Forrest Gander Takes on Translation Project of Neruda's Lost Poems
A Forrest Gander essay about translating Pablo Neruda's lost poems went up at Literary Hub last week. The poet and translator admits that he's often preferred to champion terrific lesser-known and more contemporary Latin American writers in translation. After initially "shrugging it off" upon hearing that "never-before-seen poems by Pablo Neruda had been discovered and would be published in early 2015," Gander realized the enthusiasm many had for the project, and decided to translate the poems for Copper Canyon. More:
The manuscript [Michael Wiegers at Copper Canyon] sent me was locked up like the Queen’s jewels. I couldn’t copy any part of it, couldn’t print any part of it, couldn’t successfully email it to anyone. It was the final file for the book as it was published in January 2015 by Seix Barral. That means it started out, according to Spanish-language publishing tradition, with a prologue and then an introduction pitched in a sincere academic style. The scholars expressed bafflement at lines that, perhaps due to my ignorance, didn’t seem to me so hermetic. For instance, they had difficulty comprehending the phrase “es un movimiento florido de un siclo de sombra en el mundo,” noting that their “initial impulse” was to read siclo—our word is the obsolete sickle or shekel, an ancient coin—as a typographical error for siglo, meaning “century.” They lugged in philology, Latin axioms, and a phrase by Juan Ramón Jiménez to help. But the Neruda line—which I came to render in English as “it’s but one florid flip of a blurry coin in the world”—made perfect sense to me in its context.
Once I moved through the introductory material and into the poems, it was all over. Until then, I’d been reading the manuscript on my computer in a barn flanked by cemetery. When the glowing screen revealed the lost poems, hours suddenly clipped by in minutes. I neglected to come in for dinner. The windows opaqued with night. The world hushed as I translated the first three poems. The truth is that I disappeared from myself. I was concentrated entirely into the durable moment of translation, which begins in humility, a sublimation of the self so extreme that the music of someone else’s mind might be heard. And for a while, no remnant of me existed outside of that moment.
[...]
Not all the poems are entirely finished. Some are handwritten on the backs of menus, some end in commas, some are typed up and corrected in Neruda’s hand. Movingly, this edition includes holographic reproductions: you’ll see Neruda’s handwriting, his cross-outs, his revisions. Like the first time I opened the lush facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s folded letter-poems, I found this record of the working mind of a great poet riveting. . . .
Read the full essay at Literary Hub.