Poet in New York: A Bilingual Edition Read online

  Why was Lorca killed? Was he shot because he was a poet, because he was a supporter of the republic, because he was a homosexual? Given his fame and the support he received from many people of diverse political beliefs, and considering how well-liked he and his family were in Granada, his murder defies the most ardent attempts at a reasonable explanation. His body was never found and it wasn't until 1986 that a monument was constructed where he is believed to have been murdered. It reads, "In memory of Federico Garcia Lorca and all the victims of the Civil War."

  Lorca remains a spirit of wonder and grace over Granada and Andalusia, places he loved deeply. He remains, too, the poet in New York, walking the streets, confronting its clamor, absorbing the city's energy (the urban spirit alive), and offering it all back to us in its horror and stark beauty, its squalor and magnificence, as the incarnation of our paradoxical age.

  It was only when we started translating Lorca's Poet in New York that our sense of the work of a translator took on a dramatic change, or shift in perspective, because suddenly the goal became how to take the language that Lorca wrote in-which looks remarkably like Spanish but is really a language called Lorca-and renderthat into a language that looks remarkably like English but remains, again, a language called Lorca.

  The need to approximate this language subtlety adds a difficult and complex layer to the work of translating. Lorca wrote into and as part of a culture and tradition, into and of a historical moment, as well as into and of a personal life (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual). All of these (and a lot more) are bound inevitably and inextricably into the poetry itself.

  Our initial method of translating seemed rather straightforward, but it's clear that the straightforwardness has some important underlying assumptions. We agreed that each of us would translate every poem on our own. We would do these in small, previously agreed-upon bunches and then exchange these translations. Alternating the poems, each of us would be responsible for reconciling the differences between the two versions, a third version thus emerging. We'd then meet to reconcile those reconciliations.

  We discovered along the way a lot of things. One was that even though neither of us would characterize ourself in any way as an academic literary scholar, we still needed to do a lot of critical homework, a lot of research about Lorca and Poet in New York. The research revealed to us the unusual provenance of the book. Lorca never organized the whole of the collection. It was not published as a single book in his lifetime, nor were a number of the poems that have been included in the collection. There are multiple variations on some of the individual poems and multiple versions with different poems included, excluded, or added as appendices, depending on the editors and translators, of the text we know as Poet in New York. As another set of translators, we have also been required to make choices about the text.

  In addition to discovering the need for research, we discovered that our collaboration prevented us from being sloppy with language, from being imprecise, vague, or clunky, because each of us knew the other was looking over his shoulder. We found new ways to read through Lorca's surreal-like language and multiple ways to read what seemed at first to be easy lines. We learned from Lorca and each other new ways of reading the Spanish language-words specific to Andalusia and Granada, which are defined differently elsewhere. The word polos, for example, in the poem "Norma y paraiso de los negros" ("Norm and Paradise of the Blacks") can translate as the poles (North and South). But here things become interesting. Polo has a unique meaning in Andalusia, the region in Spain where Lorca grew tip. There it also means a form of traditional music and dance. Given the cultural reference in the title of the poem to Small's Paradise, a Harlem Renaissance jazz club, this suggested to its that, between the form of music and dance and the nightclub we could translate polos not as poles, but as flamenco because of the strength it gave to the image of the line: "the lying moon of flamenco" as opposed to "the lying moon of poles." And this is how we initially translated it. We liked the fact that it would have been an unusual translation. It was a translation we could have argued made sense save for one key fact: Lorca had not written el polo but los polos. This plural (the flamencos?) could only lead its back to the poles of north and south. And poles, after a lot of thinking, is what we realized made the most sense.

  Another example is Lorca's use of the word chino, a common one in Poet in New York. Chino can refer to a Chinese man. In the feminine china can refer to a Chinese woman. But a naranja china is also a small juicy orange. The word chino can also indicate a kind of aural cacophony. It can refer to someone who is deceitful, a trickster. And, in Granada, the capital of Lorca's Andalusia, a china is a small stone used in paving streets. Context left us with the most obvious, the Chinese man (or Chinaman, with all the negative connotations the word carries from Spanish into English), but the other meanings were important in our thinking because they were meanings we knew Lorca knew.

  In collaborating, we also found it critical not only to check each other for accuracy but for liberty-when one of its chose to experiment with Lorca, to go over the top, as it were, usually when it seemed there was no other alternative, the other was there to question the experiment. Was this really Lorca? Was this beyond meaning and new interpretation? If interpretation, was it legitimate and necessary interpretation? The presence of the collaborator thus gave its each greater confidence to experiment, to play; in fact, to discover different, and often better ways to write Lorca into English.

