Poet in New York Read online

  The great poets speak to each other, across time and language and they echo each other, not always consciously. To find Lorca’s poetic peers we must look to Dante, Blake, Baudelaire, and Eliot. Dante’s travels through the Inferno, like Eliot’s through the Wasteland, are not unlike Lorca’s through New York. His sense of innocence and experience, mediated by the imagination and driven to engage and understand the physical and spiritual world, echoes Blake. And his view of reality in which good and evil are in a continual dance, at times so manic they blur together, brings us to Baudelaire.

  Lorca was not in any strict sense a man of politics, a poet of the political. He did not belong to any political party or subscribe to a particular ideology. He was, however, a man of deeply held convictions. From a very early age he felt a special bond to the peasants and gypsies, the common people of his native Andalusia. He witnessed the dire poverty in which they lived and was privy to the sordid conditions under which they functioned daily. For hundreds of years Spain had ignored the backbone of its population, the agrarian poor, who lived away from the centers of culture, such as Madrid and Barcelona. Lorca was a steadfast supporter of the Spanish Republic and in the 1930s, at a time when the republic was being challenged by the Nationalists, who longed for a return of the monarchy, with government support he founded La Barraca, a grass-roots theater project that took classical and contemporary plays, including his own, to all corners of Spain. Such an association, no matter that it was on behalf of Spanish culture, an immense source of pride for all Spaniards despite their political affiliation, was one of the factors that contributed to Lorca’s murder.

  In July 1936, long after Lorca returned from his trip to New York and Cuba, the tensions between loyalist supporters of the Second Spanish Republic and the Nationalists spilled over into open civil war. The following month Lorca was apprehended by a group of disaffected Nationalists and taken to the village of Víznar, a place notorious as an execution site. At dawn on the nineteenth of August, Lorca, along with a teacher and two anarchist bullfighters, was taken to a place called Fuente Grande and executed.

  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 García 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 render that 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 paraíso 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 up. 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 us 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 us 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 Andalusía, 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 us 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 us 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 BEBÉ Y CARLOS MORLA

  Los poemas de este libro están escritos en la ciudad de Nueva

  York el año 1929–1930, en que el poeta vivió como estudiante en

  Columbia University.

  F.G.L.

  TO BEBÉ 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

  Asesinado por el cielo,

  entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe

  y las formas que buscan el cristal,

  dejaré crecer mis cabellos.

  Con el árbol de muñones que no canta

  y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo.

  Con los animalitos de cabeza rota

  y el agua harapienta de los pies secos.

  Con todo lo que tiene cansancio sordomudo

  y mariposa ahogada en el tintero.

  Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día.

  ¡Asesinado por el cielo!

  BACK FROM A WALK

  Murdered by the sky.

  Among the forms that move toward the snake

  and the forms searching for crystal

  I will let my hair grow.

  With the limbless tree that cannot sing

  and the boy with the white egg face.

  With the broken-headed animals

  and the ragged water of dry feet.

  With all that is tired, deaf-mute,

  and a butterfly drowned in an inkwell.

  Stumbling onto my face, different every day.

  Murdered by the sky!

  1910

  (Intermedio)

  Aquellos ojos míos de mil novecientos diez

  no vieron enterrar a los muertos,

  ni la feria de ceniza del que llora por la madrugada,

  ni el corazón que tiembla arrinconado como un caballito de mar.

  Aquellos ojos míos de mil novecientos diez

  vieron la blanca pared donde orinaban las niñas,

  el hocico del toro, la seta venenosa

  y una luna incomprensible que iluminaba por los rincones

  los pedazos de limón seco bajo el negro duro de las botellas.

  Aquellos ojos míos en el cuello de la jaca,

  en el seno traspasado de Santa Rosa dormida,

  en los tejados del amor, con gemidos y frescas manos,

  en un jardín donde los gatos se comían a las ranas.

  Desván donde el polvo viejo congrega estatuas y musgos,

  cajas que guardan silencio de cangrejos devorados

  en el sitio donde el sueño tropezaba con su realidad.

  Allí mis pequeños ojos.

  No preguntarme nada. He visto que las cosas

  cuando buscan su curso encuentran su vacío.

  Hay un dolor de huecos por el aire sin gente

  y en mis ojos criaturas vestidas ¡sin desnudo!

  New York, agosto 1929

  1910

  (Interlude)

  My eyes in 1910

  never saw the dead being buried,

  or the ashen festival of a man weeping at dawn,

  or the heart that trembles cornered like a sea horse.

  My eyes in 1910

  saw the white wall where girls urinated,

  the bull’s muzzle, the poisonous mushroom,

  and a meaningless moon in the corners

  that lit up pieces of dry lemon under the hard black of bottles.

  My eyes on the pony’s neck,

  in the pierced breast of a sleeping Saint Rose,

  on the rooftops of love, with whimpers and cool hands,

  in a garden where the cats ate frogs.

  Attic where old dust gathers statues and moss,

  boxes keeping the silence of devoured crabs

  in a place where sleep stumbled onto its reality.

  There my small eyes.

  Don’t ask me anything. I’ve seen that things

  find their void when they search for direction.

  There is a sorrow of holes in the unpeopled air

  and in my eyes clothed creatures—undenuded!

  New York, August 1929

  FÁBULA Y RUEDA DE LOS TRES AMIGOS

  Enrique,

  Emilio,

  Lorenzo,

  estaban los tres helados:

  Enrique por el mundo de las camas;

  Emilio por el mundo de los ojos y las heridas de las manos;

  Lorenzo por el mundo de las universidades sin tejados.

  Lorenzo,

  Emilio,

  Enrique,

  estaban los tres quemados:

  Lorenzo por el mundo de las hojas y las bolas de billar;

  Emilio por el mundo de la sangre y los alfileres blancos;

  Enrique p
or el mundo de los muertos y los periódicos

  abandonados.

  Lorenzo,

  Emilio,

  Enrique,

  estaban los tres enterrados:

  Lorenzo en un seno de Flora;

  Emilio en la yerta ginebra que se olvida en el vaso;

  Enrique en la hormiga, en el mar y en los ojos vacíos

  de los pájaros.

  FABLE AND ROUND OF THE THREE FRIENDS

  Enrique,

  Emilio,

  Lorenzo,

  the three of them frozen:

  Enrique by the world of beds;

  Emilio by the world of eyes and wounded hands;

  Lorenzo by the world of roofless universities.

  Lorenzo,

  Emilio,

  Enrique,

  the three of them burned:

  Lorenzo by the world of leaves and billiard balls;

  Emilio by the world of blood and white pins;

  Enrique by the world of the dead and abandoned

  newspapers.

  Lorenzo,

  Emilio,

  Enrique,

  the three of them buried:

  Lorenzo in one of Flora’s breasts;

  Emilio in the dead gin forgotten in the glass;

  Enrique in the ant, the sea, and the empty eyes

  of birds.

  Lorenzo,

  Emilio,

  Enrique,

  fueron los tres en mis manos

  tres montañas chinas,

  tres sombras de caballo,

  tres paisajes de nieve y una cabaña de azucenas

  por los palomares donde la luna se pone plana bajo el gallo.

  Uno

  y uno

  y uno,

  estaban los tres momificados,

  con las moscas del invierno,

  con los tinteros que orina el perro y desprecia el vilano,

  con la brisa que hiela el corazón de todas las madres,