With love, your devoted translator

Translation is an art that has gone unnoticed for decades now. Upon finding my great-grandfather’s poetry book, I decided to honor his memory and translate them from Spanish into English. What is translation and why is it essential?

On the very first page, before the prologue, a black and white picture of an old man stared back at me. Tracing his name, which was typed underneath it, I made eye contact with a dead man; he had short white hair that sat neatly atop his head, like snow that had gathered on top of a branch, black circular pince-nez glasses that framed his eyes perfectly – a penetrating, serious stare– and thin lips hidden underneath a silver moustache. Dressed in a grey blazer and sporting a black tie, we looked at each other as if recognizing one another, as if knowing who we were, as if this wasn’t the first time I had actually seen him and had actually been looking at his face my entire life. After this encounter, I carried Sueños y Quimeras, a poetry book given to me by my grandmother that had found its home in my bookshelf, everywhere I went; it slept on my nightstand, singing my lullabies.

My great-grandfather, Ferdinand R. Cestero, faded into oblivion after his death in 1945. In his time, he was a renowned Puerto Rican poet whose poems won multiple prizes around the island. I remember once being told that Ferdinand had a statue that had been erected during his lifetime in a small town in Puerto Rico but was ultimately taken down and with it, the memory of his existence, of the impact his words had on Puerto Rican culture. This, for some reason, angered me not because he was someone from my family but because I knew that, afterwards, he would just be my great-grandfather and not someone who had dedicated his life to poetry, to art, for it to be ultimately carried off into the wind. I wondered what I could do to remedy this, feeling like it was up to me to save him. I couldn’t help but feel a weight upon my shoulders as I thought that maybe there was a reason that I stumbled upon this book.

I was taking a literary translation class where we were tasked with the project of translating a piece of writing from any language into English. The puzzle pieces were coming together and I decided that I would honor my great-grandfather and translate his poems, show off the beauty of his poetry and make his poetry accessible. With this idea of accessibility, the lightbulb shined brighter because that is precisely what translation does, it places texts within our grasp and transforms them into an element of the future. If my main goal was to rescue Ferdinand from oblivion, what better way to do that than through translation?

The word “translation” comes from a Latin term meaning “to carry across” while the earlier Greek term “metaphrasis” (which in English is “metaphrase” - ‘a literal word for word translation’) means “to speak across”. Like a bridge, translation’s job is to connect people through the power of words, the power of language; through the use of translation we are speaking to the world, we are letting other people appreciate that which without it they would be deprived of. Robert Frost once said that poetry “is that which gets lost out of both prose and in translation” stating the impossibility of translating poetry. Upon reading this quote, I have to admit that I felt personally attacked; I am translating poetry, or attempting to do so, and the thought of losing something, losing my great-grandfather’s words and more so the intrinsic meaning behind said words terrifies me. Nowadays poetry has different definitions which continuously evolve. Poetry is a million universes captured in language, and so, to translate these universes can be seen as imposible my many.

My grandfather’s poetry is filled to the brim with rhymes and meters, and for me, bringing these factors from the original language into the target language of the translation, English, is an obstacle. As a translator, I had to make a choice: do I place the value on the rhyme or on the message? I chose the latter.

“Maybe his poems are the perfect guide to get to know him, someone I never had the opportunity to meet but who has become such an important part of my life.”

Knowing where and how to begin translating, especially something as delicate as poetry, was the hardest part of it all. I spent hours upon hours just on one line, placing all my focus on finding the perfect word. The thing about language, in this case about Spanish and English, is that they both have a wide variety of synonyms and some are full of ambiguities depending on the culture. If directly translated, the meaning of a sentence changes drastically. The first poem I translated had some of the most difficult phrases I ever encountered. The poem was built in such a way that as I struggled to pick it apart, I almost thought it unbreakable. Before even looking at the title, I decided to tackle it head on. My first instinct was to directly translate it into English which ended up being completely unintelligible. Suddenly, these beautiful lines that made so much sense and that have the impression of being created merely to be used in this poem became dull and void of feeling. “La noche está triste; la casa tranquila; desierta la alcoba” became “The night is sad; the quiet house; the bedroom is deserted” which fell completely flat at my feet. There is, I realized, a very particular way in which sentences are read in a certain language; so by transforming it from Spanish into English, I not only had the job of translating the words but also had to be conscious about how people would read it. You see, throughout history, language and by consequence, literature, has shaped the way we express ourselves and has certainly impacted the way in which we read and receive meanings. So, that is to say, there is a specific way in which a sentence is read in Spanish and in which a sentence is read in English; in terms of translation this means that one has to be aware that a sentence, while it could be translated into the target language, it might not read as naturally or it might still have remnants of the original language stuck to it. This is not necessarily bad but, when reading a translated work the reader expects to understand it fully, to feel as if it is completely theirs – the domestic remainder of the original might change the reading experience. After spending a lot of time getting to know this poem, what it meant, what he meant, this specific phrase became “The night is overcome with melancholy and the tranquil house casts the bedroom aside”.

