IN THE TRANSLATOR’S WORKSHOP

Jason Wilson explores John Felstiner’s book about translating Pablo Neruda

JOHN FELSTINER
Translating Neruda: The Way To Macchu Picchu
Stanford University Press £14.95

In 1980, after more than 20 years working on a translation of Pablo Neruda’s dense The Heights of Macchu Picchu, John Felstiner, a professor of English at Stanford, knew that he had broken new ground when he published his account of his slow familiarization with that grand, rhetorical poem. Re-reading his lucid Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu is to enter the translator’s workshop, and follow Felstiner’s to-ing and fro-ing between his sense of English and Neruda’s Chilean Spanish.

His challenge was to learn Spanish, put himself as much as possible into Neruda’s shoes, and read all the poetry up to 1945 when Neruda wrote this poem about his rebirth as a Latin American and as a Communist. As an academic, Felstiner also read all the criticism, even uncollected pieces of Neruda’s prose. Reading Neruda is already a Herculean task (the current complete works will reach 5,000 pages), but translating him, despite such intimate knowledge, is even harder.

Felstiner brought with him a love of close reading, a capacity for admiration of the great poets, and refreshingly, a kind of honesty often lacking in academia. As an American, Felstiner caught what Neruda meant in the 1950s and 1960s, an antidote to the ‘sterile and effete symbolism of T. S. Eliot and the Wastelanders’ (Felstiner citing J. L. Grucci in 1942). He locates Neruda’s visionary poetics as somewhere between Robinson Jeffers and Walt Whitman (the latter translated by Neruda), and often contrasts him with T. S. Eliot, whose Waste Land Neruda had read and digested while posted to Ceylon in Chile’s diplomatic corps. Incidentally, that reading of Eliot resulted in Neruda sounding so different to Spanish ears in his staggering Residence on Earth poems of the 1920s and 1930s.

Two related questions occurred to me while re-reading: has Felstiner’s study stood the test of time and is his choice of The Heights of Macchu Picchu the best Neruda? To start with, I now found Felstiner’s biographical chapters too Nerudan, following the mytho-poetic line that Neruda offered his readers in his memoirs. Felstiner did not write a critical biography (we must await Adam Feinstein’s for that). Second, although Felstiner is acute on echoes of Neruda’s earlier work in The Heights of Macchu Picchu, he gives little sense of how Neruda became Neruda, what he read and his implicit criticism of Latin American and French poets, as if Neruda came out of nothing, was unique; so there is little here about that bizarre mix in Neruda of the traditional and modern. If the early chapters have dated, however, the central chapter, finding and justifying an English voice for Neruda, is still as alive and suggestive as it was in 1980. But why did Felstiner pick on Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu?

It seems that he came to this Neruda poem through Nathaniel Tarn’s translation of 1966, and that like Neruda himself, Felstiner was charmed by that potent talismanic site, Macchu Picchu. Furthermore, he liked the idea that this was a watershed poem in Neruda’s life, a self-critique of his earlier introspective verse and a rebirth into a new committed self and poet.
Let’s begin with the Inca site, one of the tourist wonders of the world. Neruda climbed up to it from the station below in 1943, the war raging in Europe, on his way home to Chile after three hectic years in Mexico (he had arrived there four days after Trotsky’s assassination, befriended Diego Rivera, got Siqueiros off the hook and jail by sending him to paint a mural in Chile, and almost had a fist fight with Octavio Paz). Neruda found the jungle ruins so impressive that all that he had seen in Burma, Ceylon and India paled into insignificance. Here, for Neruda, was the omphalos of Latin America, the most important archaeological unit in the entire world (his words), a site only discovered in 1911, a focus of resistance to the Spaniards, and still mysteriously veiled (the Incas had no writing, and their knot or quipu system has not been decoded).

Like any tourist today, Neruda was dazzled, and has said so in prose. However, his poem was written two years after his ascent, in 1945, just after officially joining the Chilean Communist party, soon after the atom bombs had fallen, and a new war, the cold one, was beginning. Despite the magic title then, Neruda’s poem tells readers to ignore the ruins and concentrate on the wretched anonymous and exploited builders who built the Andean mountain-top sanctuary.
Neruda’s political vision had crystallised during those years between the ascent in 1943 and 1945, the writing of the poem. ‘At Macchu Picchu’, he said, ‘I felt Chilean, Peruvian and American.’ What Felstiner does not delve deep into is Neruda’s emotional Communist Party rebirth that is at the heart of the poem. The poem’s title, I am suggesting, makes the poem seem more exotically Latin American than it actually is.