  This last part of our working method also made it clear how important being poets ourselves was to this particular task of translation. Moving through drafts, thinking out questions of Lorca and his project, led us to secondary and significant ways to solve translation issues. After wondering what Lorca was trying to do, the later phases of our work continued to have the wondering of translators but it added the wondering of poets. For both of us a new and useful question became not simply what was Lorca doing but what would each of us, as a poet, do? How would we address the poetic problems Lorca presented? This part of the collaboration left both of us feeling some trepidation because it meant that the Medina/ Statman collaboration had become the making finally of something that Lorca did not actually write. Doing this we found ourselves playing with Lorca's forms, with his repetitions, his arrangements of sequence and line. At times we found the need to make the poems leaner than the original, with less of Lorca's overwhelming language and cadences in Spanish. All this play, this erasure, has seemed necessary to retain the feeling, the power, the music of Lorca's work.

  This was obviously one of the more creative and sensitive parts of the collaboration. Here were two poets translating, writing, re-writing a poem, a book of poems, an activity that, to cite Robert Lowell, in some way functions as an imitation of another poet. Here were two poets translating, writing, rewriting a book of poems that, to cite Gregory Rabassa, will become the version for numerous (we hope) other readers. In giving ourselves leave to be more than a combination dictionary/grammar/usage text, we demanded of ourselves a great deal of humility and a bit of hubris, demanded the necessity of allowing the poetic ego to work and the necessity to also say no to that very ego. Because, in thinking about how I as a poet or how we as poets would do this, we were also responsible for remembering that often that very question, the one framed by the I or the we, while satisfying to think about, may also be irrelevant to the poem we were translating. As such, translating Lorca, arguably the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century, and Poet in New York, arguably his greatest book of poems, has required reverence and irreverence, caution and wildness, timidity and chutzpah.

  To read Poet in New York in the version we offer here is to read not prophecy but chronicle, not the future but the present. We have lost the New York City of September 10, 2001. What we gained is a New York in some ways wiser, sadder, and perhaps better able to deal with both triumph and tragedy. We cannot quantify grief, nor can we quantify hope. They are not found in mourning prayers or in hate,
not in the call to arms or in prejudice, not in money or fast cars or the most glittering jewels or the tallest buildings or the smartest books. These are ancient lessons Lorca learned well in New York, and we, lulled into complacency by our collective wealth, forgot and relearned in a nightmare of fire and ash. To read this book now is to see Lorca's eyes-eyes of a child-staring from the anonymous grave into which he was thrown after his murder and to hear the black sounds of duende carried by the Spanish breeze above our buildings and streets to a place where true grief and hope, twin sisters, reside.

  Poeta en Nueva York / Poet in New York

  A BEBE Y CARLOS MORLA

  Los poemas de este libro estdn escritos en la ciudad de Nueva York el ano 1929-1930, en que el poeta vivio como estudiante en Columbia University.

  F.G.L.

  TO BEBE AND CARLOS MORLA

  The poems of this book were written in the city of New York during the year 1929-1930, in which the poet lived as a student at Columbia University.

  F.G.L.

  I

  Poemas de la soledad

  en Columbia University

  Furia color de amor, amor color de olvido.

  -Luis Cernuda

  I

  Poems of Solitude

  at Columbia University

  Fury, the color of love, love, the color of forgetting.

  -Luis Cernuda

  VUELTA DE PASEO

  BACK FROM A WALK

  1910

  (Intermedio)

  New York, agosto 1929

  1910

  (Interlude)

  New York, August 1929

  FABULA Y RUEDA DE LOS TRES AMIGOS

  FABLE AND ROUND OF THE THREE FRIENDS

  TU INFANCIA EN MENTON

  Si, to ninez ya fabula de fuentes.

  -Jorge Guillen

  YOUR INFANCY IN MENTON

  Yes, your childhood now a fable of fountains.

  -Jorge Guillen

  II

  Los Negros

  Para Angel del Rio

  II

  The Blacks

  For Angel del Rio

  NORMA Y PARAISO DE LOS NEGROS

  NORM AND PARADISE OF THE BLACKS

  EL REY DE HARLEM

  THE KING OF HARLEM

  IGLESIA ABANDONADA

  (Balada de la Gran Guerra)

  ABANDONED CHURCH

  (Ballad of the Great War)

  III

  Calles y suenos

  A Rafael R. Raptin

  Un pdjaro de papel en el pecho dice que el tiempo de los besos no ha llegado.

