A Re-reading in Translation

While sorting through a stack of used books at an outdoor bookstand the other day, I came across a copy of the latest issue of Revista de Occidente, a journal dedicated to arts and culture that holds a fair amount of prestige in Spain (it was founded in 1923 by philosopher José Ortega y Gasset). This particular issue caught my eye because it includes an interview with Adam Zagajewski, a contemporary Polish poet whose work (as translated into English by Clare Cavanagh) I have become familiar with over the last few years. Following the interview the journal includes five of Zagajewski’s poems in Spanish translation.

Zagajewski has become quite well known in the U.S.—he currently teaches at the University of Chicago, and before that he taught at the University of Houston. His poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” [“Spróbuj opiewac okaleczony swiat”; in Spanish “Intenta alabar al mundo herido”] appeared in The New Yorker on September 15, 2001, providing a timely (though unplanned) response to the events of 9/11. (You can read Cavanagh’s English translation here.) The tenth anniversary of that day will find me in Spain, and therefore it seemed fitting to read Zagajewski’s poem again, this time through the lens of a different language.

The first thing that strikes me is the beauty of the Spanish sounds. In the English, I love the repeated hard “a” of “praise” and “mutilated”—the echoed stress drives home, from the first line, the imperative character that runs through the poem, as it asks the reader to “try” and to “praise.” In Spanish the vowels are more rolling, joining syllables and communicating this necessity of “praising” by making the words aurally contingent upon one another: “Intenta alabar al mundo herido” sounds “In-ten-tal-a-bar-al-mun-dohe-ri-do.”

In English, what jumps out at me are the images of this poem—things that the poet incites us to appreciate: “wild strawberries, drops of wine,” leaves eddying over “earth’s scars,” “the grey feather a thrush lost,” the “gentle light.” However, reading this Spanish translation I notice—probably due to the fact that I have taught Spanish grammar for the last few years—the way the poem builds its imperative, from the somewhat passive “try to praise” (“intenta alabar”) to “you must” (“debes”) to “you should” (“deberías”), and finally, the outright command: “Praise” (“Alaba”).

As I recognized these different modulations in Spanish, particularly the subtle shading of "debes" vs. "deberías," the translation deepened my appreciation of its urgency, its sense of necessity: praising this mutilated, wounded (“herido”) world needs to happen. I think the poem suggests that this is (in part) art’s responsibility; art must extol, edify, and rejoice over this world despite its brokenness, it must eddy—a lovely word choice by Cavanagh; it makes me wish for the Spanish equivalent, arremolinarse, in Elzbieta Bortkiewicz Morawska’s translation—over the earth’s scars.

What about praising a mutilated America? A country that makes mistakes, goes into wars hastily, one whose actions in the world have often been imperialistic? A country whose Congress has lately been dysfunctional? I confess, being in the honeymoon period of my stay in Spain, I can find this hard to do at times. (Although, to be honest, many of the same charges can be leveled at Spain.) Zagajewski’s words in the interview provide a helpful perspective. When asked about the differences between Europe and the U.S., he responds:

En Europa todo el mundo está ¡tan cansado por la historia!... América, por el contrario, tiene la fuerza de su relativa juventud, los americanos aún están dispuestos a luchar. A menudo se equivocan, porque cometen grandes errores; sin embargo, el mero hecho de que los ideales de Homero—como, por ejemplo, la defensa de la patria—sigan estando allí tan presentes, hace que para ellos el tener que defenderse sea algo perfectamente posible y vigente, algo asumido. Y es eso lo que me maravilla.

[In Europe everyone is so tired by history! America, by contrast, has the force of its relative youth, the Americans are still willing to fight. They are often wrong, because they make big mistakes; however, the very fact that the ideals of Homer—like, for example, the defense of one’s country—continue to be so present there makes having to defend oneself, for them, something perfectly possible and valid, something assumed. And that is what astounds me.][my translation]

PS. On a tangential note, the title of Zagajewski’s poem in English shows up in this song by my favorite band, Over the Rhine--"All My Favorite People Are Broken." The picture in this video is dark, but the audio’s pretty good. 

Reading Photography: Cristina García Rodero "Transtempo" and Ruth Matilda Anderson "Atesorar España"

After a friend and I visited a photography exhibition in Valencia last Saturday, we saw a book in the gift shop entitled Como leer la fotografía [How to Read Photography].  We agreed that it was a book we would like to read.  I can’t say I’ve studied very much about photography, but I love to “read” photographs, more or less in the same way that I interpret paintings, considering the positioning of the elements in the picture, the light and shadow, expressions on faces, and focus (maybe akin to brush strokes in painting??).  I don’t know much about technique, but I do have some theoretical ideas.  To me, the exceptional thing about photography is that the image is captured instantaneously; it snatches a second from real time and freezes it, makes it endure.  There is something magical or mystical about this.  C. S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters that “the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”  A photograph captures that encounter of the temporal and the eternal.  When it freezes time, photography can point out the miraculous in the present.  We could also say that, by preserving a past moment as present, it unlocks a kind of “redemptive” potential in the past, revealing a new understanding of a historic moment, giving us an inside look at how things “really were”—things that tradition and textbooks might have missed or gotten wrong.  (Here I’m thinking of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who writes about photography frequently in his Arcades Project and elsewhere.)

