
That is what I think about translators that it was
in another place this question.
I don't know where it is.
I think that translation is such an act of generosity
because it's like getting completely into the writing
or into the experience of writing of another person.
And I think Monica and you and the other translators
as well that I have been working,
they have the capacity to get into the minds.
Because it's getting into the mind of another person
in order to put it in the other language.
Do you feel like--
Do I feel generous?
Well generous no, but how can you remove yourself
also from your own writing or how
is the relationship between letting you
go in the writing of the other person
and at the same time it's like three parts the question.
How do you let yourself go into the writing
of the other person?
Then how you recover yourself in the process
of reviewing because that is the process that comes afterwards.
And the last part I forgot.
[LAUGHS] I have something else.
Well I wanted to touch upon.
And I'm going to answer those questions,
I think it leads into it.
I wanted to touch upon this thing that you said about.
And if that's important to remember
I think, is that there's not one Spanish or one English,
their Englishes, there are Spanishes.
There are variants of a National language.
And I think that I had never thought of that before.
But I guess in my case, I mean you know Monica de le
Torre grew up in Mexico.
But she grew up bilingual because her mother
speaks English.
Her mother's American and father's Mexican.
My parents are Spanish but I grew up here.
And I don't think that I have this kind of hardened Spanish
of have a particular way because I grew up in New Jersey
with so many different kinds of Spanish speakers.
So I feel very much a chameleon.
I mean, I do have a certain Spanish accent.
When I go to Spain it doesn't sound Spanish enough
apparently.
Immediately where are you from?
The Canary Islands.
Which maybe you won't understand as a joke.
But it's like the island off of Spain.
So where are you from exactly?
And I think that maybe I could inhabit the Spanish
because I've been used to doing that my entire life.
Which is to inhabit whichever Spanish
is present and maybe vary in different variants of Spanish.
And I've sort of cobbled together
this kind of weird Spanish of different places.
And in El Paso it's changing a lot with the Mexican influence
and I have students from all over Latin America.
So I mean, how do I remove myself from it?
Well, I don't really feel--
I never end up writing like the people
I translate believe it or not.
It just doesn't happen.
I've never written like Cecilia Vicuna.
I've never written like Lila.
It doesn't enter my work.
Why?
I'm not sure.
But like I said to Gail at lunch today,
is that I very much feel that I write
best not when I open a notebook to write
but when I enter another work.
Because I feel like I'm gathering,
I'm sort of cultivating something out of that work.
And it's not so much that you're imitating, or you're stealing,
or you're trying to take something.
It's feeding you because it's making you think.
It's kind of giving you this kind of energy or food
for your own work.
And it's encouraging you.
I mean you see, wow, this is this amazing work
and you want to go write.
So I feel like when I translate I also write.
I mean, it's a productive time.
And I think about the revision process
is one that takes longer than actually the first drafts.
And this is probably true of my own writing,
is you really want to get it to a certain place.
No, I think actually the revision process
takes longer with translation than with my own work.
And I've had the situation where either Lila, or Cecilia Vicuna,
or Lucas Vazquez who was another person who I translate
or who I have translated say, Rosa it's perfect.
Let's just send it off.
And I say, it's not.
I mean, we have to revise it again.
And I insist on it.
And it's not always something I want to do.
I have other stuff to do.
I teach classes.
I have a partner who wants to see me every once in a while.
I mean, I don't relish having to do it all the time.
But for me it's a responsibility.
And its a responsibility to Lila,
I've committed to her so that's it.
It's not like I'm only halfway committed to her.
And also it's my work in the world.
I mean, it's a reflection of what I do.
So I try to go over it as many times as possible.
And sometimes to the point where it's just like I'm nitpicking
and I know it.
I know that I'm just like, what do
you think we should do with this word Lila?
What do you think we should do?
And you're just like enough already.
I can tell you're just sort of like OK, let's just move on.
But the revision process I just think
is something that maybe is part of that generosity.
But I don't see it as a generosity,
I see is just part of a commitment.
No, but I think it's the best part.
No, because this is the moment that you
are seeing your work in another light completely,
you are seeing your work in another language.
And here comes Rosa the translator
with these weird questions about what is going on here?
What are you trying to say here?
That is a question.
[LAUGHTER] What are you asking me?
Please.
And we spend maybe hours in the phone
talking about specific details.
And I think it's a lot of fun also.
I don't know for you but for me I enjoy it a lot.
It is.
You also have to do research.
For myself I had to do some research outside of it.
I mean, there are acrostic poems in Guardians Of The Secret
and another series called Carnivorous Flowers.