A further reason that seems to have stirred Felstiner is that many other translators have felt the same attraction to this epic-ishy poem. Felstiner had read them all — H. R. Hays, 1948, ‘Waldeen’, 1949, Angel Flores, 1950, George Kubler 1960, Ben Bellit, 1961, Nathaniel Tarn, 1966, and Tom Raworth, 1971, focusing particularly on how bad Bellit’s version was, and adopting and criticising Tarn’s. But this reading of earlier renderings brought him up against Neruda’s sensuousness, his untranslatable use of vowel sounds.

Having read so many versions into English, Felstiner had come up against the old trap, Frost’s dictum that poetry is what gets lost in translation. In an implicit way, Felstiner defends bilingual texts so that, like Raworth’s prose version, the translation functions as a way into the Spanish. He doesn’t actually say that — his book, naturally, ends with his translation of the long poem, proof of his apprenticeship. But he is explicit about working against earlier translations, a mark of his honesty.

Another way of working with translation that Felstiner emphasizes is voice, Neruda’s incantatory reading voice. There are three recordings of Neruda reading Alturas de Macchu Picchu; once you have heard Neruda read, as I have, you read him hearing his voice in your head, and this poem is a litany. Felstiner solves punctuation problems in the poem by listening to Neruda reading aloud, his pauses. But there is a further problem concerning Neruda’s voice, especially in this poem, that Felstiner only indirectly faces up to and that is that the poem was written to be read aloud; it is declamatory, loud and public.

A word for word rendering brings you up against this language problem; Neruda’s words enter through the ear, not the critical eye; he is close to Dylan Thomas in this aspect. Felstiner, acutely honest, admits that at moments the poem seems ‘bloated, its metaphors merely jostling each other’, that they surprise him but are not ‘true’ so that Neruda ‘virtually parodies himself’ and Felstiner as a reader, any reader, becomes ‘careless of what they signify’. Here is the crux of the translator’s dilemma, for they ‘sound’ good when read or heard aloud, but mean little when read more critically on the page, especially Canto IX, without verbs, where the verse mimics the construction of a wordy Macchu Picchu: ‘Sidereal eagle, vineyard of mist. / Bulwark lost, blind scimitar. / Starred belt, sacred bread...’ and so on for 41 lines. The point being that the difference between struggling to understand what Neruda means and scribbling down a literal version doesn’t exist, for Neruda is building a city of sounds to be heard by listeners (already the words of the title Macchu Picchu are gorgeous sounds).

So a reader of The Heights of Macchu Picchu does not get any insights into the magical place itself, but into Neruda’s visionary self-understanding about new forms of love (moving away from eroticism towards a patriotism directed at his patria Chile and all Latin America) and new attitudes to death and work. In the silence of this mysterious site, Neruda discovers that he speaks for the dead workers, and the living ones who can only ‘listen to’, not read his poetry.

Felstiner’s 1980 book, then, has not dated when it comes to letting us into the translator’s workshop, a place of sweat and labour that is usually out of bounds. Yet, there is still Felstiner’s own version into English to come. Here we brush another puzzle, for it is also based on choices and whims (failures and mistakes), like all the previous translations, and the two published since (Jack Smitt, 1991 and Stephen Kessler, 2001 — the last not yet seen; so far ten versions into English of this poem).

Here are two examples of Felstiner pushing Neruda beyond Neruda: one is at the start of the poem where Neruda has ‘Hundí la mano turbulenta y dulce / en lo más genital de lo terrestre’, translated as ‘I plunged my turbulent and gentle hand / into the genital quick of the earth’ where the unique Spanish turning of an adjective ‘genital’ into a noun by adding the neuter ‘lo’ is interpreted as ‘quick’. Felstiner knew this was a risk, admits it ‘tunes up Neruda’s Spanish slightly’, but why tune it up, what dissatisfied Felstiner with Neruda’s Spanish? Neruda uses that ‘lo’ construction twice in one line, he didn’t write ‘de la tierra’ but ‘lo terrestre’, which the English is forced to ignore completely.

