[The following is from a work created by Juan Gelman and presented in Spanish as a presumed translation from an otherwise unknown American poet. The translation of Gelman’s translation into English is therefore the creation as well of the "original" poem and poet. The complete work, both English and Spanish, appears in The Poems of Sidney West, Salt Publishing, 2009, along with Hedeen’s and Rodríguez Núñez’s essay, “Juan Gelman or Translation as Fidelity,” also excerpted below.]
La traducción, ¿es traición?
La poesía, ¿es traducción?
Po I-Po
Translation, is it treason?
Poetry, is it translation?
Po I-Po
lament for the death of parsifal hoolig
it began to rain cows
and in light of the prevailing situation in the
country
the agronomy students sowed disorder
the engineering professors proclaimed their
virginity
the philosophy janitors oiled the staples of
intellectual reason
the math teachers verified crying the two
plus two
the language learners invented good bad
words
while this was happening
a wave of nostalgia invaded the country’s
beds
and the couples look at each other as
strangers
and twilight was served for lunch by
mothers and fathers
and the pain or the hurt slowly dressed the
little ones
and the chests fell off some and the backs
off others and to the rest nothing fell
off at all
and they found God dead several times
and old men flew through the air holding
tightly to their dried testicles
and old women hurled exclamations and
felt painful stitches in their memory
or oblivion
and various dogs approved and toasted
with Armenian cognac
and they found a man dead several times
near a carnival Friday ripped from the
carnival
under an invasion of autumnal insults
or over blue elephants standing on Mr.
Hollow’s cheek
or close by the larks in sweet vocal
challenge with summer
they found that man dead
with his hands openly gray
his hips disordered by the events in
Chicago
remains of wind in his throat
25 cents in his pocket and its still eagle
with feathers wet from infernal rain
oh dear ones!
that rain fell years and years on the
pavement of Hereby Street
without ever erasing the slightest trace
of what had happened!
without dampening one of the humili-
ations not even one of the fears
of that man with hips scrambled tossed
in the street
late so his terrors can mix with water
and rot and end!
and so died parsifal hoolig
he closed his silent eyes
kept the custom of not protesting
was a brave dead man
and while his obituary did not appear in
the New York Times and the Chicago
Tribune paid no attention to him
he did not complain when they picked him
up in a truck from the city
him and his melancholy look
and if someone supposes this is sad
if someone is going to stand up and say it
is sad
know this is exactly what happened
nothing else happened but this
under this sky or vault of heaven
lament for chester carmichael’s bird
all the young girls sing in Melody Spring
all the young boys dance in Melody Spring
and the old women knit the old men smoke
their sea foam pipes in Melody Spring
all except chester carmichael dead in the fall of
1962
previously he had lost his leaves as a tree
feathers winds pieces of memory falling all
around him
the last to fall was a woman or what was left
of a woman
semi-gnawed chewed dry and even
phosphorescent
who illuminated chester carmichael night after
night
and still could not be extinguished and shines
where the southern road begins
he is dark:
not so much because of earth and death
time reworked his face as a small angel
and now he is naked without alternatives
decadences furies
among smooth roots and the rest of his
seasonal companions
chester carmichael was finished
he left with a spikenard in his hand accom-
panied by one hundred thousand monkeys
who danced and sang as the young girls and
boys of Melody Spring
there were no sobs screams flowers over his
heart
only a beautiful bird who would stare at him
and now watches over his head
oh tiny bird!
every so often it bends over chester carmichael
and hears what he is giving back
calm as the sun
[final poem] errata
where it says “he escaped from himself as
from a prison cell” (page such and such
verse whatever)
it could say “the tiny tree grew and grew”
or some other error
as long as it has rhythm
is certain or true
and so sidney west wrote these lines that
will never love him
in the freshness of a dry dark well
on top of a world blinded by sun
or alone alone alone
where it says “if we were or we were/as
human faces”
(page such and such verse whatever) it is
as the ox that ploughed there
not rotted by pain or fury
disguising much of the time in solitude
ah sidney west! here ends (hopefully)
your wretched aspimos leanings
what tiny bit round this man
and what animal within
all those birds that knew how to invent ate
sidney west
ponina and nino especially
greedy from their state and passion
open sweet as useless
where it says “one day the following happened”
(page such and such verse whatever)
sadness had happened by before
and that is fatal for the poet
or it was fatal for west’s pain
hey tiny bugs horseflies brilliances greeting
in the Oak’s cemetery!
there they put sidney west let him sleep
where it says “let him sleep sleep sleep” (page
such and such verse whatever)
it should say let him sleep and nothing more
and so when west with his first love
headed for sidney sailor
sidney the last in history
spun with west as a water wheel’s donkey
let him sleep and nothing more should be said
(page such and such verse whatever)
and nothing more let him sleep and nothing
more
let him sleep sleep sleep
let sidney west sleep sleep sleep
until his feets grow wings please
let sidney west sleep
until we love one another well
let him sleep sleep sleep
the father breathes it if he really wants to
breath it
here they lie as before
but let him sleep sleep sleep
let sidney west sleep
where it says “curtains with birds so morning
enters singing” (page such and such verse
whatever)
sidney west should turn himself off in the
morning
let him sleep sleep sleep
TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
On Juan Gelman and Sidney West
Translation as Fidelity
Juan Gelman is the most significant, contemporary Argentine intellectual figure and one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. Son of a family of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, he grew up like any other porteño, among soccer and tango, in the populous neighborhood of Villa Crespo. He was initiated into reading by his brother Boris, who would often recite Pushkin’s verses to him in Russian. He also received from Boris the works of Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other modern and contemporary classics. At 11, he published his first poem in the magazine Rojo y negro, and in the 1950s formed part of the group of rebel writers, El Pan Duro. He was discovered by Raúl González Túñón, among the most relevant voices of the southern country’s poetic avant-garde, who saw in the young man’s verses “a rich and vivacious lyricism and a principally social content […] that does not elude the richness of fantasy.” ...
The use of translation as a tool for poetic creation that distinguishes Juan Gelman’s work, reaches its apex with The Poems of Sidney West. María del Carmen Sillato has stressed how this device, along with heteronomy and intertextuality, is “an expression of alterity by recognizing the other-author, the other-text, and the other-language as co-participants in the elaboration of a textual universe.” As for us, we only have left to mention that these translations of Gelman’s translation have been carried out under the most rigorous accuracy. It is this, upon conveying the poetic subject’s message, which makes beautiful expression possible. There is much in these texts that is truly untranslatable, just as surely there was in the imaginary American’s originals. Something must have gotten lost in the translation, and something must have remained, for the whole maintains its power, humanity, lucidity. In sum, we hope this translation is not treason but, on the contrary, an act of fidelity. ...
The Poems of Sidney West offers us only one clue about when these accounts take place, yet it is significant: chester carmichael “dead in the fall of 1962.” The space is even more precise and determined, always within the real or imagined United States. This territorial emplacement, beyond Argentina’s borders, constitutes a frank questioning by Juan Gelman of the nationalism and populism on the rise during the era. According to this decolonizing political gesture, what is being challenged is not only individualist romanticism but also the collectivist realism promoted by Stalinism and deferred to with its variants by Latin American coreligionists. Ultimately, both this romanticism and realism are based on a voluntarist and thus idealist conception of social movement, which produces a distorted representation of reality. What is sought here is the destruction of the self, a redefinition of the poetic “I” that, like these stories’ characters, experiences a metamorphosis, de/composes to achieve the com/position of the subordinated other.
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