Translating Political Reality from Contemporary Poetry - Panel Introduction

Here we are today, Bradley Schmidt, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Ed Morin, and myself, Julia Leverone, at the end of this fabulous and supportive conference, in pursuit of the politics in translation. Our panel is called "Translating Political Reality from Contemporary Poetry." Since we are four, I will contribute a lengthier introduction (not longer than a paper, I promise) that touches on my own translation work.

Edward Morin has had his poems and co-translations of Greek, Chinese, and Arabic poems in many journals. He edited and co-translated The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry Since the Cultural Revolution (University of Hawaii Press). He has co-translated book manuscripts of poems by Cai Qijiao and Yousef el Qedra.

Dr. Moscaliuc will be discussing the political subtexts of communist and post-communist Romania in her translation work. She will be focusing on the work of Carmelia Leonte in The Hiss of the Viper, which appeared from Carnegie Mellon University Press last month.

Bradley Schmidt lives and works in Leipzig, Germany as a translator and instructor, and is an Assistant Editor at Asymptote. Bradley will be talking about poetry from the German Democratic Republic and how depictions of the political in German poetry shifted after the fall of the Berlin Wall.



We have answered to pleasure, whether from our love for the language or culture or the authors and their stories or the poems we have chosen; we have made versions in English that are, now, also our own creative works. As Gayatri Spivak stipulates, we have surrendered to the texts. We will be thinking about and discussing how in our processes of translation we read, researched, and returned politics to the poems that we see as so implicated.

One of the exceptional capacities of translation is to almost automatically enter a work into discourse. It is certainly harder to recognize oneself as separate when merely reading (merely, as if we are such superior readers). Our languages and agendas become very apparent in the act of translation. It's part of our task, right, to see ourselves, to see our audiences, see and adjust. That's the vessel's role. And then there's the original with its own circumstances and dealings, and subsequently there are questions we have to ask what those discourses were, what the poetry was speaking to.

In the development of my own translation work I have fallen in love with the poems and the story of the original author I have chosen, who came to me indirectly through researching another poet. Francisco Urondo was an incredibly binary individual in his national political and literary context; he was a prolific writer, tightly knit with other writers and journalists, and an intellectual; and he was also a militant captain in the Argentine guerrilla organization Montoneros. His simultaneity was not something he advertised to the separate groups; each were somewhat antagonistic in theory, though many other writers were revolutionaries in Argentina and other Latin American countries. Actually, his testing of the Montoneros' tolerance for different values—in his case, via his relationship with a compañera outside of marriage—resulted in Urondo's transfer to Mendoza, which was a particularly dangerous place for him to be. He was recognized there as a militant and a subversive by the police, chased down, and killed. This was three months into the 1976 dictatorship.

Urondo's story has twists and layers, is nearly unbelievable, is devastating. His literary production had only twenty years of development. In that time, he increasingly accommodated his political ideology as he himself became more involved, denouncing the growing harms of the Argentine state, including contesting its regime of silence. His writing was part of a larger movement in Latin American poetry to become conversational, to be unavoidable in its engagement with difficult truth. It witnessed and formed memory. Urondo's project was pervasive in his writing; so it was in his life. More than that, it is evident that politics and art were inseparable for him, and his critics have noted the same. His politics manifested in long lines, in naming, in commentary; and in frankness, humor, and pain.

I deal with this in varying methods, try not to and most times don't feel guilty for adding words in explanation, rearranging the order of delivery of information, or cutting small pieces from the originals in order to promote cohesion and sound. Here are three lines I have broken and shaped into efficacy; they read, "The wild birds will take flight, the islands will defeat / words: sacred silence over the earth. // Then we will go towards the fire." The last line in the Spanish includes four extra words—so more faithfully, it would read, "Then we will go towards the fire with the great heretics." Not only is the last line grander, more resonant and transportable, but it coheres better in metrical beats to the rest of the poem, which I also break up from the original prose lines.

Much of his politics lies in abstractions and terminology—words like red, defeat, light, eternity—and keeping that consistency throughout my collection of Urondo's poems in translation is important like maintaining a certain imagistic sharpness in Dante's translations is important. As translators, maintaining a tone and a style over content in any poem's context is the bane and beauty of our existence. Is translating political poetry different? We must remember that the negotiation of material onto the page was the initiating process that is our task to comprehend—by asking, what politics surrounded the act of writing, surrounded the author? How far did the political project extend in the world outside of the writing?

How do we as translators interact with the politics of the original authors? Are we subsumed, method-acting carriers of the same ideas while involved in a translation project? Should we be objective and refrain from adapting the politics in order to fairly represent it? Feel or be fair? Our panel's title makes use of the preposition "from," which suggests distance. Instead of holding poetry and politics as distant, rather I mean to observe how we as translators deal with original politics as an element in which we might not be so easily or immediately fluent in our present moment and place.

Our translations come from works of countries spanning from China to Romania to Germany and to Argentina, offering an interestingly representative but by no means comprehensive arc of politics. I am very much looking forward to these talks and explorations of how politics have been translated; how they've been regarded by us as translators. A factor in these is who we are and how our affiliations come to bear on our translation work. Do we have a discourse with the originals? Why have we translated political writing? And though the contexts for each of our original poetries are contemporary, not all of them occurred flush to the present moment—so time and place are variables. What can our understandings of the originals teach us about current and future political writing? What can our translations into English teach us about maneuvering politics in our current literary production?

We have committed to poems, those transportable, flexible, memory-inducing things. And served poetry; and made poetry. Let's turn now to hear from the panelists about their experiences with politics in poetry.







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