And so for me I've had to find copies or images--
reproduction that's the word I'm looking for.
Reproductions of the paintings.
Now I'm the translator.
Now you're the translator.
Reproductions of the work.
Either of sculpture or painting.
And that doesn't necessarily help believe it or not.
Because you're reproducing a poem not a painting.
So you're trying to see what she sees.
But having to do that research is also I think,
really productive for me just to go outside of my own interests.
I may not necessarily look up.
I love Jackson Pollock so that's not true.
But I may not look up some other painter
that she's interested in.
I was introduced to the work of Alejandro Twombly, Cy Twombly's
son.
And that was really exciting.
I hadn't even known that he had a son.
And also finding out about the anatomy
of the eye, which you talk a lot about in Guardians
Of The Secret.
In order to figure out what the heck
you were saying with all this fluid.
There was fluid everywhere and it was
connected to amniotic fluid.
And I don't know what this woman is talking about.
And once you learn about the eye,
you realize that she really is just
drawing from this information that's
there, scientific information.
She's making poetic.
But I have a question for you Lila because we're
talking about the paintings.
And I know that you've been very influenced by visual art.
And you've written a lot of acrostic poems.
They've been published in art catalogs
rather than in poetry collections necessarily
anthologies.
And that painters have asked you to write
poems for their paintings.
Which I think is incredibly sexy and exciting to be asked to.
For a painter to be like, can you write some poems
for my paintings?
That's really so flattering.
And so I wanted to do you see it as a kind of translation
yourself this relationship with art that
then is turned into a poem?
I don't see it as a translation because when
I'm looking at a work of art, it's more
like I feel like a connection.
Sometimes not all the times.
But I feel a connection with the work of art.
That work of art is telling me something.
That I feel I should write.
And it's more like a way of understanding something
always about myself.
I think because in the end a work of art
is positing some kind of question
that it's moving you in a certain way.
That I want to know what is going on there.
What is that movement that is going on in that moment?
And so I cannot see it as a translation because I don't see
it that I'm trying to translate what is being shown in an image
or in colors for example.
But in a way I have to agree with you.
In the sense that with the Jackson Pollock painting,
Guardians Of The Secret, there was a big show in Moma.
I am very fortunate that I live in New York,
that I could develop this work.
Because you have amazing shows there all the time.
And there was this retrospective of Jackson Pollock
in the '90s I think.
And I saw this work by Jackson Pollock.
In the moment I saw it, it was like an image of a dream
that I had when I was 20 years old or something.
There was a time that I wrote all my dreams
and I was reading Jung when I was in my 20s.
So I was writing all my dreams every day.
And when I saw the Jackson Pollock like 20 years later,
the painting I said, my God this is my dream.
This is my dream, exactly the dream.
And this is what I wrote in the book, in the poem.
So that was like the opposite.
Like the painting was a translation of my dream.
Of course, this was not true at all.
Because then I went back to the dreams and I said,
I have to look at that dream.
And there were two dreams in that painting.
But in my memory it was only one.
So it was very interesting for me
how memory works in relation to dreams.
Because you mix everything in a way.
I was telling Rosa now that she's breast feeding,
this has nothing to do with translation.
Sure it does.
[LAUGHTER]
When I had my son and I was breast breastfeeding him
it was like they pushed the bottom like this
and I was remembering all my dream.
Many dreams came like this [BLUBBERING]..
This is also something that I wrote in Guardians
Of The Secret.
Because it's a book about vision and about inner visions
and different ways of seeing with glasses, without glasses,
partially blinded, and many different perspectives.
Of the sense of seeing more than the abstract seeing
or the visionary seeing, which is also in there.
But I mean, going back to your question.
When I see a work of art, you cannot translate images
into words.
I think it's a different process.
But you can translate words into words.
What you're translating is words into words, I think.
Not images into words.
So it goes through another space or area.
But in relation to the works of art,
it really helps you to look at the paintings or the images
when you're translating the work.
Or you don't feel like any connection whatsoever
or you say, that is horrible.
What is it writing about?
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's what I said
is, I don't know if it helps me necessarily
to see those paintings.
But I don't know if it's the key to translating.
Because really I have to translate what you're seeing,
which isn't going to be the same thing that I'm seeing.
But I find it a responsibility to say
that if I'm translating a poem that's called Guardians
Of The Secret by Jackson Pollock and I don't try to find
the painting, to look at it.
I mean, it's responsibility.
I mean, if you're writing about poems set in a certain country
and you can't place it on the map.
