I attended a craft workshop organized by the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild about translating poetry by Jesse Lee Kercheval. She’s Zona Gale Professor of English Emerit at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The workshop had to be rescheduled when she had computer difficulties several weeks ago, but it was still pretty well attended for a Zoom event on a rainy Saturday morning.
She talked a bit about her path to translating poetry. She grew up speaking French, but learned English in her childhood. For the past 15 years, she’s been going to Uruguay and learning about the language and literature of the region. She’s published both original poetry and poetry in translation.
She brought several examples to show the kinds of choices translators make when trying to share a poem from one language to another. They were fascinating and gave the audience the opportunity to discover how choices throw cultural and linguistics aspect of both the original and target languages into relief.
One poem, translated by her and by another poet was particularly fascinating to me, as I could see how the other poet created a more masculine take on the poem showing cultural differences in how men and women speak. It reminded me of how in Japanese, men use a much rougher, more clipped, kind of speech.
Another poem showed the challenges — and limitations — of trying to bring a cultural construct from one language into another without intersecting with different cultural biases in the target language. The word “barrio” has different cultural connotations in the two communities: do you try to translate it or leave it in? Even the title of the poem, which was purely metaphorical: do you translate it literally? Or try to capture a corresponding metaphorical meaning in English? Choices!
For many, many years, (more than 30!) I have been writing poetry in Esperanto and trying to translate it into English. I’ve also done some limited translation of English poetry into Esperanto. And as an undergraduate, I studied Spanish for many years. So this was just a perfect fit for my interests and needs. I’ve been thinking about making a new chapbook of Esperanto haiku and now I’m even more excited to get started.