292
G. S. FRASER
That gets the feeling, but it is not quite perfect. Bly's "my heavy soul" is
literally, for instance, "mi acongojado corazon," literally my oppressed
or afflicted heart, and Neruda is a very
phys£caZ
poet so one would have
preferred "heart" and some adjective with the weight and length of
"acongojado," say "my overweighted heart." "Broken
objects"
for
"cosas
rotas" in the first line too much suggests the word "objects" in
books of philosophy (and Neruda is a very
unabstract
poet) so one
would have preferred the straightforward "broken things." "Animal" is
rather abstract for "grandes bestias" which has a special suggestion of
load-carrying animals, mules, donkeys, horses. And "that has too much
bitterness" is perfectly correct, by the dictionary, for
"demasiado
amargos"
except that one thinks of unwashed pots, pans, plates, and so
on, as
sour
rather than bitter. But, again, one has the Spanish on the
other side- -and one of the special pleasures of reading translations is
trying to improve them.
The Peruvian poet
C~sar
Vallejo, less well known than Neruda, and
in a short note, John Knoepfle gives an appealing account of him:
The man is a mystic who is skeptical, a fugitive deeply in love
with his home, an isolated man who cannot put aside his painful
communion with others. He expresses in masculine tones, the
massed, present anger of the poor man. And moreover there is
something very ancient in this Vallejo.... It is the authority of the
oral poets of the Andes.
(A point, the last one, which bears on the relevance in this group of
Beowulf.)
To give his flavor to readers new to him, as I am, I shall quote
one very short poem translated by Knoepfle (and I here I pick no holes,
for even with the help of my
Diccionario Manual Illustrado de la Lengua
Espanola,
I can find none to pick):
BABBLE
Meek house with no style, framed
with a single knock and a single piece
of rainbow wax. And in the house
she destroys and she cleans: says at t£mes:
"The asylum is nice. Where? Here!"
Other times she breaks down and cries.
A perfect short poem, and in its concise reticence almost unbearably
moving, in English as in Spanish. Perfect translation is, very occasionally,
possible.