I mean, I don't know if you need to go
to that country necessarily to translate them.
Even though I've spoken to translators
who for example, have gone to a place where a poet lived when
they were writing the poems.
They can see the balcony they were looking out
of when the poems were written.
I mean, that perspective can help.
But I feel like I need to know what to some extent.
And at least have that as a reference point.
Just like looking up a book a word in a dictionary.
Yeah exactly, OK.
But I want it because we're talking about the visual.
I mean, I don't know how many of you have
the Guardians Of The Secret.
But we're speaking about not being
able to translate late from images to words
and only translating words to words.
But there's a section here in which
I guess Lila decided that whatever was sort of happening
in her head and in her body couldn't
be translated to words.
And there are images.
And this is the section of the book.
It isn't supplementary so to say.
It's not illustrations but it's section five I think,
yeah it's Section 5 of the book.
So it should be read as part of it,
as one section that then follows another.
And some of the images, it does reference
some of the things that are said in the book.
I mean, some of the I and I think
there's the reference to the amniotic fluid.
Yeah here says, líquido amniótico.
And I thought a lot about this book while I was pregnant.
Not necessarily when I was giving birth,
when I was pregnant.
I didn't think of your work while I was giving birth, Lila.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't think so.
While I was pregnant and also breastfeeding I
thought a lot about this book.
Because you go so deeply into sort of the physical processes
of that experience.
And I thought would I have translated it differently
if I had had that experience?
I don't know.
Just looking up the Pollock painting
or going to Brazil to see that balcony that someone looked out
of, I don't know.
So I don't know, maybe leave questions.
Only one thing I want to add to contradict myself, of course.
It's like I say that the paintings do not
translate into words.
But yes, I'm not contradicting.
It could translate into shapes because actually this book I
kind of thought about the shape, that is something
that we are not talking about.
I thought about the shape of this book or the clue
of the shape of this book was given to me by a conversation
that I had with a Spanish poet, Concha Garcia.
We were looking at Mark Rothko paintings in Washington.
And so I asked her, how do you write a poem like a Rothko
painting?
And she told me, those are tones.
And say, tones.
So then I decided like to mix tones.
Like to put together different tones in my writing.
And also to shape the book with a justified margin.
And I'm looking for a good example with a longer poem.
But I don't know, different square, cómo se dice,
rectangles of text with different tones.
And so the shape of a painting gave me the glue
for the shape of the book.
And this was very good.
Yeah, and Malvas has a shape to that I think.
I mean, sometimes I think people just
consider it sort of centered on the page.
But it's really isn't.
It's not about it being centered on the page.
And it's not that it has necessarily particular line
breaks.
But at least in the section that I translated,
the shape of these sections mimics
the trace of the body in the water, the wake.
So you see sort of as the body goes through,
what's left of those traces.
So the form relates to the content very closely.
Yeah that is what I usually do.
OK.
So I guess we wanted to open up the discussion with you.
We have to turn off our--
Well, if you guys don't mind, I'd
like to start with a question.
Which is I really would like to hear a little bit about what
it was like for you Lila to write in English
and for you Rosa to translate into Spanish the poem
that you read together last night.
I think that's what you said.
That it was written first in English
then translated into Spanish.
Do I have that right?
Yes.
Actually this is the first time I wrote--
It's not the first time that I write in English.
But that I write a poem in English
and I did a translation into Spanish.
I did the whole thing and it was--
I don't know it was the first time that I did that
and it was a good experience for me.
Because it's completely different from getting
the translation from another person.
In the sense that you feel that you have more freedom
to do whatever you want.
You don't have to stick to the text.
Which I think in the translations
and in the process of translation,
I'm not so rigid in terms of the content or of the wording more
on the rhythm.
But in this case, it was like, OK well, this
is not exactly the same.
I don't care.
I like how it sounds in English and I like
it to sound in Spanish well.
But if it doesn't mean to do it in the same way, I don't care.
It has to have the same sensation
that it came from more than the exact translation.
But there are many parts that they
are very close also because there are many words
that you say in the same world, like the solution.
The solution is exactly the same.
But what we did for the first time was to read it together.
Which was quite an experience.
Not to deal with this kind of superimposition.
And I think that when I wrote the poem
the idea of the solution, I don't even remember
what is the poem about.
The solution.
Dissonance.
Dissonance, that's why.
I knew that I was right.
Dissonance.
I think that it was the first time
that I could get this sense of what the dissonance between.
I was not thinking about the dissonance
between the languages at all.
I was thinking about what is dissonance?
