Translating the Moment

BIRI 2013 #2: A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by C.A. Conrad


Books I Read In 2013
#2

A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
C.A. Conrad
Wave Books
2012

(This is a book of C.A. Conrad's (Soma)tic Exercises with the poems he wrote after doing the exercises. I read the book and got increasingly enthused and ended up writing an exercise in tribute. Here it is.) 


THE DEER AND DAISIES

"the / deer and / daisies are / not why it's / remembered"
- C.A. Conrad

Exercise: Find a site of dehumanization and trauma or violence or warfare. It can be something recent or something in the more distant past. Something close by or something you have to travel to. Terrorist attack. Drug violence. Perhaps a murder site. Perhaps a battle site nearby. Perhaps your own home. The thing is you should know right where it happened. Or have a good idea of right where it occured. You are going to go there.

As C.A. Conrad says, "The exercises are designed to fling us OUT OF our routines. Routine is what puts a cap on the imagination. [...] So the exercises give EVERYONE—no matter who—the frame to bust out of that routine, if only for a little while. The exercises get us to deliberately engage the world in unexpected ways."

Sit down in a spot where you can feel comfortable. First record the sounds of that particular place for a while. Like a few minutes. Or ten minutes. All the while take your notes. Just notes and notes. Think about what happened, but don't write about it. Feel your body in the space. Feel the fear of something bad happening to you in that same place.  Was the site a place where recent violence happened? Are you afraid something could happen to your body? Think about the ghosts that might run through that place, afraid. If you feel afraid in the space, write in that fear. If you don't feel the fear, then write in the feelings that you do have. Write what you see, what you observe, what you feel, taste, smell. Write down all of that. Try to make your writing of these notes match the rhythm of the scene, write notes with the same rhythm of the noise around you. Don't turn away from that noise. Stop and deeply listen to it. Let the writing of notes flow out of the scene in front of you. Don't feel bad about the writing not being good. Don't stress yourself in that way. Just write what you are able to write in that particular moment. Let the writing occur without getting in its way too much. There is a poem in there somewhere. Try to tease it out later.

This process of teasing out can be dicey. As C.A. Conrad says in an interview at the end of the book: "In shaping the poems there are often lines that jump out and present themselves as lines for the poem, yes, but very often lines present ways to entire new structures that were not even considered at the time of doing the exercise. Trusting the notes. Trusting too that at the time of carrying the notes around to form the poem is its own kind of exercise, BEING in the world with the notes. Does that make sense?"

If you lose hope, here is another quote from C.A.: "But WHY DO THIS? Because the world is beautiful, and I'm here, knowing its beautiful, and I'm tired of some people having money to BREATHE while others suffer. Suffering is a big part of what I look to for guidance. Suffering and love. Resistance is most urgent. Resitance is the real magic. As you soon as you set yourself down thte path of NOT being agreeable to the directives of others your poetry becomes THAT LIFE! It becomes YOUR POEMS, YOUR LIFE!"

And remember: "I never want to be anything but a student of this world who travels with other students, anxious, disturbed, always eager to imagine yet another kind of handle on the door."

What Fences Us In





Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Waiting room at the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: Two female patients talk about the nervous indigestion they're suffering from. One of them, the older woman, tells the younger one about her day-to-day concerns (the kids, money, health), and now the additional issue of avoiding getting hit by a bullet. The younger one tells her that the other night she felt sick and had to go to the hospital at dawn, that she lives with her mother, she didn't want to wake her up so she wouldn't insist on going with her, not only because of the inherent risk involved, but also because if her mother went, she wouldn't have anyone to leave her son with. The older woman says, you were really lucky, because if you'd run into the bad people they could've cared less you were feeling bad. The younger woman shook her head, yeah, I was really lucky, I didn't run into anyone and they took care of me at the hospital.


Time: 6:20 p.m.
Location: Waiting room at the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: The younger woman goes in to see the doctor, and the older woman talks to the receptionist. The older woman asks her if she's received any phone calls, like extorsion attempts to get money. She tells her the story of her neighbors, a couple of elderly people who were kidnapped by phone. On the phone, they gave instructions for them to leave their house and they went to a hotel and there, under threat of death, didn't answer any calls from their children. The kidnappers called their children and got a large sum of money from them. The elderly couple was later found at the hotel. Next, the receptionist tells her that a few moments before she received a strange call from an educated man asking her for the doctor, which seemed strange to her and she said he wasn't in, and that that same man then started asking her what kind of work she did there and other strange things. The receptionist was so scared she hung up on him.


