La traducción chupa...

Estaba leyendo el ahora difunto blog en inglés (The Tijuana Bible of Poetics) de Heriberto Yepez. Aquí dos citas de un post de 2003:

Translators should permanently work the other way around they normally do. Not to continue using their knowledge of another language and culture to completely change them into their own linguistic and cultural codes.

...

You wanna learn another language? Write in it—instead of just using second languages to keep your original language sharp and well fed. You're never going to learn another language. That's the beauty: to never forget other cultures are different from us, and we can never, and should never overpower them.

Me encantan los "errores" del inglés. Me encanta que yo también tengo "errores" en español. Y los tendré para siempre. Y más vale aceptar que mis lectores que hablan el español como primer idioma van a ver mis errores y quizás reirse y quizás burlarse de mí. Y que está bien que lo hagan. Que allí reside una inversión de poder. Una inversión muy grata.

Si quieren leer el blog del Yepez está aquí.

Language makes tracks.

I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and an effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine.

Sirens an emergency far away that I will never then knew. Statement made my story. Arguments undermined it but brought up water.

We have a come a long way from what we actually felt.

Middle school library light, the magazine racks and the stacks. The light moving slowly up the wall in a recent story. Shouting nuns. Honduran refugees were on the Gulf Coast a long time before rooftops.

Realism, if it addresses the real, is inexhaustible.

Flaking paint on long rusted metal boxes. Fog lingered for days, made weather that called for taking jackets off, for carrying crumpled plastic and sweet musty gray material on forearm. The old man did not wave to you as the garbage men would come for the palm fronds. Obviously no one has swept in ages. Does the wind make those trees bend like that. Or did they cut them that way.

Language makes tracks.

Stuck, objectified, you hauled your ill-gotten prey through the wood and left stained-glass shadows. The word knew it was too serious for pigeons, for porn. The Victorian period is not past. Love between men is simply civilized, provokingly back into the bush. This wood that makes me feel so comfortable. Your balconies. The ice cream truck. A lack of dust. The curtains were made to block the sun. Pots of gumbo served with jalapeños, tabasco and Korea. If ever belief, then the cornice pieces the new colors invisible to these Daltonic eyes the sky blue isolated from roof lines, palm trees, rocks make out a torso lures passersby into the dirt where long worm tails hid from the coffee and goats. Imagine: the light did not wake me!

Imagine: never to be unintelligible!

"How am I to choose between all the subjects I have remembered because they once seemed beautiful to me, now that I feel much the same about them all," he answered.

Quotes from My Life, Lyn Hejinian: 47-8, 51, 101, 60, 66, 73.

Me too neither.

Fog from my mouth made into creamsickles on treecorners an imagined course of sinewy air a turn left across lane markings into the emptiness of gray and cross traintracks smiles and courses winter ornaments glistening metallic garlands metal red bronze and silver. Knelt down bending smiling through ache ¿Por qué no escribes le dije? No sé. ¿Sabes el nombre del lugar de dónde vienes? No. Sin embargo de alguna manera montastes esos caballos los de tu abuelo y el rancho donde vivías ya me hiciste imaginar como fue the first time you wrote more than a few lines. Made my eyes opened despite without to want wanting. Outside again the fog lifted midwinter heat wave again. Old wellstructured architectural hairstyle aunts of our fifties wander in the trailer park of pecans. ¿Viniste de quién sabe dónde para estar aquí? Me too. Illegal radio blares as Juanita's flashes by Doña Vicki's light turns as railroad tracks again. Dan said it's Christmas and the investigation took six months. What's six months and two days? The little girl and her sign, but it's not her birthday, es Navidad. The Flores, the new place, La Dinner Bell light changes and through to the tan orange brick. On to mingling awkward a ways away from winning make the time pass macaroni con verguenza, squash casserole with a side of damn never told you chilangolandía was next door to the mystery farm, huh? Now you no. Anyway, in the wood panels on the floor tiny shards around a small woman's screaming image, but nothing to do to rescue her. Laziness incapacity unknowing. Coral reefs bright orange red yellow steel flowers to break car windows policelady does nothing merging eyeballs and dissappearing shadows projected through wispy white doily cloth hanging blue cushions scare off resters. Am I part of the art? Let me out. I-59 north then to I-10 east made all the sense of exits and run down wood gray wood house stuck beauty tragic lustfully between feeder road and that bald head's BMW. Your mofongo made my heart sing, cachai? Your motorcycles dreamed of you before you could see. So safe there with your little wooden love book. Do you know the town you came from? Me neither.