What is the meaning of dissonance?
Because we were supposed to present a collaborative
work for an event that Eileen Miles organized
in June or in July in New York.
Which was going to be everything,
was going to be in silence.
So everybody was going to read poems in a group.
We had to present a project, the collaborative project.
And all was going to be in silence.
So it was a very weird situation.
So I was thinking about silence but the dissonance in silence.
The idea of dissonance and also the opposite
of Mauve Sea-Orchids-- it's more dissonance
and the sense of not touching.
Like mom is all related to connection
but this poem dissonance is all related to disconnection.
And lack of the sense of touch mostly.
So the idea of dissonance was very well expressed by the two
languages being together.
So now I would like to see how did you
feel about reading it together.
First of all, tell about the experience
about you reading in Spanish and me reading in English, which it
didn't work at the beginning.
It happened very quickly.
I mean, Lila and I were talking about this before.
It's just like I had a crying baby in the hotel.
We had to come up with something quick.
And we came to this decision to do it like this.
Because Lila read it first and she
was going to read the English first and then
the Spanish herself.
And I just thought, I don't know if I like it that way.
Because when you see it on the page.
Can we show it?
I didn't bring it.
I don't know if I have a copy of it.
On the page, it's broken up into fragments.
And the Spanish and the English go right after each other
in these fragments.
And they're scattered around the page
sort of like a constellation of words.
And when she read it in this linear fashion,
I thought that's really not capturing it.
And because Lila is always about connecting the form
to the content or having the form say something in addition
to the content.
I thought it just sort of dissolved,
that form in the performance.
And we thought, well, wouldn't it
be interesting since I always read the English for me
to read the Spanish?
And it was hard for her to inhabit English
and it was hard for me to inhabit the Spanish.
And we tried it a couple of times
and we kept tripping over it.
It was horrible.
The moment we took on our assigned roles
of Spanish, the Spanish Argentinean poet
in me the English girl from New Jersey.
Not English girl from New Jersey girls, speaks English.
Then suddenly we did it once and it really sounded really good
and the second time it sounded amazing I said, OK I got to go.
And then we did it sort of the third,
maybe even the fourth time we read it--
Was here.
--was tonight, was last night.
So I wasn't nervous about it, though.
I mean, because I just it came together so beautifully.
It was exactly like you said the performance reflected
the content.
And the form itself of what you were trying to express.
And I wonder and my question for you, who was here last night?
Hearing it I mean, what did you hear and how did you hear it?
That's curious for me.
Well, first I'll just say I thought it was beautiful.
And I do only speak English and so
obviously, my attention was going more to the English
that I followed throughout.
But then there were these moments
where the words in Spanish and the words in English
are so similar occasionally.
That there is this kind of synthesis of sound and meaning.
And so there were times when I did
feel like I could enter both languages.
But most of the time I was with just the English.
But it had this kind of haunting echo, musical echo,
to have the two languages happening at once.
This was in the text is the English, which
was really original language.
The English is one font. ¿Cómo se dice un tamaño majarande,
un tamaño--?
It's a larger size font and the Spanish is in italics.
And one size less.
So as you said, it's like an echo
of what I wanted it to sound.
Is like a little bit removal.
So it's not the same margin, the Spanish
is a little bit moved to the side.
So the idea was like to have these two things together.
But a little bit removed from each other.
Como corrido.
How do you say that?
Corrido?
Removed.
Removed, a little bit removed.
And this is what really happened when we were reading it.
But I was thinking I mean, maybe in the future we could
experiment too with maybe a kind of lack of mastery,
which is also dissonance.
The discomfort of maybe me reading in Spanish
and you reading in English.
And I remember that was the first time I had ever read it
So I was also kind of tripping over parts because I had never
seen it before.
And I thought that was interesting.
I think we were uncomfortable with it
not being a perfect performance when we did it the first time.
But there's something about that discomfort
that I think is interesting.
Because that's what language is and what
trying to understand people across languages
is not really always being able to articulate perfectly.
Yeah.
That was interesting when we did it.
Because I wanted to do it in English because I
wrote it originally in English.
So I wanted the original language to be my language.
But it was like I don't know.
We got completely confused.
We couldn't articulate it as we did it in the other way.
And also reading it together is confusing even though when
I was reading in Spanish.
I said, did I say that in Spanish or English?
What did I say?
You know like this all the time in your head
when you were reading
I was moving into the English sometimes
when I was reading in Spanish and you
were moving into the Spanish, we were migrating across.
I don't know if we were changing but your head was like,
where am ?