This poem, the one I was translating right in the beginning of my journey, is called ‘Que noche tan larga’ which in English would directly translate to ‘What a long night’. However, I ended up titling it ‘This endless night’ and I can recall freaking out about taking such a liberty; who was I to change the title? In the midst of this mental breakdown, I thought maybe Google could serve as a helping hand through this process. I typed “How to translate poems from Spanish into English” –I was desperate for answers. The first link I saw and clicked on was titled ‘Five Tips on Translating Poetry’. Bingo! Step one, stay close to the poem. Seems fair enough, I thought; I was always very clear that if I wanted to translate Ferdinand’s poetry, I had to get to know the poem itself – what it wanted to say, what it wanted the reader to feel. Step two, get to know the poet. At this, I immediately paused. I can loosely recall the rule from this random website saying: “if you pick a poet that is still alive for your translation, contact them and feel the liberty to ask them any questions that might help you understand the poem itself, their intentions and thus help you with your own translations. However, if you pick a poet who has already passed, your job is much harder – but all you have to do is research about their lives”. I paused once again. I’ve tried searching for any biography or just any details about my great-grandfather, and although there are some things about him floating about on the internet, they are very minimal. So, how was I supposed to get my translations right if I knew close to nothing about his life?

Octavio Paz once said that “a poet’s truthful biography is not found by knowing the events of their life, rather it is found through their poems”. So, I chose to believe this and all that I have learned, all that I have found out about him, I have found through his words. I realized that I wanted to ask him questions and see if he could answer me as I dissected his poems, as I picked them apart and transformed them. Maybe his poems are the perfect guide to get to know him, someone I never had the opportunity to meet but who has become such an important part of my life.

Ferdinand’s poems, even though the magic of it mostly lies in the flow of the rhymes and rhythm, hold such strong and beautiful stories as you get to know them, as you get acquainted with each word, each comma, each hyphen. The message behind his poems, the essence of who he was, what he believed were important narratives, was something I did not want to lose. This poses a new problem, though: to some extent I am creating an entirely different and new poem which some might argue is not a true translation and could actually become my poem. There will always be something lost in translation and believing in one single way of translating cannot be farther from the truth. When it comes to translating in general, I choose to believe we should let a hundred flowers bloom; there are so many ways of looking at a single poem, at a single novel – it all depends on the translator and their choices. If at some point in the future, my great-grandfather’s poetry is given the recognition I truly believe it deserves, there might be another translator that instead of placing the value on the message of the poems, will translate it sticking to the rhyme. This does not discredit my own translation and makes theirs superior; there will never be a single and correct way of looking at things, of looking at a poem. I see it as a puzzle piece, or as an inves- tigative journey to find out more about the person you are translating, where you are taking every single word as a clue, like a grain of salt, revealing more with every movement, every “carrying across”. George Szirtes, a British poet and translator, said it best: “There will always remain the question of the faithful translation. The difficulty is deciding what it is one should be faithful to. A poem is a complex whole made up of many elements, not one of which has an exact equivalent in another language. Yet we hope for recognition, for some ideal combination of surface and depth fidelities. The ideal doesn’t exist. But living translations do: echo on echo on echo.”

And so they do ‘echo on echo on echo’ for all eternity.

Out of ninety-seven poems that I found buried in between the pages of Sueños y Quimeras, I have only managed to translate ten so far. Translation is a process; one has to be patient with the words, with oneself mostly, and let the work speak to us of its needs. As I translate, I not only move words across a border, to another realm where they transform into another language, but I also carry myself across trying to follow in my great-grandfather’s footsteps in order to find what he wanted the reader to find, to know, to learn. With every scribble of his pen, I follow and hope to find more about him, more about me. It all began with the title. With his dreams, his ‘sueños’. With his chimeras, his ‘quimeras’.