Years ago, I harboured vague and improbable ambitions to be a translator of poetry. What could be more fulfilling, I thought, than to try to capture the beauty of a poem from another language and culture and render it the homage of a translation into my own?
But after many discouraging attempts, I began to feel daunted by the hopelessness of the task. If unravelling the knottiness of poetry in Spanish wasn’t hard enough, the sheer slipperiness of the right words in English, not to mention the right tone or the right rhythm, seemed to grow almost exponentially the longer I tried.
That was some time ago. Since founding the English Republic of Letters here on Substack, I have occasionally gone back to translating poems, such as here.
Most recently I was, I have to confess, disappointed with my lame attempts at translating “cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor” from Jorge Manrique’s poem Coplas por la muerte de su padre [“verses on the death of his father”].
For “cualquiera tiempo pasado", I wanted to use “each time past”, but thought that would sound too much like Eliot’s Burnt Norton, too much like a 20th-century meditation on time. Switching it round, I could say, “Every past time was better.” But that hardly sounds natural to me. I’m going to continue to tinker with that for a while and perhaps come back with an amended version.
But then again, why bother, I ask myself? It’s a fraught business. For those who venture into print/digital publication with their translation, you might say there are double the usual lines of attack from a critic.