So there’s a little bit about my “theory” of photography.  All this to say, I find it spectacular when I come across an artist who has a knack for snatching seconds out of time: when someone has the eye, the instinct, the ability to plan these moments—or, more likely, plan for them, and grab them as they fly by.  

In the last week, I’ve seen two exhibitions that got me thinking about all of this.

The first was an exhibition of photographs by Cristina García Rodero, a Spanish photographer who has taken some remarkable photographs of life in rural Spain (among many other things).  I had seen a collection of those images earlier this summer, at another exhibition in Seville, so when I learned that the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid was showing her work, I went right away.  I'm interested by a particular theme that comes up often in her work: provincial life, immersed in popular tradition and ritual, in ways that can be uplifting, comical, absurd, horrifying—and usually more than one of these at once.  In the collections I saw, many of the photos are of Catholic rituals, in which blank expressions and awkward postures reveal boredom rather than spiritual elevation, or where child-sized coffins (meant to remind the devout of their mortality) point out an aspect of rural religion that is at once very material and very macabre.  (This dark aspect of ritual seems to be a particular interest of the artist; she has also done some fascinating photographs of Haitian rituals. You can see some of them on her website.)  García Rodero’s touches of irony—kids whose attention is elsewhere during a solemn religious rite; a coffin balanced on top of bottle crates, a priest who appears bored to tears in the confessional while an old lady leans intently to pour out her soul to him, probably for the umpteenth time that week—point out the everyday, mundane, concrete, and incongruous aspects of religion.  In this, García Rodero’s approach reminds me a little of the Southern Gothic (William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor), as an artistic response to regional religious life.

The second exhibition was “Atesorar España” at the Fundación Bancaja in Valencia.  It was comprised of 345 photographs from the collection of the Hispanic Society in New York, which document Spanish life from the second half of the 19^th century and the first decades of the 20^th (incidentally, the period I work on in Spanish literature).  I was particularly impressed by the work of an American photographer, Ruth Matilda Anderson (bio in Spanish), who traveled to Spain several times in the 1920s to take pictures throughout Spain (with special attention to Galicia, the setting of García Rodero's photos).  Some of my favorites were her pictures of working women and children. In general, the images document the anonymous lives of peasants and laborers in pre-Civil War Spain.  In a couple of the photographs, the artist herself appears; her bobbed hair and modern clothing stand out, but not dissonantly, against the rustic backdrop.  

And to top everything off, in another part of the exhibition, guess who showed up?  My guy, Unamuno, posing for a portrait.  I just can’t escape the dissertation…

Los últimos días de vacaciones

I'm here! I got in to Madrid last week, arriving at 5 in the afternoon to a rather deserted city. Compared with the Madrid I left in early July, it seemed like a ghost town. August is the month of vacation in Spain, as in other parts of Europe, and lots of things slow down, or shut down completely. In a way it was a nice way to come back and get set up in my new apartment: streets and stores are less crowded, waiting time is at a minimum, the pace of life just seems slower. But it was also strange: harder to get in touch with people, shorter business hours, and several of my go-to places in the city for art, music, film, etc. didn't have anything going on.

Now that it's September 1st, things are changing. New calendars of events everywhere, the summer sales in the stores are suddenly over, there are segments on the news about how to lose the weight that you put on drinking beers at the beach. The study abroad program that I taught for this summer is opening its fall session. And I have orientation next week. Soon I'll have to ponerme a trabajar en serio [start working for real]!

I've done a little bit of reading and writing this week, and made some trips to the Biblioteca Nacional, in addition to working out bank accounts, internet, etc. etc. There has been some stress. But I've also been trying to explore, and enjoy the simple pleasures I like about daily life in Spain. Here are a few:

1) Running in the Retiro in the morning.

Not very Spanish-sounding, I know. But running is growing in popularity here, and there are always a bunch of people out jogging through the gorgeous park when I go. This summer I lived right next to it, so it was easy to get up and go for a run. Now it takes me longer to get there, but I like the little route I've chosen through the streets.

2) Salmorejo.

Salmorejo is gazpacho's slightly paler, thicker cousin, made with tomatoes, onion, garlic, and bread. You can buy pretty good salmorejo and gazpacho in the grocery store.

3) Fresh bread bought that morning from the bakery around the corner. 'Nuf said.

4) Pear yogurt. Why do they not have this flavor in the U.S.??? Yum. And kiwi is pretty good, too.

5) "Traditional" markets. I love getting groceries in the old-school, pre-supermarket "mercados." This summer I made visits to the Mercado Antón Martín in the Embajadores section of Madrid. Now that I live in the city center, I've been exploring Chueca, a very trendy part of town that has been gentrified over the last decades, especially thanks to the gay community. On one of my first days I discovered the newly re-done Mercado de San Antón. It's very Chueca--clean design, gorgeous stands with sustainable ("ecológico") produce, booths upstairs selling everything from traditional tapas to sushi, and a gorgeous "azotea" (terrace) on the roof. Maybe a little pricey for every day, but I know I'll be back...

That's enough for now. Just one last note: thanks to my friend Elena, I also got to head out to a local "feria" in her town, on the outskirts of Madrid, and confirm that it was a lot like a county fair in the States: rides, games with prizes, fair food... Oh, and then blasting music in the streets all night until it's time to run the bulls through them at 8 AM!