A quick mistranslation here from the astonishing Golden Age Spanish writer Luis de Góngora y Argote. This is not especially typical of his work, as I understand it, which ranged across many genres and was wildly influential in his day and arguably to the present day. I hope to return to add a bit more about my thoughts on de Góngora later when I have the time.
Meanwhile, I present here my mistranslation of one of his most popular lyric poems, an indisputably true piece of profundity and clarity that is probably best known in English via this spectacular version recorded by Dead Can Dance. You can listen to their version here, and then decide how badly my mistranslation compares.
When You Hope for Flutes, You Get Whistles
Fortune grants us things according to no rules. When you ask for whistles you get flutes. When you ask for flutes, you get whistles.
Honours and wealth walk habitually down many strange pathways. To some Fortune gives great presents, but to others she grants robes of shame. When you hope for whistles, you get flutes. When you hope for flutes, you get whistles.
Sometimes she steals the hut and plough from the finest goatherd, and for whichever one she fancies the lamest goat will bear two kids. When you foresee whistles, it’s flutes. When you foresee flutes, it’s whistles.
Because a young guy in a village who takes only one egg will swing in the sun for it while another walks past freely bearing a hundred thousand crimes. When it should be whistles, it’s flutes. When it should be flutes, it’s whistles.
Turgut Uyar was of the same generation of İkinci Yeni (Second New) poets as Sezai Karakoç, whom I previously mistranslated. Their movement’s voices functioned like a kind of mini-modernist revolution in Turkish poetry beginning in the 1950s or so, introducing imagism, more vernacular language and a kind of domestic intimacy to the tradition.
Uyar himself was from an Ankara military family and grew up in a suburb of Istanbul. He attended military school as his father had, and joined the army again in his father’s footsteps. His family suffered somewhat because his father had refused to join in the War of Independence in Ankara, choosing instead to stay with his family. Uyar claimed to see both sides of the argument.
As a public servant, he spent his early adult life moving around from post to post, serving both in the far east near Georgia and on the Black Sea coast, locations which inform and appear in his earliest work. He married young and had three daughters with his first wife Yezdan Şener, before divorcing her to remarry Tomris Uyar (nee Gedik), a prominent and influential writer and translator from Istanbul.
For Tomris it was also a second marriage, the first having ended soon after the tragic death of a child. She was admired by a number of other writers in their social circle, which caused quite a lot of insecurity and anxiety for Turgut at times. Yet they had a son and remained together until his death from cirrhosis in 1985.
In one of his better-known poems, this sense of anxiety in love comes to the fore. The self-knowledge that his attachment is ‘broken’ in no way lessens his attachment. If anything it reinforces his resolve – not to change how he feels or attempt to fix it – but to live within his flaws, perhaps out of habit, perhaps stubbornly, but mostly out of fear that fixing it would serve only to break it further.
Uyar accepts his brokenness, even revels in it, and at the same time accepts that perhaps he ought not to. Yet within this cracked exterior is a very pure emotion which he frantically wishes to preserve, that of the love he bears for his wife. She functions as the operating centre of his existence, wherein even time is silenced. It’s a lot of pressure to put on a relationship, but Tomris seems mostly to have tolerated it.
My Heart is a Broken Clock
Everyone thinks you are you without even knowing that you aren’t really yourself, aren’t really you. As I pass by, I would say, when they ask me the time; it is “her past her” o’clock. No one understands what I mean. They say, you never fixed that clock of yours. They never ask whether I want to have it fixed.
My heart is a broken clock that’s always stopped at you.
I can stop time in my heart, because without you it passes, and the hour hand resents the minute hand. If this broken clock ever started working, it would be the death of me. You should know that if the hour hand passed the minute hand my heart would give out. So at least let’s leave it broken.
Because my heart is a broken clock that’s always stopped at you.
Yes, it’s another, perhaps overdue, (mis)translation. There have been others which I didn’t feel did justice to their progenitors, so it’s taken this long to produce one I was prepared to release into the wild. I really wanted to keep Pasolini’s own word solitude, not least because my favourite football stadium is also curiously called by that name. But it’s clear from the subject matter that what he’s discussing isn’t some kind of autonomous security so much as its opposite, a loneliness even within a crowd, and even when that crowd has an overtly amatory intent.