  -Vicente Aleixandre

  III

  Streets and Dreams

  To Rafael R. Radon

  A paper bird in the breast says the time of kisses has not arrived.

  -Vicente Aleixandre

  DANZA DE LA MUERTE

  DANCE OF DEATH

  Diciembre 1929

  December 1929

  PAISAJE DE LA MULTITUD QUE VOMITA

  (Anochecer de Coney Island)

  LANDSCAPE OF THE VOMITING CROWD

  (Twilight at Coney Island)

  New York, 29 de diciembre de 1929.

  New York, December 29, 1929

  PAISAJE DE LA MULTITUD QUE ORINA

  (Nocturno de Battery Place)

  LANDSCAPE OF THE URINATING CROWD

  (Nocturne of Battery Place)

  ASESINATO

  (Dos voces de madrugada en Riverside Drive)

  MURDER

  (Two voices at dawn on Riverside Drive)

  NAVIDAD EN EL HUDSON

  CHRISTMAS ON THE HUDSON

  New York, 27 de diciembre de 1929

  New York, December 27, 1929

  CIUDAD SIN SUENO

  (Nocturno del Brooklyn Bridge)

  CITY WITHOUT SLEEP

  (Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge)

  PANORAMA CIEGO DE NUEVA YORK

  BLIND PANORAMA OF NEW YORK

  NACIMIENTO DE CRISTO

  BIRTH OF CHRIST

  LA AURORA

  DAWN

  IV

  Poemas del lago Eden Mills

  A Eduardo Ugarte

  IV

  Poems of Lake Eden Mills

  To Eduardo Ugarte

  POEMA DOBLE DEL LAGO EDEN

  Nuestro ganado pace, el viento espira.

  -Garcilaso

  DOUBLE POEM OF LAKE EDEN

  Our cattle graze, the wind exhales.

  -Garcilaso

  CIELO VIVO

  LIVING SKY

  Eden Mills, Vermont, 24 agosto 1929

  Eden Mills, Vermont

  August 24, 1929

  V

  En la cabana del Farmer

  (Campo de Newburg)

  A Concha Mendez y Manuel Altolaguirre

  V

  In the Farmer's Cabin

  (Newburgh Countryside)

  To Concha Mendez and Manuel Altolaguirre

  EL NINO STANTON

  THE BOY STANTON

  VACA

  A Luis Lacasa

  COW

  To Luis Lacasa

  NINA AHOGADA EN EL POZO

  (Granada y Newburg)

  GIRL DROWNED IN THE WELL

  (Granada and Newburgh)

  VI

  Introduccion a la muerte

  Poemas de la soledad en Vermont

  Para Rafael Sanchez Ventura

  VI

  Introduction to Death

  Poems of Solitude in Vermont

  For Rafael Sanchez Ventura

  MUERTE

  A Luis de la Serna

  DEATH

  For Luis de la Serna

  NOCTURNO DEL HUECO

  1.

  NOCTURNE OF THE HOLE

  1.

  II.

  It

  PAISAJE CON DOS TUMBAS Y UN PERRO ASIRIO

  LANDSCAPE WITH TWO TOMBS AND AN ASSYRIAN DOG

  RUINA

  A Regino Sainz de la Maza

  RUIN

  To Regino Sainz de la Maza

  LUNA Y PANORAMA DE LOS INSECTOS

  (Poema de amor)

  La luna en el rear riela, en la Iona gime el viento y alza en blando movimiento olas de Plata y azul.

  - Espronceda

  MOON AND PANORAMA OF THE INSECTS

  (Love Poem)

  On the ocean the moon shimmers, on the canvas the wind moans and lifts in slow modulation waves of silver and blue.

  - Espronceda

  New York, 4 de enero de 1930

  New York, January 4, 1930

  VII

  Vuelta a la ciudad

  Para Antonio Hernandez Soriano

  VII

  Return to the City

  For Antonio Hernandez Soriano

  NEW YORK

  Oficina y Denttncia

  A Fernando Vela

  NEW YORK

  Office and Denunciation

  To Fernando Vela

  CEMENTERIO JUDIO

  JEWISH CEMETERY

  New York, 18 de enero de 1930

  New York, January i8, 1930

  PEQUENO POEMA INFINITO

  Para Luis Cardoza y Aragon

  SMALL INFINITE POEM

  For Luis Cardoza y Aragon

  New York, io de enero de 1930

  New York, January io, 1930

  CRUCIFIXION

  CRUCIFIXION