Criticism | Politics

Poeta en Nueva York

By Rigoberto González

There’s been plenty of talk and balk on Harriet regarding translations, and as a translator and teacher of literary translation, as someone who’s first language is not English, I’ve decided to finally speak up but through the introduction of one of the best translation projects I have come across to date: Pablo Medina and Mark Statman’s collaborative English version of Federico García Lorca’s conflicted love letter to our beloved New York City.

Though Medina and Statman are modest in their introduction, positioning themselves not as scholars or professional translators but as admirers of García Lorca, they suddenly “realized a new translation of Poet in New York was needed that showed the city, not just as it was then (1929) but as it became after September 11, riven by tragedy, burdened by rage, humbled by grief.”
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, when people began to turn to poetry for language and orientation, Medina and Statman discovered fresh resonance in García Lorca’s verse, and proceeded to re-imagine a leaner but no less powerful edition that spoke to anyone who had been part of that communal shock. From the poem “Blind Panorama of New York”:
Everyone understands the grief that comes with death
but true grief is not present in the spirit.
It isn’t in the air or in our lives
or in these terraces full of smoke.
True grief that keeps things awake
is a small infinite burn
in the innocent eyes of other systems.
From “Living Sky”:
I won’t complain
if I don’t find what I was looking for,
but I’ll go to the first landscape of dampness and pulse
to understand what I seek must have a target of joy
as I fly in the midst of love and sand.
I fly in cool air over empty beds,
over collected breezes and ships run aground.
I stumble, waver, through hard, fixed eternity
and a love at last without dawn. Love. Visible love!
García Lorca’s poems to New York are bleak, indeed wounded, informed by his arrival on the eve of the Stock Market crash and the Great Depression. He claimed to have witnessed no less than six men hurl themselves off the high-rise buildings, defeated by the despair of bankruptcy and the darker times to come.
Six years later, while García Lorca is back in his war-ravaged Spain, he is executed by Franco’s Nationalists. This gives his verse yet another suggestive dimension. From the poem “City without Sleep”:
Life is not a dream. Look!
We fall down the stairs to eat damp earth
or we ascend to the edge of snow with a chorus of dead dahlias.
But there’s no forgetting, no sleep:
living flesh. Kisses bind the lips
in a tangle of recent veins
and those who suffer, suffer without rest
and those who fear death will carry it on their shoulders.
Medina and Statman have carried out an extraordinary project—still very timely, still quite necessary, acknowledging the reasons people turn to poetry, and to translations of poetry: to connect with human emotion, to experience expression and a view of the world through a sensibility shaped outside of one’s familiar context, landscape, or culture. That these two translators are also poets is evident in the music and fluidity of the English version, in the key choices they make in order to serve both the original Spanish and the English readership. (Read the Medina/Statman intro for further word on this subject.)
Translations are never perfect, but they are essential. I will not engage in a battle that is not worth my energy because I’d rather speak to those who are willing to seek out imaginations and artistry that is not English-only. I have read many wonderful poems about my U.S. home, New York, and García Lorca’s Nueva York is just as glorious. And Medina and Statman’s New York is not one step removed from the brilliance of any of them.

2008-01-22

Posted in Books, Criticism, Group Blog, Poems, Politics on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 by Rigoberto González.