Time: 6:50 p.m.
Location: Inside the gastroenterologist's office.
Facts: I go in and sit down on one of the seats in front of the desk, I listen to the doctor talking on his cell phone, it's clear he's talking with some family member, since he's tell them them about how he's been receiving strange phone calls. He asks them to tell his siblings to be on the lookout.


Time: 7:25 p.m.
Location: My house.
Facts: As soon as I get home from the doctor's office, I start to hear sirens. I run to check Twitter. Apparently a man's body is sprawled out on the street. On the same street I just came from, which is about two blocks away and where the doctor's office is. At an intersection close by. That all this had just taken place and that the police were showing up.


And I'm left thinking to myself: all this happened as I was walking around that area. Minutes before. Minutes after. A body in the street.


The metal fence. The tension. All of this that fences us in. And some of us insisting on jumping all the damned barriers.


Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions

The first book-length translation of the work of Mexican feminist activist and social critic Marta Lamas is now out. Translated by your truly.

The book is the first in a series called Theory in the World edited by Gayatri Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela, dedicated to translating, publishing and disseminating theory from the Global South. As the info page about the series states:

Despite the flurry of interest in translation studies, markedly less emphasis has been placed on the process of translating theoretical texts, especially those originating outside of Europe and the U.S. This series breaks new ground by translating book-length theoretical works and taking up the issue of the doubly marginalized text. Theory in the World asks a scandalous question: is “theory” different when produced in the postcolonial world? Has globalization changed the picture? Has localization, touching on transnational gender roles, embodiment, non-Western poetics, reading practice, and canon-formation survived? Finally, it asks how the classical questions of translation studies become altered in this previously ignored geopolitical context and looks at the ways literature and the pedagogy of the humanities take account of these alterations.

Exciting!

Notes for the Future, Obama and the Northamericans

I just got back from a presentation at the Book Fair in Tampico, Tamaulipas, México.  I gave a talk in a tent in the main square on translation and also set up a desk in the square and did free translations for passers-by: letters for kids to their English teachers, love letters y más.  At the end of my talk, I passed out cards to the audience and asked them to write their hopes, dreams, recommendations, suggestions for the new Unitedstatesian president and for the Unitedstatesian people.  I told them I would translate what they wrote and post it on this blog so that my readers would have a look into what people in one small port city at one hopeful moment had to say about los Yunaites.  Here are their notes translated into inglés:

Obama: I want a better world I want peace on Earth I just want love I think that's what everyone wants. Race or whatever color you are doesn't matter it doesn't matter if you're from here or if you are someone from somewhere else.  Now I want the best for the world that the war stops that the dawn breaks once again that the land provides fruit again but you what do you want...  - José A. Pérez Mtz 

Open your eyes.  Watch out for the Right.  Hope isn't everything.

I hope for more human relationships between you Northamericans and us Mexicans, I wish you a lot of prosperity.  - Adriana

Well what I think is that Obama is going to be the change because he is between two races his mom and his materal grandparents his dad of color so there isn't any mistrust of him on my part and I do hope that he gets papers for all the Mexicans that are over there and don't have family here and already have their roots there that he helps everybody over there all the Mexicans. - Rosalba Gómez Hdz - his American mom his dad of color

That the hope entrusted in the President elect of the U.S. is reflected in real change and that it doesn't happen to them like it happened with us Mexicans, the change promised by Fox never happened.

That he eradicates racism hopefully it happens since he's of color he could be the perfect person to do that.  - María Olivia Ibarra Hernández

My hope for the whole world especially those who govern the nations is to work, work and work to find solutions to worldwide poverty.  - Joel Guerrero Morante

(i am a grandmother) i was pleased that Obama won since it represents a change that was needed for a long time  - Maria Jesus Ramirez

That he can follow through on his campaign proposals and fulfills the hopes invested in him. 

