Review
Federico Garcia Lorca Selected Poems
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
Selected Poems
Trans. by Merryn Williams
Bloodaxe, £7.95
Merryn Williams has taken on a massive challenge in translating many of the major poems of Lorca. It is a substantial introduction for the English language reader, divided into six parts covering all the major phases of his poetry. In all of them there is a radiance and sensuality that can dazzle. Where they spring up with the immediacy of the popular culture Lorca drank in from the fields around Granada, they can make the translator' & task appear deceptively easy. But in mid-career (and the end was so short) Lorca's poetry took a dive into complexity and turmoil, above all in 'Poeta en Nueva York', which bears the courage of his struggle to integrate the personal, the deep-rooted force of his own popular culture, and moral and political judgment in the shock of New York, in a way that expresses, prophetically and nostalgically, the pain of a civilisation overtaken. These poems, and others before and after of the same ambitious complexity, present their Himalayas to Merryn Williams, and she is not quite triumphant.
In the introduction, she sets out her stall for the Gypsy Ballads modestly: they are "written in extremely tight verse-forms which are almost untranslatable”. This modesty is wise, because building on rhyme and assonance, Lorca's line sings in a way that if it were possible would demand complete departure from the original in translation. Merryn Williams rides the radiance of the imagery, and on the whole it would be unfair to expect much more, though sometimes we get it.
Take the incantatory sounds of the 'Ballad of the Moon, Moon':
El nino la mira mira.
El nino la estci mirando.
That if a rocking repetition is the music that carries half of the brilliance of the Gypsy Ballads: maintain it through a whole poem with an elemental light, and you have what hypnotised the Spanish public. The translations mostly bring us the light, and that's often excellently done: certainly enough to excite me if I didn't know Spanish. And sometimes the sound supplements the images to bring us a poetry of very high quality:
The moon came to the smithy
with her bustle of white rose...
In the agitated air
the moon moves her arm
and shows, pure, shameless,
her breasts of hard tin.
That, and the next poem, 'Preciosa and the wind', convey wonderfully how surrealism is actually a very old way of seeing, as the source of dreams is an old source carrying its own inner logic, in this case of eroticism and sexual hunger, often through hard shining surfaces and what lies beneath them.
The major, mostly later, poems present a different challenge to the translator: they have a terrific impetus in many places, and a sensual grandiosity which is very Spanish, containing that danger of excess which Lorca confronted and carried off magnificently.
But it's in these 'difficult' poems that the quibbles begin to accumulate. Some of them are debatable aesthetic points; some of them are small inexplicable departures from the original; there are obvious mistakes; and places where important meanings run off the rails.
To take the 'Ode to Salvador Dali' as an example: it anticipates the New York poems in its complexity, a celebration of love and friendship at one level but a weighty statement about aesthetics at another, and particularly about rationalism and disorder and their relationship: “The man who thinks with the yellow ruler is coming...the butterfly collectors flee”. There are several imprecisions and disappointing losses from the original. Take “The horizon... joins great glasses of fish and the moon”. That's a very surreal image; but it loses the very Daliesque precision of the original. “Vidrio”, here, translated as glass (which in Spanish is often interchangeable with “panel” contains the sense of the intersection at the horizon of two plates of glass, one “of the fish”, and the other “of the moon”, which has the almost scientific clarity of a Dali. Again, clarity and sense are lost in the next stanza when “agua dulce” is translated literally, as “sweet water”. “The mermaids emerge” (from the sea) “if we show a glass of fresh water”, not a vase of sweet water. And in the next stanza, quite an important precision is lost when Merryn Williams has Lorca praising Dali's “yearning for everlasting limits”. I don't think that makes a lot of sense: literally, it's “limited Eternity”, “eterno limitado” - eternity with limits, which expresses Dali's driving fusion of rebellion, wanting it all, with discipline and order, recalling those psychological conflicts so strongly related to childhood and the nineteenth century that were so important in the birth of modernism and surrealism. Lorca is extremely clear-sighted about his friend 's neuroses and fears, as the translation puts it later: "I sing the pain of the statue that you hunt without mercy /the fear of feeling that awaits you in the street" .The second line is absolutely/right; but the Spanish of the first line has the sense, much more clearly, of Dali having " a relentless need to become a statue - which coheres better with his fear of feeling.
And the finale: there's a misreading of "Viste" which can be the past historic, "you saw" ; but it can also be the imperative 'Dress', which makes grammatical and aesthetic sense: not "you saw, always naked", which gives "pincel" (paintbrush), or Dali, the wrong gender, but literally:
Dress and undress your paintbrush in the air,
before the sea that's full of ships and sailors.
I think that has the sense of putting paint on and off the paintbrush; but you really can't be mixing up your genders at this level, even with images redolent with homoerotic suggestion.
Similar weaknesses run through the book - just enough to undermine the enjoyment of someone who has a good understanding of Spanish; and that occasional tendency tomake already difficult verse less clear is worrying. I am sorry to have emphasised the negative because Lorca's electrifying newness from way back shines through in many hundreds of lines, and we can thank Merryn Williams for that. Perhaps my ambivalence about this book is best expressed by saying that it deserves a revised second edition.
Page(s) 60-62
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