One of the best things about being a translator
is that you get to inhabit a whole host of writers
with different styles, and perspectives, and quirks.
The translator can be a kind of chameleon,
diving into new seas of language and adapting to new backgrounds
with each project.
There is always some research involved.
That's one of my favorite parts of being a translator.
And for a fleeting moment, I can trick myself
into thinking I'm an expert on the subject of the novel
or the book at hand.
Most recently, for example, I've been
working on a couple of collections of poems
by the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton.
And I've immersed myself in the debates of Communist
intellectuals about the role of poetry in a revolutionary
society, particularly in Cuba in the early 1970s,
when Dalton was living there and participating in those debates.
Today, I'll be reading a few of the Dalton poems, which
have not been published.
I'm still working on those, as well as a selection from You
Dreamed of Empires.
And then in a bit of a throwback,
I'll read a section from The Savage Detectives, which
is the first Bolaño novel I translated
20 years ago at this point, and which
was such an important book for me
and I know also for many readers.
I'll begin with the Dalton poems.
It's especially wonderful to be here
at the Poetry Center for this, because Dalton is my first foray
into poetry as a translator, and it's been a really illuminating
experience.
One of the truisms of translation
is that the translator isn't allowed to skip.
So in other words, as readers, we sometimes
let ourselves glide past phrases we
don't understand, trusting that we'll get
the gist of the passage anyway.
The translator cannot do that.
We have to wrestle with every opaque construction
and wayward word until we think we've understood it.
And then we have to triangulate between that understanding
and the surface obscurity to find the right balance
for the reader.
We don't want to spell things out too obviously or artlessly,
but at the same time, we want to let
a glimmer of critical understanding light the way
for the reader.
In poetry, as you can imagine, this kind of negotiation
happens constantly and is more fraught.
As a translator of prose, I sit there typing away,
and as a translator of poetry, I'm
much more likely to be staring into space.
So the Dalton poems vary a lot.
Some of them are relatively transparent.
And for the most part, those are the ones
I've chosen to read tonight.
Others are truly opaque.
So for the first time as a translator,
I've been faced with a question, what
do you do when you simply don't understand
a line or a whole poem?
I mean, I'm firmly of the belief that anything worth reading
has some through line or some subterranean
coherence or unifying element.
So the task of the translator in that case
becomes teasing that out as best I can,
even if it's tenuous or rooted more in cadence and sound
than in sense.
But occasionally, I succumb to the reasoning
of St. Jerome, who said about translating scripture,
that he always translated sense for sense,
except where the mysteries of the sacred were concerned.
And there, he translated verbum per verbum or word for word.
I don't think there are too many mysteries
of the sacred in the poems I'm reading today,
but you can see what you think.
So the collection that these poems, three of the poems
come from is called A Slightly Odious Book.
And as you can tell from the title,
it tends toward the irreverent.
Many of the poems are about poets themselves,
whom Dalton likes to mock.
And as I mentioned before, in the early 1970s,
as he was writing these poems, Dalton was living in Cuba
and taking part in heated debates about the role
of the poet and revolutionary society,
somewhat pertinent for us today.
On the one hand, he felt that poets were irrelevant
unless they fully engaged in the Revolutionary struggle.
He himself trained as a guerrilla fighter
and was killed at the age of 40 by his own comrades
in El Salvador in an incident that
has never been fully explained.
But on the other hand, he resisted the growing tendency
of the Cuban government toward the imposition on poets
and writers of a Soviet-style social realism.
Avant Garde poetry, as he saw it,
was as important as armed struggle, and in fact,
was its own kind of utopian endeavor.