Obama: Never forget the common man Never forget to respect equality of opportunity, justice for everyone equally Never kill anyone with your power.  - Martha Izaguirre

Portrait of the Mal


Today starts a new series on bad texas of occasional translations of blog posts in Spanish - these are posts that make me pause, stop my incessant interscrolling and leave ripples and eddies in my brain for days after. There are contextual and translation notes after the translated post. To start things off, this post from Guatemala by Javier Payeras:


Portrait of the Mal°
Monday, August 18, 2008 on chulo chucho colocho


I feel guilty each time I write. I feel guilty each time I finish a page and someone else reads it. I feel guilty for thinking that I can make literature. People who make literature become the literati. I feel guilty for that, for saying that I'm a literary person. This is a long series of guilty feelings which finally end up being pure rhetoric.

I once read a phrase that I liked, something encapsulated in a book that motivated me to write. Someone gave me the recipe for baking a cake and I burned it. Someone clapped for me and I sang four more songs. Someone pushed me and I slipped. No one warned me that it would be easier if I didn't touch the pristine, blank sheet of paper I had in front of me with my impure hands.

No one should be taken to prison for the simple fact of writing, just as no one should be taken prisoner for stripping off their clothes. But if one writes and then publishes, it is the same as leaving the house naked and scaring the lady selling bread: it makes a mockery of the thin line between the semiliterate amateur and the genius. It is a crime.

So becoming a bad writer is the same as transforming into a criminal genius. I am a criminal: I have published a few not very important books, I have called myself a writer, they have called me a writer and up to this date I have not used surgical gloves to touch or to say what I love.

I greatly appreciate the people who make me see things and who through their criticism try to make me be reasonable. I have several people who discourage me for my own good and for the good of literature. They accuse me of being all sorts of things: opportunistic (that was the first thing they called me), pretentious, degenerate, disillusioned, consumerist, mediocre, phony, cynical, illiterate, insecure, naive, deceitful and a ton of other adjectives of that ilk. Unfortunately, writing is the best I can do (which does not mean that I do it well). Perhaps the most difficult of all has been to survive. When I show up to ask for a job, employers look at my resume and laugh. It seems stupid to them that I say I am a writer. Everyone thinks that a writer is a pompous person and not someone unemployed who—if they so desire—could throw away the trash or clean their toilets for them. They think that we writers live in cosmopolitan cities, we have money, literary agents, we dine with ambassadors, we give lectures in packed auditoriums and we sleep with lots of women. So then they answer

—you know we already hired someone—

and they give me no other option except turning around and taking off.


°°°


Contextual and Translation Notes:

I found the blog of Javier Payeras a few days ago by way of another Guatemalan author, Alan Mills. (Yes, I know, his name is Alan Mills and he is Guatemalan.) I was reading one of Mills' poems in Plan B, an independent poetry project out of Ciudad Juárez that is publishing amazing poets from all over North and Central America, a kind of bridge between worlds and languages if you will. So I read a poem in Spanish by Mills and I was shocked to find a gringo who wrote such amazing work in Spanish. So I went to his blog Revólver and discovered that his name was simply some kind of fluke of colonial experiments (I invented an explanation in my head) and that he was certainly no gringo. But while on his blog, I read a post that linked me to one by Javier Payeras, Retrato del mal. This post grabbed me and left me musing. So last night at 2am when I couldn't sleep I translated it. This morning, Payeras gave permission to post it.

° The title I translated as "Portrait of the Mal." Mal is actually a word in English, used more in medical terminology as I found in The American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary. The definition is "a disease or disorder." I liked the idea of leaving the word mal there, because the noun mal in Spanish has multiple definitions (translation of the definitions from here) - 1) the opposite of good, evil; 2) material or moral harm; 3) misfortune or calamity; 4) illness or ailment. I wanted to capture the complexity of the word mal in Spanish and since I could think of no word in English that had these multiple meanings, I decided to leave the word mal which turns out then to be a decision not only to leave the word in Spanish, but also to translate the word into English, i.e. a medical term for a disorder. At the same time, I left the word untranslated and translated it. I'm a happy translator today.

uno escribe
porque
no hay ocupación más torpe y desdichada
que vivir.
Gloría Gómez Guzmán

one writes
because
there is no occupation more awkward and unfortunate
than living.

Translation by John Pluecker