What am I doing?
That was very interesting.
But the interesting thing too is that this dissonance I mean,
our cognates.
I mean, they sound and look alike.
So when you see it on the page it's very easy to mix them up.
So I think we were doing that to where
we were sort of looking for our English word
and saying the Spanish word because they look so similar.
Which I think is an interesting kind of message too.
I get by that.
Hello, could you maybe show us a passage where
you had to compensate in a way?
Something from your working process.
It says, órgano, ocular, oculta, occurencias, ordinarias,
ordinando, errores, horrores, humores adores.
So do you hear that?
I mean even if you don't know Spanish,
you can hear that there's the repetition right
of the O sounds throughout.
Errores and adores are the only ones.
So we wanted to find words out.
Luckily we were able to find mostly words
that have that same sound.
They have the same sound.
And so in English it was ocular organs
obscure ordinary occurrences organizing errors, horrors,
humans, servers.
So there were various words that could
be chosen to represent the Spanish properly.
But we had to choose words also that reflected
that sound in Spanish.
And I don't think that's exactly the question
that you're asking.
I would have to go through this and think about it further,
that's a difficult question by the way.
But I think that with something like
that you're with a line like that,
you're never thinking of just what the words are obviously.
You're thinking of that chain of sounds.
And you're going to put whatever.
And if we had to change the meaning of that completely,
we would have.
Because the most important thing is to get that bom,
bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom.
And you've been doing that Lila.
I know that you like this kind of layering of sounds
because you do this now.
[SNAPS] This kind of sound.
One thing is she did that last night
and she's done it in other readings.
Where it's like the bom, bom, the one thing after another.
Here is another thing that it's not--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
This is an example.
--yeah.
Exactly it's right there.
I had forgotten about this one.
This is well, why don't you explain it it's better.
Corín Tellado is--
She is, was.
She is.
According to my mother who told me this, I didn't know this.
The other day my mother came to visit me
and she buys this magazine called
Vanidades, which is like--
what is Vanidades, an equivalent in English?
[INAUDIBLE]?
No.
No, not really.
My people.
Yeah people.
Yeah it has all sort of like what's
happening in the telenovelas and all this stuff.
So she buys this and they have these romance novels
that are cut into sections, they're
sort of different chapters and eat for a month to month.
And it's by Corín Tellado who is--
Corín Tellado was very cheap little novels that you read
when I was 13 years old about romance.
And written by a Spanish woman.
That actually I found out that she's
the person that more books has sold in the history of Spain
after Quixote.
So let me tell you that she was very, very popular.
All over Latin America, It was amazing.
And every summer I was like, reading all the Corín Tellado
books.
So somehow in this book this Corín Tellado appeared
because it was a scene of seduction.
The ice in a moment of seduction and let's read the poem.
So it's Él me mira muy de cerca, el verde ocupa casi todo el ojo
y el color es tan intenso como hechizante.
En los ojos flota una serenida seductora.
Un erotismo controlado.
Una mirada cautivante, diría Corín Tellado.
He looks at me up close, the green takes up most of the eye.
And the color is as intense as it is spellbinding.
A seductive serenity floats within the eyes.
A captivating stare Danielle Steele might say.
So I mean if we kept Corín Tellado it would have meant
nothing to the English reader.
I mean there's a good example of Benjamin.
The translation does not exist for someone
who can read the Spanish.
So who would be the equivalent of Corín Tellado?
And immediately you know what that means.
You know the kind of literature that you're
going to get even if you've never read her.
So Corín Tellado is the same thing.
I mean, my mother actually has read her
and told me that she's dead.
She's been dead forever, but they still publish Corín
Tellado and it's probably someone else writing them,
but she's so popular.
Because people expect certain kind of writing.
And also because it's obviously that the whole thing is ironic.
But at the same time is acknowledging that you
have that perception also.
Even though you are laughing at Corín Tellado very well and you
have read it.
And a captivating--
A captivating stare.
--a captivating stare.
Which is kind of cheesy sort of playing off like what?
He looked at me with a captivating stare.
That line wouldn't have been parody if you didn't know who
Corín Tellado was or was and is, I guess.
It's been with Danielle Steele it works.
That's one where we had to--
Yeah we were talking about.
--and, of course, I knew who Corín Tellado is
but immediately you said when I was translating,
so who would be the equivalent of this?
Yeah, exactly.
So that one was right under the other one.
The stupid thing that you saw.
Thank you all then for coming and thank you so much,
Rosa and Lila.
We really appreciate it.
This was wonderful.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]