Viewing entries tagged
Translation
Poonachi / Perumal Murugan / 2016
Poonachi tells the story of the ordinary life of an extraordinary goat capable of very large litters and delivered to a poor family by a giant. While the plot points are hardly three stuff of high drama, the novel captivates through its poignant description of Poonachi's feeling and its brutally honest and dystopic portrayal of life in rural India. This goat is literally the most human character I've read in years. 5/5
Frontier / Can Xue / 2008 in Chinese / 2017 translated into English
Anushka and I began reading Frontier in Shantiniketan, continued it on our front porch in Chicago, and finished it over the phone while i lay sick with covid. Frontier is a book that demands to be reread, occupying a strange place between dreamlike surrealism, dystopian literature, and horror. The plot devices and narrative structure that define traditional Western fiction fall flat in describing what makes Frontier so captivating. I would frequently find myself laughing, cringing, and doubling back to track the meandering narrative. Soon, I realized trying to understand the components and logic of the plot was actually distracting me from the moment by moment magic of the story. It literally feels like you're in a dream, where the most insane and irrational possibilities are taken without doubt and the narrative pace can sink in for a while before suddenly snapping to other wild or strange possibilities. The only thing that raised my eyebrows was the treatment of a Black character in the book, who definitely is exoticized, which on one hand would be a realistic portrayal of the Black experience in China but on the other hand its impossible for the novel to treat very ethically bc all characters seem to lack an interiority. This isn't a psychological drama bc the reasoning of characters is perturbed by this dream logic. Overall, the racial awkwardness contributed to the uncanny, unsettled feeling. Because narrative matters less, the book sinks into purer emotion and sensation somehow. It's truly a marvelous strange disturbing novel that I'll twirl in my head for years in sure. Reminded me most of Red Ants by Pergentino Jose. 4.5/5
Foremost among the writers whose work has showed me the most about intimacy and pace is Francisco Aragón. You cannot read a Francisco Aragón poem in a rush. As someone raised on slam, hip-hop, and the beats—you know, on a verse known to Howl—I needed a writer like Aragón to teach me how to slow down and really pay attention to a moment.
In After Rubén, Aragón braids his careful reflections with lo-fi remixes of Rubén Darío poems. I say, lo-fi, because Aragón’s English translations of Darío poems don’t try to preserve the rhyme and rhythm that make the poems magical in Spanish, but rather frequently breaks up stanzas and even lines to make you linger on each phrase. This gives the poems an intimate, relaxed lo-fi quality. Aragón’s “Symphony in Gray,” for example, begins:
Like glass
the color of mercury
it mirrors the sky’s
sheet of zinc, the pale gray
a burnish splotched
Whereas the original poem begins with the noun “el mar,” letting you know that Darío is describing the sea, here we do not get an explicit hint of the sea, until the fifth stanza, where “leaden waves crest / collapse—seeming / to groan near the docks.” In the translation, we are too close to the object to see the whole; note the short lines, really breaking each image down piece by piece. The effect is to create an almost hyper-real version of the original, which in this case compliments the intent of the original: to draw the reader through hypnotic shades of gray.
The collection generously includes the Spanish versions of Darío’s work in the back of the book, allowing word nerds to flip between the English and Spanish versions and savor the different nuances between form and diction, as well as a non-fiction essay discussing his relationship to Darío’s work. In the essay, Aragón explains how his mother and father had, despite their limited education, memorized Darío poems from their schooling in Central America, which they cherished and passed down to Aragón. This collection is Aragón’s way of preserving Darío’s work for another generation of Latinx writers and re-introducing him to the English canon. While I have known about Darío from my forays into Spanish literature, I deeply appreciate Aragón’s ability to take his dramatic, virtuosic voice and make it seem down-to-earth and plainspoken. Aragón has offered me a completely new window into his work.
Aragón’s own work doesn’t play second fiddle to Darío’s in this collection, either. Rather, Aragón carefully sets Darío up as a queer Central American elder and by the end of the collection, the relationship between them feels spiritual. Darío and Aragón strengthen one another in this collection. Whereas Aragón mines aspects of Darío’s life, line, and legend to speak to the present, he also uses his own openness about his queerness to open up this once silenced aspect of Darío’s life and work. In “Winter Hours”/”De Invierno,” Aragón transforms an image of Carolina into an image of Amado, and in “I Pursue a Shape”/”Yo Persigo Una Forma…”, Aragón transforms an image of Venus de Milo into an image of the David. Darío was closeted during his lifetime. As Aragón writes in an essay in Glow of Our Sweat, he himself was once shy about his sexual orientation, but has moved towards highlighting and being open about his queerness as a way of denouncing homophobia. These on-and-off-the-page moves on Aragón’s part are acts of inter-generational healing, creating a path for future queer artists of color to authentically present themselves to the world and define themselves on their own terms.
Lets put it another way: In my favorite poem in the collection, “Nicaragua in a Voice,” Aragón writes,
More than the poems
—the fruits that sang
their juices; dolls, feverish,
dreaming of nights,
city streets—for me it was
the idle chat between the poems:
cordial, intimate almost…
like a river’s murmur
as if a place—León,
Granada—could speak,
whistle inhabit
a timbre… as if, closing
my eyes, I had it again
once more within reach:
his voice—my father
unwell, won’t speak.
In After Rubén, Aragón finds a way to retrace many voices that were once crushed, once silenced, whether they belong to his father or one of the greatest Latin American poets in millennia. And that is a reward worth “more than the poems.”