"An Anthology of Spanish-American Women Poets"

[spiralsheep]

Liz Henry has compiled and translated "an Anthology of Spanish-American Women Poets" (also available at the link as a .pdf):

"Toward an Anthology of Spanish-American Women Poets, 1880-1930 is an anthology of my translations from Spanish to English of 42 poems by 25 women from 11 countries in the Americas. Each poet in the anthology has a short biographical note with information about their work and about the poems I chose for the anthology."

I don't understand Spanish so, as with most translations I read, I have no idea how the translations map onto the original poems (although I tend to assume most translations which work as poems in their own right are more, and less, than literal equivalents). Nor, as these poems have been selected from a larger body of works, do I know how representative the repeated themes and apparent inter-poet conversations are of that wider corpus.

Vaso furtivo by María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (1875-1924, Uruguay)

Por todo lo breve y frágil,
superficial, fugitivo,
por lo que no tiene bases,
argumentos ni principios;
por todo lo que es liviano,
veloz, mudable y finito;
por las volutas del humo,
por las rosas de los tirsos,
por la espuma de las olas
y las brumas del olvido . . .
por lo que les carga poco
a los pobres peregrinos
de esta trashumante tierra
grave y lunática, brindo
con palabras transitorias
y con vaporosos vinos
de burbuja centelleantes
en cristales quebradizos . . .

A quick drink by María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (translated by Liz Henry)

To all that’s brief and fragile,
superficial, unstable,
To all that has no foundation,
logical argument or principles;
for everything imprudent,
quick, mutable, and finite;
to spirals of smoke,
to thyrsus-stemmed roses,
to foam on the waves
and forgetting’s sea-mist . . .
to all that’s nearly weightless
for the wandering folk
of this transient earth;
grave, moonmad, I drink to all that
with transitory words
and heady wines
sparkling with bubbles
in the most breakable glasses . . .

Comments

[sashajwolf]

I've only been reading Spanish for just over a year, but that looks like a fairly literal translation to me. "A las pobres peregrinos" is "To the poor pilgrims", but that's the biggest divergence I noticed.

[spiralsheep]

Thank you. While I don't understand Spanish, I can read classical Latin so I can recognise common roots and roughly check translations and, of course, t'interwebz helps out if I rly want to know. I've been reading quite a lot of Spanish poetry, mostly Hispanic, in translation recently and I've discovered that my favourite translations tend to be those closest to transliteration. Interestingly, that's not always the case with less closely related languages (and origin cultures) than Spanish and English.