Departments
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Week of 10 December 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 17 |
Feature Article
Share captures TLS Translation Prize
By Eric McHenry
"Books of poetry, my dear Miguel, catch on very slowly."
So Federico García Lorca wrote to Miguel Hernández in 1933, shortly after the unheralded publication of Hernández's first collection. It's a truth Don Share can second. I Have Lots of Heart, Share's bilingual edition of Hernández's poetry, has just received the prestigious £1,000 Spanish Translation Prize from the London Times Literary Supplement -- nearly two years after its appearance.
"The award was a complete surprise to me," says Share (GRS'88), contributing editor to Partisan Review and a graduate of BU's Creative Writing Program. "I hadn't applied for anything. I didn't know the book was being considered for anything. It had come out in early '98, so I'd thought that any opportunity for this sort of honor had long passed. But the prize, it turns out, is biennial."
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Don Share Photo by Kalman Zabarsky
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"It demonstrates something useful about translating, and writing in general," Share says. "You work in silence for such a long time, and then finally, unexpectedly, it has an impact somewhere far away."
In a sense, it is fitting that Hernández's work still fights to be read. A poet, antifascist, and soldier, Hernández spent most of his brief life defying the forces that would suppress and ultimately snuff out his revolutionary voice.
Born into provincial poverty in 1910, Hernández had a rapacious intellect and "lots of heart." By his 24th year he had moved to Madrid, published two volumes of poetry, and entered the literary milieu, befriending Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
Hernández wrote with equal dexterity in traditional forms and free verse, reflecting the depth of his autodidactic education. Infusing sonnets of tremendous formal precision with fantastical imagery, he revealed his affinity with both the Spanish modernists and such 17th-century masters as Góngora.
"Miguel Hernández was a shepherd boy, a goatherd," Neruda told the poet Robert Bly in 1966, in an interview Share partially reprints as an epilogue to I Have Lots of Heart. "The only education he got was from the priest of the village. It was wonderful because the library of the church had the classics -- nobody had read the books in that library for centuries! Miguel discovered them and out of the poetry of the Golden Age he made all by himself a really beautiful language . . . ."
In 1936 Hernández enlisted in the Republican Army, and became well-known as what Willis Barnstone, in his introduction to I Have Lots of Heart, calls "the poet of the Spanish Civil War." When Francisco Franco's forces prevailed in 1939, they arrested Hernández, and he remained in prison until his death from untreated tuberculosis in 1942. Hernández made crucial contributions to his obra while a captive, scribbling poems on toilet paper. "Your laughter is / the sharpest sword, / conqueror of flowers / and larks. / Rival of the sun. / Future of my bones / and of my loveŠ" he wrote to his infant son in "Lullaby of the Onion," one of his last and best-known poems.
Like Hernández himself, I Have Lots of Heart had an inauspicious beginning. As a student in the Creative Writing Program, Share was required to take a foreign language proficiency test; he started translating Hernández poems in order to brush up on his Spanish.
"I'd remembered reading some Hernández when I was in college, but I couldn't find a particular poem that I had in mind," he recalls. "So I thought, I'll just translate a bunch of these until I figure out which one it was."
Gradually, his translations came to the attention of several BU professors, including George Starbuck, Derek Walcott, and Rodolfo Cardona, all of whom encouraged Share to press on with the project. The more he translated, he says, the more the poems affected him.
"I began with that glib notion that it would help me with my Spanish. But what happened was that I found myself more strongly moved by these poems than by anything I was reading in my own language. I realized that they were really a part of me in a way that other poems wouldn't be."
Equally motivating, he recalls, were the responses the poems elicited at public readings.
"People would come up to me and say, 'Those are beautiful,' or 'Those are striking.' A person once came up crying, after I'd read 'Lullaby of the Onion.' And people would ask me, 'What's a good book of Hernández in translation?' But at the time I started this project, all the other book-length translations were out of print. So I'd have to say, 'Well, you can't really buy a collection of his work.' And I began to realize that this needed to be redressed. It became a cause."