My earlier point suggests that Neruda did it for ‘sound’ (the vowels ‘o’ and ‘e’) not for sense, while Felstiner worked with sense, adding ‘quick’. The later version by Jack Smitt, who presumably read Felstiner’s, corrects ‘quick’ to ‘the genital matrix’, slightly closer to Neruda, but still ignoring the point that for Neruda the matrix was sound itself.

One more example of Felstiner’s tuning up comes from the last canto, number XII. From the metaphoric heights of Macchu Picchu, Neruda tells the silenced builders that he wants their passion, their iron, their volcanoes, that Stalinist steel. He says ‘file the knives you kept by you’, a call to revolution and revenge from the pre-Colombian origins of Latin America’s exploited workers. Then the tricky bit. First in Spanish: ‘ponedlos en mi pecho y en mi mano’ which Felstiner turned into: ‘drive them [the knives] into my chest and my hand’. He chose ‘drive’ when ‘poner’ is a basic Spanish verb meaning ‘to place’ or ‘put’ as in Jack Smitt’s 1991 version ‘put them in my breast and in my hand’. Felstiner was aware of this choice: ‘I make the decision — a risky one — that he wants to suffer the knives not use them’. How does Felstiner know? Of course, he doesn’t, it’s what he guesses, despite his years of putting himself into Neruda’s shoes. Unfortunately, the little word ‘en’ can also mean ‘on’ (‘en la mesa’, on the table, etc); so the line could mean that Neruda sought both self-sacrifice with a knife, and revenge, with a knife at the ready, metaphorically in his hand, but not driven through it, Christ-like. In the sentence, the weak Spanish verb ‘poner’ is governed more by ‘knives’, while Felstiner’s English sentence is governed by the verb ‘drive’, as ‘put’ is too feeble. But you cannot ignore Neruda’s revolutionary call to use the knives and fight, ‘la lucha, hermanos’, as canto XI ends, ‘rise to be born with me, brother’ and that’s a brother in arms, not brotherly or Christian love.

Here then is the paradox at the heart of Felstiner’s book; no matter how much hard work you put in, starting from scratch on the spot in Chile in 1967 to publication in 1980, a translation is still dependent on choice and risk, and second, that Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu has been translated at least 10 times in complete published versions because not one translator has felt that any other version has quite got it right.

I suggest this is mainly because Neruda turned towards, was reborn into, a bardic mode where voice creates the poetry, not words on pages. He wasn’t always like that, though it’s an element in all his earlier poetry. By the end of Felstiner’s book, I wondered if, like me, he didn’t prefer the earlier poems of Residence on Earth, for one of his chapters is an acute reading of ‘Dead Gallop’, a poem from that Neruda collection. Felstiner did say as an aside that Neruda’s ‘Widower’s Tango’ (my own favourite) is ‘splendid’; perhaps Felstiner was challenged by the long Macchu Picchu poem, but found the shorter, more surrealist ones finer poems?

At the end of his book, Felstiner admits to two thoughts. First, that he felt ‘a strange sense of having authored’ Neruda’s poem himself, that is, through translation he became a poet, and second, that his version is sometimes better than Neruda’s, and here I agree, where the risky translator is an ideal editor (at one point he regretted that Neruda didn’t have a sensitive editor). This brings us back to his ‘genital quick’ and the feeling that Neruda’s Spanish now sounds like an ‘uncannily good translation’ of Felstiner’s own translation.

Felstiner’s pioneering study on Neruda argued that a translator works at more than a poem — translating is a discipline that ‘requires every resource: history, biography, tradition, theory, philology, prosody’, as he wrote in 1998, but by then he had moved on to Paul Celan’s biography, and later to Celan’s Selected Poems and Prose, 2000. Re-reading his Nerudan phase brought me deep into the process of translating, often more exciting than the end product.

Jason Wilson translated Octavio Paz’s Itinerary for Menard Press, 1999 and compiled Buenos Aires: A Cultural and Literary Companion for Signal Books, 1999. He is professor of Latin American literature at University College London.