Essay

Poets on Translation: Translating Titles, or The Thief Who Robbed Another Thief

Embracing ambiguity in names and naming.

Originally Published: July 21, 2025
Image of a pink/purple globe superimposed on a human head in shades of green/purple, of which we see a doubled profile with words in various languages seeming to emanate from the globe.

Art by Eva Redamonti.

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

“Sometimes a title acts like a little hole through which you enter a poem. Sometimes the title blankets the poem entire. Titles are so various, like hats.” —Heather Christle

I’ve long had a fear of naming. As a child, I named our chicken Blacky, our cat Whitey, and two fish Favorite and Second Favorite. When a black Labrador puppy acquired at a New Year’s Eve party was in danger of becoming Blacky II, my parents stepped in.

Perhaps it’s because of this that I leave my poems untitled for ages, as I waffle between various possibilities. I’ve coveted both the short and sweet (Roger Reeve’s King Me) and the impossibly long (Hayden Carruth’s Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands), and titled my own first collection God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode, but He Had to Make Sure. When my husband, Ian, was searching for a title for his first collection, I was torn between the brevity of “Burntisland,” the name of his hometown in Scotland, and “When the Moon Starts to Pull like Some Far-Off Engine,” the title of one of his poems. Amid the back and forth, I realized I’d never fully unpacked what it is I want titles to do in the first place. Do I want them to attract? To intrigue? To give warning of what’s to come? To point a way to the Bigger Idea being wrestled with?

My indecisiveness around naming intensified after I moved to Spain and began to work seriously on translation. More than naming a pet, or choosing a title for my own creative work, settling on a title for a work of translation feels to me akin to naming a child, a separate soul whose name might help carve out their path. Whereas I see my original work as an extension of my thoughts, my translations feel like a distinct entity. While I like to think I can never be wrong in the naming of my own work, when it comes to translation the possibility of failure feels more acute.

Perhaps due to this uncertainty, I’ve become obsessed with seemingly untranslatable titles and have catalogued titles—of books, but also of individual poems—which I rank on a scale of translatability. Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another” from One Train posed little difficulty to my mind: “Un tren puede esconder a otro” (translated into Spanish by Sandra Toro). The poem’s epigraph, “(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya),” also lends itself to easy rendering. Reeves’s King Me, however, resists easy translation, given that being “kinged” in checkers is specific to English, where pieces (called “men” in English) become kings when they make it to the other side of the board. In Spanish and many other languages, however, this achievement renders the piece a “dama” or lady, and a player might say something like “reina” (queen) or “coróname” (crown me).

Gender was a stumbling block for me in translating the poetry collection Oscura deja la piel su sombra by Beatriz Miralles de Imperial Ollero, beginning with the title. Word for word, the title is Oscura (dark) deja (leaves) la (the fem) piel (skin) su (its/their/his/her) sombra (shadow). Spanish’s gendered articles (la/le) and gender nonspecific pronouns (su) were difficult to render given that in English articles are not gendered while pronouns are. These nuances, though subtle, seemed crucial for a collection that explores the end of a relationship between two women. I wound up going with How Dark My Skin Is Left by Her Shadow.

Of course, all of this is relevant beyond the world of poetry. William Faulkner’s Light in August was rendered by Enrique Sordo as Luz de agosto, which I found lacking, though perfectly accurate, because I didn’t think it captured the range of possible meanings in English, where light can refer to illumination but also to ease, a lack of heaviness—both physical and metaphorical. I’d read that Faulkner took his title from the idiom “heavy in June, light in August,” about pregnancy and birth, and while at first I stumbled over this “lost” meaning, what I’d forgotten was that in Spanish “dar luz,” literally “to give light,” also means “to give birth.” Just as with all forms of creative processes, words have little engines of their own and can work when you aren’t looking. “One idea may hide another,” warns Koch in his poem, “It can be important / To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.”

Leaping across time and genres, Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket is rendered in Spanish as a kind of terrific spoiler: Ladrón Que Roba Ladrón (Thief Who Robs a Thief). The Spanish expression “Ladrón que roba a ladrón, tiene 100 años de perdón,” means something like, “it’s no crime to steal from a thief.” I can’t help but recall T.S. Eliot’s “Good writers borrow, great writers steal,” a phrase that he, undoubtedly, borrowed or stole from someone else.

In the foreword to his translation of Pura López-Colomé’s No Shelter, a book I return to often, Forrest Gander quotes Nicolas Kilmer’s translation of Petrarch, who, writing about translation, insists that it be

similar, but not the very same; and the similarity, moreover, should not be like that of a painting or statue to the person represented, but rather like that of a son to a father, where there is a shadowy something—akin to what painters call one’s air hovering about the face, and especially in the eyes, out of which there grows a likeness that immediately, upon our beholding the child, calls the father up before us.

This approach allows for a world of ambiguity, as a son can look almost identical to or not at all like his father, or anywhere in between.

If I can begin to think of the writer as the original thief, some of my own preciousness around translation lessens, and the weight of this question of translating titles in particular begins to fall away. Names may give way to nicknames, and a son can resemble his father whether or not they share a name.

Layla Benitez-James is the author of God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode but He Had to Make Sure (Jai-Alai Books, 2017), selected by Major Jackson for Cave Canem’s 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Benitez-James has served as the Director of Literary Outreach for the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid and is the editor of its poetry festival anthology, Desperate Literature. Poems and...

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