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.
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I was delighted to take part in what turned into a group-translation party on Facebook recently, curated by Dave Bonta of ViaNegativa, a blog that I've been following for years. What started as an expression of frustration at his own attempt to translate José Santos Chocano's poem El Sueño de Caimán – "this poem is kicking my ass" – turned into a workshop, as several poets with varying degrees of Spanish fluency tried their own hands at the translation. I'm convinced that this is is one of the highest uses for social media. You can read the whole series at ViaNegativa. Here's mine:
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