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Notebook

More translations

6/15/2015

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A second translation workshop happened in our Facebook group this weekend (which is an open group, by the way), this time tackling Julio Cortázar's "Zipper Sonnet." The group version hasn't been published yet, but it was great fun to lob back and forth various interpretations of both the overall meaning and tone of the poem and individual lines and words. I feel a bit like I'm looking inside of poetry by doing these – like a dissection somehow of poetry's core principles of meaning and sound. How do you make a poem that both means what the original means, and still has power and grace in its new language? This one is meant to be readable both from top to bottom and from bottom to top. A beautiful challenge.

The original:
de arriba abajo o bien de abajo arriba
este camino lleva hacia sí mismo
simulacro de cima ante el abismo
árbol que se levanta o se derriba

quien en la alterna imagen lo conciba
será el poeta de este paroxismo
en un amanecer de cataclismo
náufrago que a la arena al fin arriba

vanamente eludiendo su reflejo
antagonista de la simetría
para llegar hasta el dorado gajo

visionario amarrándose a un espejo
obstinado hacedor de la poesía
de abajo arriba o bien de arriba abajo


And two interpretations of mine, one rhyming and one without:

top to bottom or else tail to top,
this trail leads only to this trail
faking the climax and then the drop
a tree that rises or else fails,

he who imagines it another way
will be the poet of this contortion
in the dawn of a cataclysmic day
a shipwreck rising from the shore, then

avoiding his reflection, barely
oh enemy of symmetry
to arrive at the gilded portion

a mirror binds this visionary
oh stubborn maker of poetry
tail to top or top to bottom

*
upside down or downside up
this road is ouroboros
a false summit and then a cliff
a tree that grows and splinters

he who sees another way
shall be a poet of convulsion
in a terrible awakening
the sand heaves forth its wrack

he flees his reflection,
he harries equilibrium,
seeking a piece of gold –

dreamer, lashed to the mirror
dogged creator of the poem
downside up or upside down
*




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