Pasolini, it is no secret to reveal, was an ardent, one might say addicted, pursuer of impersonal sex, especially among the back streets of Rome where, in the 1970s, such activity from a famous gay man could easily provoke a dangerous response. Indeed, it is generally considered, except by some conspiracists, that this is the way by which he met his horrific and premature end.
The poem I think speaks for itself, even when muffled and garbled by my mistranslation. There is little requirement for exegesis here, except perhaps in relation to the very final phrase, fratelli dei cane, which taken literally means brothers of dogs.
Decades on from Pasolini’s demise, I think he might appreciate the new acerbic allusion this phrase has accrued with the ascent of the right-wing Fratelli D’Italia party to rule in Italy. Their political opponents have, on occasion, used this as a term of abuse. It may even be the case that they are overtly quoting Pasolini. Solitudine is not, after all, an obscurely known text in Italy.
And if not this poem, it may be that they reference instead Pasolini’s Lettera del traduttore, or ‘translator’s note’ as we might say in English that he wrote to explain and introduce a (mis?)translation of his own – that of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The whole letter is worth reading from the point of view of anyone interested in mistranslation or indeed translation. As this academic article indicates, it revolves around a central metaphor of a translator as a dog gnawing and worrying at a bone. Translators therefore are a kind of fratelli dei cane, he suggests.
Solitudine gives us another more personal meaning for that phrase, however, one embedded in the risky sexual practices he sought on those dangerous back streets of Rome in the years of lead, when political extremists like the Red Brigades and their right-wing equivalent, not to mention various mafias, brought continual terror to the country, a terror only compounded for a famous gay man in overt pursuit of anonymous sex in a devoutly Catholic nation in dark, windy, trash-filled alleys.
Pasolini captures the risk and the addiction, that such pursuit held for him, but also the inherent hollowness it left inside. I hope I have managed to convey a sense of his words, partly a confession but also a kind of mental dérivethrough his own sexuality.
Mostly I’ve preserved his somewhat unorthodox orthography. Finally, I am happy to accept the status he anointed both of us with, that of a brother to the dogs. I have gnawed at the bone of his poem as he chewed at the Oresteia. I hope that I have not disgraced him.
Loneliness (mistranslated from Solitudine, by Pier Paolo Pasolini)
You have to be really strong to love loneliness; you need good, strong legs and extraordinary resilience; you can’t risk colds and flus and sore throats; you shouldn’t fear theft or murder; if you must stroll throughout the afternoon, even throughout the night, you need to know how to do it without thinking; there’s nowhere to sit; it’s some kind of winter; with a wind that cuts through the wet grass, through the damp and muddy stones and rocks; nowhere can comfort be found, there’s no doubt about that, and besides, there’s a whole day and night ahead with no responsibilities, no limits at all.
Sex is just an excuse. No matter how many encounters there may be - even in winter, when the roads are abandoned to the wind, among the expanse of trash piling up against distant buildings, there are many – they’re still only moments of loneliness; warmer and more alive is the kind body which anoints you then departs, whereas the lover who deserts you is colder and more deadly; this is what fills you with joy, like a miracle wind, not the innocent grin or shady arrogance of those who then depart; carrying away their youth, so enormously young; and in this way it’s inhuman because it leaves nothing behind, or rather, it leaves only the same mark in every season.
A boy with his first lovers is nothing less than the fertility of the whole world.
And the world comes to him like this, appearing and disappearing, like a shapeshifter. Everything else remains the same, but you could wander through half the city and never find it again; the act is over, repeating it becomes a ritual. And so loneliness grows bigger even if a whole mob was waiting for their turn: the disappearances grow – leaving is fleeing – and the next one looms over this one like a duty, a sacrifice to the death wish.
But as time passes, fatigue makes itself felt, especially just after dinner time, yet for you nothing changes: you just about manage not to scream or cry; and it would be serious if it weren’t just fatigue, and maybe a little hunger. Huge, because that would mean that your desire for loneliness could not be more satisfied, so what’s waiting for you if something no one calls loneliness is the true loneliness, the kind you could never accept?
There’s nothing in the world you could eat or drink, no possible satisfaction that’s worth this endless walking through these poor streets, where you have to be both strong and disgraced, a brother to the dogs.
It’s been a while since my last (mis)translation. Not for the first time, I have traduced a Brazilian.
