WEBVTT

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One of the best things
about being a translator

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is that you get to inhabit
a whole host of writers

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with different styles, and
perspectives, and quirks.

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The translator can be
a kind of chameleon,

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diving into new seas of language
and adapting to new backgrounds

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with each project.

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There is always some
research involved.

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That's one of my favorite
parts of being a translator.

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And for a fleeting
moment, I can trick myself

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into thinking I'm an expert
on the subject of the novel

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or the book at hand.

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Most recently, for
example, I've been

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working on a couple of
collections of poems

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by the Salvadoran
poet Roque Dalton.

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And I've immersed myself
in the debates of Communist

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intellectuals about the role
of poetry in a revolutionary

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society, particularly in
Cuba in the early 1970s,

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when Dalton was living there and
participating in those debates.

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Today, I'll be reading a few
of the Dalton poems, which

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have not been published.

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I'm still working on those, as
well as a selection from You

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Dreamed of Empires.

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And then in a bit
of a throwback,

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I'll read a section from
The Savage Detectives, which

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is the first Bolaño
novel I translated

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20 years ago at this
point, and which

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was such an
important book for me

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and I know also
for many readers.

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I'll begin with
the Dalton poems.

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It's especially
wonderful to be here

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at the Poetry Center for this,
because Dalton is my first foray

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into poetry as a translator, and
it's been a really illuminating

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experience.

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One of the truisms
of translation

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is that the translator
isn't allowed to skip.

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So in other words, as
readers, we sometimes

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let ourselves glide
past phrases we

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don't understand,
trusting that we'll get

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the gist of the passage anyway.

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The translator cannot do that.

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We have to wrestle with
every opaque construction

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and wayward word until we
think we've understood it.

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And then we have to triangulate
between that understanding

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and the surface obscurity
to find the right balance

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for the reader.

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We don't want to spell things
out too obviously or artlessly,

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but at the same
time, we want to let

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a glimmer of critical
understanding light the way

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for the reader.

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In poetry, as you can imagine,
this kind of negotiation

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happens constantly
and is more fraught.

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As a translator of prose,
I sit there typing away,

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and as a translator
of poetry, I'm

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much more likely to
be staring into space.

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So the Dalton poems vary a lot.

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Some of them are
relatively transparent.

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And for the most part,
those are the ones

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I've chosen to read tonight.

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Others are truly opaque.

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So for the first
time as a translator,

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I've been faced with
a question, what

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do you do when you
simply don't understand

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a line or a whole poem?

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I mean, I'm firmly of the belief
that anything worth reading

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has some through line
or some subterranean

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coherence or unifying element.

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So the task of the
translator in that case

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becomes teasing that
out as best I can,

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even if it's tenuous or rooted
more in cadence and sound

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than in sense.

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But occasionally, I
succumb to the reasoning

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of St. Jerome, who said
about translating scripture,

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that he always translated
sense for sense,

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except where the mysteries
of the sacred were concerned.

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And there, he translated verbum
per verbum or word for word.

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I don't think there
are too many mysteries

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of the sacred in the
poems I'm reading today,

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but you can see what you think.

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So the collection that these
poems, three of the poems

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come from is called A
Slightly Odious Book.

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And as you can tell
from the title,

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it tends toward the irreverent.

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Many of the poems are
about poets themselves,

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whom Dalton likes to mock.

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And as I mentioned before,
in the early 1970s,

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as he was writing these poems,
Dalton was living in Cuba

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and taking part in heated
debates about the role

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of the poet and
revolutionary society,

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somewhat pertinent for us today.

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On the one hand, he felt
that poets were irrelevant

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unless they fully engaged in
the Revolutionary struggle.

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He himself trained as
a guerrilla fighter

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and was killed at the age
of 40 by his own comrades

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in El Salvador in
an incident that

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has never been fully explained.

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But on the other hand, he
resisted the growing tendency

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of the Cuban government
toward the imposition on poets

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and writers of a
Soviet-style social realism.

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Avant Garde poetry,
as he saw it,

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was as important as armed
struggle, and in fact,

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was its own kind of
utopian endeavor.