U know yr a nerd when...

as soon as you finish classes (and after a little too tired partying) (and before a little too tired partying), you run off to the library to get the list you've been making all semester of books you really want to read:

My Life - Lyn Hejinian
Lost in the City - Edward P. Jones
Señas de identidad - Juan Goytisolo
A Journey Through Texas - Frederick Law Olmsted
If This Be Treason: Translation and its Discontents - Gregory Rabassa
Telling Tales - Ed. Nadine Gordimer
Gringos in Mexico - Ed. Edward Simmen
The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña - Dagoberto Gilb
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits - Laila Lalami

U know yr a nerd when you look down and think dreamily, That's me in a slice of time. That's me.

Turn off your cell phones!

Cell phones can also be used to spy on you. The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney, Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even on conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone.

- From NY Times

A cambiar

Parece que voy a tener que usar exclusivamente el español en este pinche blog, porque mi familia lo ha encontrado y ahora me quieren hablar del blog todo el tiempo. Así que mejor el español, pero lo más feo es que creo que pueden leer en español lo suficiente para entender lo que escribo. Qué lastima. Tendré que aprender otro idioma, algo menos ententible para el anglo-hablante. No sé, a ver si Blogger funciona en ruso o arabe o algo así. Y a ver si lo aprendo rapidito para que ya no me lean tanto. Qué verguenza.

Save Ourselves

Sometimes I tell myself that it takes a disaster, maybe even a military defeat, to wake up America and allow us to save ourselves or what remains of us.

- William Faulkner in a letter to a friend, June 12, 1955

Tis the Season

Estoy un poco en contra de todos, pero la belleza viva que pulsan mis manos me conforta de todos los sinsaberes. Y teniendo conflictos de sentimientos muy graves y estando transido de amor, de suciedad, de cosas feas, tengo y sigo mi norma de alegría a toda costa. No quiero que me venzan.

- Federico García Lorca en una carta del otoño de 1928 a Jorge Zalamea (unos meses antes de su partida a Estados Unidos)

Colors

What you made is light green flowers blue gray stones white tipped purple black striped feathers yellow broccoli chartreuse pine cones. Hunting around abandoned houses as the first Northern wind blew through wood covers windows eucalyptus plants too overgrown to unearth and stuff in the trunk. Found oxblood bulbs poking out for fall. Stole them and planted them ready for oversummering and next fall explosions. You made colors for the first time like universe taking mercy on colorblind dreamers.

En la biblioteca

Scanning for PQ6578 or GT7001, leaned over to see the lowest rung of the shelves, searching for that last book on my list for the evening. Bent over with my back, sprung back up, fast in a great arc and momentarily saw a Book on the shelves:

The Present Will Last a Very Long Time

Eyes flip frantically across spines. Where did that cross my vision? Lost by now. The Book already gone, disappeared.

Baby

Makes paper rot. Headaches shrivel and dissolve. Turns off computers. Cyber fades. When you ran to hug me, I dropped to one knee, swept you up, your laughing delighted. Delight was a word of light and honey. The smell like indissoluble yellow. Like a way out.

El día después

Wanting to go already. Let it down already. Already the coldness, if only. Funny, I know, how my nose doesn't stop running. Sad, I know, how already not here to pick up the tissues.

Janitors win!

Houston janitors ended a monthlong strike today against the city's five major cleaning companies after reaching a tentative agreement that will guarantee higher wages, more work hours and medical benefits.

More here.

L.A.

Quiero vivir en Los Ángeles. Watch the L Word like a maniac. Listen to KCRW radio from Santa Monica. Want to live in an airy apartment in Echo Park with views of Downtown and the Hollywood sign. Soundtrack for working in the window: Without Gravity, Decemberists, Tom Waits, Joanna Newsome. KCRW. The grass is always greener. But in this case, maybe it is.

Still editing the translation of El corrido de Dante.

Día de los muertos

Hicimos un altár para mi abuelo, William Donohue, y para Freddy Fender. A. trajo fotos de sus abuelitas. S. trajo una foto de Hell Girl, una amiga que se nos murió recién. En su convivencia, sale una verdad previamente escondida, opino yo. Granpa, Freddy, las abuelitas de A., Hell Girl. In the coming together, the sharing space, a previously hidden truth comes to light.
El papel picado que hizo JorgeFreddy
Mi abuelo materno
Ofrendas

Why

Writing makes motion.

Write to doubt, to make mistakes, to search and experiment, to imagine the possibility of saying "no" to authority.

Without writing, all is frozen.

No doubt, no making mistakes (or anything else), stagnated and repetitive, closed down to all thought, always "yes" downbeat, downtrodden, a slack rope.

(Paraphrasing Ignazio Silone on Lornadice.)