Leda Beatriz Abreu Spinardi (often known by the mononym Ledusha), is a poet, translator and journalist. This poem comes from her self-published second collection Risco no Disco (‘Scratches on the Record’), which first appeared in 1981 and was republished in 2016. Risco no Disco also later became the title of her poetry column in the Folha de Sao Paolo newspaper in the late 1990s.
This collection was the one that made her name, and characterised her, and perhaps a generation of young urban Brazilian women who were emerging from the Seventies towards the equal rights they would finally achieve with the Citizen’s Constitution of 1988.
Ledusha’s poetry, both feminist and feminine, reflected a women’s perspective within the movement of marginais poets and musicians who came of age and defined a generation in the Eighties.
Reticence
my love
away from you
I come upon disrespectful poems
away from you
my desire destroys doors
and quotations
away from you
I cover myself
with such mischief
you could only compare it
to how unfaithful
some metaphors can be.
Thus far I’ve tried to avoid Irish language poetry, partly because it reminds me of the shame of not speaking my indigenous tongue, and partly because such poems come a little too close to home sometimes.
That said, I’ve tackled Scatha’s warning to Cuchullain in the past, so I guess there’s not really a rule as such here. Therefore, I have added to the hilltop of poetry translations yet another version of the Song of Amergin.
Amergin, in short, was one of the Milesian invaders who displaced the Tuatha de Danaan, or Children of Danu, from Ireland. The latter later morphed in mythology to become the undying, the supernatural race of the Aos Si, or people of the Sidhe, ie the underworld.
The Milesians, or sons of Mil, were according to the same mythological history, Celts who came to Ireland from Iberia originally to invade. This history is told in Ireland’s mythological repository, the aptly named Leabhar Gabala, or Book of Invasions, for many were the invasions of Ireland.
Amergin comes to Ireland therefore as a conqueror, intending to displace the people of the land and take ownership himself. It is told that as the Milesians approached the coast of Ireland, Amergin was suddenly possessed of poetic inspiration and thus emerged his enigmatic song.
I don’t wish to comment or critique it too much. It is after all a product of ancient pagan imagination, likely filtered through layers of Christian sentiment before reaching us in its current forms. What we can safely say is that Amergin expresses the confidence of the conqueror, but a very unusually expressed confidence, in which he already seems to be merging with the flora and fauna, the geography and meteorology, of Ireland itself.
In this sense, he is declaring himself to be a suitable king and custodian of the land, for in that scapegoat primitive society, the wellbeing of the ruler was intimately braided with that of the kingdom and the land itself. Often, in times of famine, a king would be put to death to placate the land and the gods. In his song, therefore, Amergin displays an expansive kind of amor fati. He is accepting this gamble, this fate, and pledging his capacity to fulfill the role of leadership by himself becoming one with the land.
Amergin, however, did not become king, or Ri, of Ireland. He was a bard and sorcerer, a druid not a ruler. Instead the island was divided (then like now) into two kingdoms, north and south, each ruled by one of his brothers. This being Ireland, of course that led to its own difficulties later, even as Amergin became the chief poet and judge of the land.
We can perhaps accept that, in his divinely inspired song, he had at least earned that title. The song is, in a sense, the first judgement he handed down.
“The Coming of the Sons of Miled,” illustration by J. C. Leyendecker in T. W. Rolleston’s Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race, 1911.
The Song of Amergin
I am the air that moves the sea.
I am the sea wave moving.
I am the ocean’s bellow.
I am the seven-antlered stag.
I am the ox who fought seven times.
I am the hawk descending from the cliff.
I am the beam of sunlight in a dewdrop.
I am the most beautiful of flowers.
I am a boar in courage.
I am a salmon through water.
I am a flood on the plain.
I am a hilltop of sorcery and poems.
I am the tip of the battle spear.
I am the god who ignites fires in the mind.
Who is it who sheds light where the mountains meet?
A brief interlude in the (mis)translations project to offer something original, insofar that any poem may be original. This one is presumably self-explanatory.
Hands
There had to be earlier times that I don’t remember now lost in the fog of memory, from confabulation to capitulation, but the weekend that those poor kids burned in Dublin, a few days before Bobby starved to death, I went away for the first time with my da, over to the football on the ferry, a bumpy crossing, toilets heaving with puking men, ankle deep, stinking of sour stout, black and yellow, till we landed in Liverpool, like millions before us, just after dawn, into grey skies, drizzle you wouldn’t call rain, all the shops still shut but my stomach complaining, and it was still Yosser’s town then, red and angry, Torytortured, the darkened eyes of the sleepless staring up suspiciously from shopfronts, and we went looking for sausages and bacon, anything really to stop my complaining, walked all the way from the docks to Anfield, my hand in his. In his hand.
