The Translation Process of Pizarnik's Diana's Tree

Last fall, the publication of Yvette Siegert's translation of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik's "canonical poetry collection" Diana’s Tree (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014, with an introduction by Octavio Paz) led her to lecture about the process at places like Oxford, and to publish excerpts at The White Review and TLR. Siegert expands on this with a new essay, adapted from her Oxford talk, at The Chronotype. It gets real alchemical: "Octavio Paz alludes to this cult [of Diana] in his Introduction, which is built brilliantly on the conceit of the encyclopaedia entry, but he transposes her story into a new Latin American mythology. In fact, Paz plays on the fact that Diana is the old alchemical term for silver; the name Argentina, of course, is derived from the root argentum, the Latin word for silver."

Siegert connected her translation process to Pizarnik's composition:

I knew some of this background when I began translating, but avoided researching it too much, out of a concern that this curiosity would cause me to over-interpret certain words or images. I opened to the text, read Octavio Paz’s Introduction for guidance and began right away with No. 1, not stopping until I had translated all thirty-eight poems. Some translators prefer to do a quick, rough and literal first draft and then go back to tinker with the language. This is not how I went about it. Each poem emerged into English like a photograph developing in a dark room. I remembered that Alejandra was twenty-six years old when she published this book, that she was fiercely single-minded in her sense of purpose as a poet. Late at night, after playing hooky from the part-time job at UNESCO she’d landed with the help of Julio Cortázar, Alejandra would sit on her bed in her tiny, filthy flat above a Chinese restaurant near St. Suplice and chain-smoke and write. Her method was meticulous: she would scribble out single words on index cards then painstakingly rearrange these in front of her on the mattress, until the order and shape of the emerging lines felt right. She did not work in a rush.

I decided not to rush, either, or to take any of the words for granted.

She remarks on what the moment was like in 1962:

Mostly, however, I imagined Alejandra writing these poems in 1962. I tried to inhabit her ambition to express paradoxical ideas with spare, limpid words. When this book came out and made the rounds of Latin American literary circles in Paris, Pizarnik had already published three collections in her native Buenos Aires, and she had gained a reputation for being a precocious, driven poet. Diana’s Tree, however, was a pivotal artistic event.

And connects her own father's term of endearment, mi vida, to a special place in the work:

...What came to mind was my father’s voice addressing me in Spanish. He has a tendency to refer to my mother and me as mi vida, which is equivalent to an English term of endearment like honey. Just as the literal translation of this English endearment would sound awkward in Spanish, however—it would be weird to call someone mi miel—so, too, did it sound stilted to translate mi vida as my life. It occurred to me that the speaker of Pizarnik’s poem was using that repetitive mi vida as a term of endearment, addressing her own vulnerable life with tenderness. This allowed the translation to fall into place. The final version reads:

Life, dear life, let yourself fall down, let yourself hurt, my love, and bind

yourself to the fires, to the credulous silence, to the green stones in the house

of night, let yourself fall and let yourself hurt, my love.

A great piece: read it all at The Chronotype!