Translating 'Bizitzak' ('Life')
Amaia Gabantxo writes: The translation of this poem took some chiselling away of initial translation choices that were too elaborate. In the original Atxaga inhabits the nature of things, an inside outsider. He recollects the thoughts of natures different from his own effortlessly, and reflects on them with ease. ‘Bizitzak’ opens rather harshly: ‘Bizitzak ez du etsitzen / ezpada muga latzetan; / ezpadu Ohianarekin egiten amets, egiten du Desertuarekin’ (‘Life will only hold on/ to the harshest of frontiers/ when it doesn’t dream of the Jungle/ it dreams of the desert’). It is through the abundance of ‘ch’ sounds that he achieves this effect. In terms of sound it is a very powerful opening, containing the echo of an important statement.
In my translation I try to maintain that strangeness and sparseness; thus my opening stanza becomes ‘Life knows only thorny extremes. / When not Jungle / Desert. / It dreams no more’. I made up for the lack of harsh sounds with the inclusion of the idea of ‘thorny extremes’, which I thought was harshly juxtaposed and strange-sounding. The line ‘It dreams no more’ closes the stanza with a gravitas similar to that of the original text.
In stanzas two, three and four, the poet enumerates his innermost wishes, wishes for the absolute, for September, the Sun, the Night. In stanza five, he confesses to the dogmatism of his heart, which will only accept an ‘all or nothing at all’ view of life.
As in the hedgehog poem, in ‘Bizitzak’ Atxaga makes a recipient and ally of Nature. There is a lack of control as to what the poet’s own nature is in these two poems. The sparse words, aligned precariously along the page, reflect that instability in the English version. Like September, Sun and Night, the poet wishes for an extreme version of himself, and it is his misfortune that he will not be happy with less.
But it is his own heartbeat that determines this condition.
There is a beautiful achievement in cadence, particularly in the first three lines of the last stanza, for ‘egundo ez’ (‘never’) and ‘beti beti’ (‘always’) evoke the beating of the heart. When coupled with the verb ‘esan+ka’ (‘esan’ means ‘to say’, the suffix ‘ka’ implies infinite repetition, and it would be something like ‘says and says and says . . .’) and placed next to ‘Bihotza’ (heart), the image of a heart beating ‘never, never’ – ‘always, always’ – ‘never, never’ – ‘always, always’ ad infinitum is emphasised. So my solution to this beautiful but problematic image was to reproduce this repetition, literally, in the English poem.
Atxaga uses capitals for all the nouns that people this poem, thus subverting their meaning, their position in the poem; perhaps calling for a more intimate understanding of them: ‘Desert’ as the essence of the desert? ‘Jungle’ as the essence of the jungle? The use of capitals implies these are their names. This contributes to the sensory tangibility of the poem, to its ability to transcend the page; and thus, at a subconscious level, those capitals become heartbeats.
Page(s) 13-14
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