I think they even lost that day, those invincible reds, and I don’t recall the match, just the crowd, a sea of scarves, the roar of thousands, the fear and thrill of it, a man’s world, and me manhandled into it, gripping my father’s fingers for fear of losing him in the crush of the crowd, the swaying terrace bouncing underfoot, and when, in the dayglo sun of Puglia I grab my own kid’s tiny hand to arrest his limitless courage in the face of the big world, the onrushing mopeds, the cars and traffic he’s obsessed with, this is what I’m really holding onto, the dead man’s hand, that lost grey world, all victories in defeat.
My name is Luca I lived on the hot sea floor I lived quite a while ago About four billion years or more.
They say I came from a meteorite during the Eoarchaean night Just don’t ask me when that was Just don’t ask me when that was Just don’t ask me when that was
It might be because I’m mumsy But you’re all descended from me The lineage is rather hazy But all life are my kids, you see.
From spirochaetes to amoebae, cat, dog, whale or butterfly, every living thing is mine every living thing is mine every living thing is mine.
For more info on your oldest ancestor, here’s a nice NYT article on the topic.
On this, his 459th birthday, I will dedicate a little time to re-reading some favourite sonnets – originally a Petrarchan form of poetry – by the Bard. I might even pass time with that overlooked early masterpiece Venus and Adonis, or else the now contentious Taming of the Shrew.
Or there’s always Nothing Like The Sun, Anthony Burgess’s tour-de-force novel of Shakespeare’s lovelife, which heavily features a Dark Lady who, for once, isn’t Italian. Burgess is somewhat of an outlier when it comes to Shakespeare. Despite having spent much of his own life in Italy, and married to an Italian, he tends to play down Shakespeare’s Italian connections.
Where most researchers and novelists have followed AL Rowse and identified the Dark Lady as Emilia Lanier, a woman descended from the Italian Bassano family, Burgess presents her as an unlikely Malayan in Elizabethan London.
This has always been my favourite of the covers.
Likewise, where many scholars accept that it is possible, though unlikely, that Shakespeare could have travelled abroad to Italy before his theatrical fame, Burgess elsewhere fictionalised a Shakespeare travelling to Spain to meet Cervantes at the height of both men’s fame. (He also wrote a short story where Shakespeare received literal inspiration for his plays from time travellers, so as a theorist of Shakespeare he was very much an outlier really!)
I recently got the chance to revisit Stratford-on-Avon, and attend a performance of the recent RSC production of Julius Caesar, considered by many to be the best of Shakespeare’s Roman plays.
It was as magical and eclectic as one might expect from the RSC’s troupe. The lethal geopolitics of the late Republic and early Empire are distilled by the Bard into an almost claustrophobic clash of private loyalties and public interests.
I also went to visit Shakespeare’s schoolhouse, which is amazingly still in use as a school today, and was treated to a Latin lesson from his schoolmaster, an entertaining chap who may possibly have been an actor too. For it was of course in Warwickshire and not Tuscany that Shakespeare was first introduced to Italy and the literature of Latin and – by extension – Italian.
The more one reads Shakespeare, the more the influence of Italy, Romans and Italians becomes evident. I haven’t even mentioned his likely friendship with the English-born Italian John Florio, author of the first English-Italian dictionary, and a man who contributed almost as many words to English as Will himself.
Italy has no shortage of writers to be proud of, and no need to lay a claim to England’s finest. Nevertheless, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without Italy.
How cosy and quaint do the petty sectarian bigotries of 20th century Irish writing seem today.
I’m not referring to the civil war in the North of Ireland, usually euphemistically referred to in a diminished manner as the ‘Troubles’. I lived through most of that, and it was extremely unpleasant indeed.
Rather I mean the slightly earlier period of the early and mid-twentieth century, when Irish writing bestrode the world in the forms of giants like Joyce, Beckett, Yeats and Behan.
What’s interesting, considering just these four (though we could add many other lesser names), is the varying personal reactions to the sectarian divide in Ireland. For the Protestant-raised, middle-class and cosmopolitan Beckett and Yeats, minor distinctions in flavours of Christianity was an irrelevance at best.
Yeats in later life veered into mysticism, theosophy, magick and the occult. Beckett by contrast tended to dismiss Christianity if not all religion entirely, referring to it as “all balls”, though conceding that it amounted to more than merely “convenient mythology”. Raised in the era they were, both Yeats and Beckett imbibed plenty of Christian dogma in school and wider culture however, and both demonstrate in their writing an easy and deep familiarity with Christian writings and the Bible.
Beckett, probably not considering conversion to Catholicism
By contrast, the Catholic, lower middle-class/working class Joyce and Behan seemed unable entirely to shake off the tribal Catholicism of their backgrounds and education. I was reminded of this recently when I re-encountered Behan’s hilarious take on Anglicanism:
Don’t speak of the alien minister,
Nor of his church without meaning or faith,
For the foundation stone of his temple
Was the bollocks of Henry VIII.
Behan wearing a rosette proclaiming what is undoubtedly the greatest sporting chant ever.
Behan was a self-described “daylight atheist”. This is often presented online in the form of a quote: “I’m a communist by day and a Catholic by night”. However, I’ve not found a reliable source for this variant. Anyhow, Behan clearly had not managed to transcend the petty sectarian rivalries which beset Ireland, and in this he echoes Joyce, who in the highly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes his alter-ego protagonist Stephen Dedalus refusing to consider conversion to Protestantism:
– Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a Protestant?
– I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?
We might consider this passage as a depiction in mature adulthood of his prissy adolescence were it not that it is echoed elsewhere in his work, such as the short story ‘Grace’ in Dubliners.
Joyce in his lengthy European exile.
It’s worth remembering too that Joyce and Behan both escaped the confines of petty Ireland if anything more completely than Yeats ever did, the latter becoming a senator in the newly independent Ireland whereas Joyce relocated permanently to Europe, while Behan spent much of his time in London and America. (Beckett like his mentor Joyce went to Europe and never looked back.)
So then, what fuels this seemingly pointless animus? The grounds of objection from both Joyce and Behan relate to an apparent illogicality inherent to Protestantism. Notably in both instances, there is no defence of Catholicism offered, merely a snide (and in Behan’s case, very funny) dismissal of Ireland’s second-largest faith.
And unlike Yeats, neither sought to construct a religious faith of their own, though in Joyce’s case at least there was an astonishing attempt to replace the religious impetus with an aesthetic one, succinctly underpinned as Joyce said, by “silence, exile and cunning.”
I think Behan’s piece (a translation as it happens from 16th century Irish) gives the game away here. In many locations, the first line of his translation is misquoted as referring to “your Protestant minister”. But Behan like his source material makes clear that while Anglicanism is being referred to, the issue is less the protest against Catholicism underpinning it than its alienness, that is, the fact that it was the faith of the foreign (ie English) overlords who governed Ireland from the time of bebollocked Henry to their present day.
In other words, it was an atavistic political tribalism rather than a theological objection. We still have those tribalisms in Ireland today, primarily in the North where those overlords remain in position, likely against their will and desire, due to the complexities of establishing a permanent and lasting peace. In the 26 counties of the Irish Republic however, these passages stand out as glaring anachronisms now.
And even in the North, the late great “famous” Seamus Heaney (like Yeats and Beckett a Nobel laureate) is best described as sociologically post-Catholic rather than a devotee of the creed of his birth. This runs counter to the opinions offered by some of his most astute critics, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edna Longley in particular of course, but is it unfair to point out that both critics came from Protestant backgrounds and hence saw the cultural references to Catholicism in Heaney’s work as more significant than it was simply because those references were alien to them in the same way that Protestantism was to Behan?
So, will you be converting to Protestantism, Seamus?
In other words, the sensitivities may be reversed here. Perhaps it is as readers that we detect these curious emphases. Perhaps we misconstrue the petty cultural rivalries of sectarianism in mid-20th century Ireland because religion played such a larger role in cultural life in those days, in ways that anyone under 50 is unlikely to recognise in Ireland today.
The great Irish writers never stop teaching us, and one of their lessons is that we must challenge ourselves as readers with regard to what we find striking in their writing. What we notice and what we do not says perhaps as much about us as it does about them. They hold a mirror to our souls, even if, like Behan, we are daylight atheists.
