LITERATURE | TRANSLATION

Translating Poetry: Lorca’s ‘La Monja Gitana’ (‘The Gypsy Nun’)

And some reflections on the creative process

What thoughts and feelings lie behind those hooded eyes? (Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash)

Writing poetry is a demanding task. Translating it is somewhat easier in one sense — the bones are already there — but harder in another. You have to sculpt the flesh back onto them, to create a pleasing, if rudimentary, clay likeness. Rather than a hideous Frankenstein’s monster that mocks the poise and grace of its model.

Much of what breathes life into a poem — the metre, the rhyme scheme, the sounds of the individual words themselves, how they taste in the mouth and caress the ear — will almost certainly not work as well or in the same way in a different language. You must find some way of creating an equivalent effect in the mind and heart of the reader, while reflecting, as far as you can, the style and sense of the original poet.

It’s a painstaking and time-consuming process, and not one that I often tackle, despite the artistic appeal of the challenge it presents.

Translating Spanish is my day job, and tends to be the last thing I want to do in my free time. But I remembered the other day that years ago I had started work on a version of Lorca’s La Monja Gitana (The Gypsy Nun) for a literary translation competition, and must still have my original draft somewhere in the deepest cloisters of my hard drive.

I dug it out, dusted it off, set to work completing, revising, polishing, and am fairly pleased with the outcome. Lorca’s general themes of sexual and societal longing and frustration are timeless and universal. The more specific issue of repressive institutional control of female sexuality remains sadly relevant as well, from Afghanistan and Iran to Arkansas and Indiana.

As the subtitle suggests, mine is a deliberately free adaptation. There are plenty of more literal renderings available, in print and online, many of them quite acceptable to the ear. But I wanted to write something less constrained by the precise meaning and structure of every single line, a work that felt a little more like an independent creation.

In translating poetry you’re damned either way. If you stick to the exact same metre and rhyme scheme, translate every term literally, the result will be horrifically stilted. A crutch to help someone learning the language as they hobble their way through the original, but not something you would read of itself for pleasure.

If, on the other hand, you give yourself freer licence to transcreate, you also sacrifice the poet’s authentic voice, without — by definition — creating a fully fresh and original work in its place.

The task is similar to playing a cover version of a classic song. You want to make it your own, while allowing the genius of the first incarnation to shine through. And hope that it ends up more towards the soaring Hendrix Watchtower end of the spectrum, rather than a slice of Madonna’s ersatz American Pie, destined for the cultural dustbin.

Essentially what I’ve done is to abandon the strict octosyllabic metre of the Spanish romance, or ballad, opting instead for short lines of seven, eight or six syllables that simply feel like they offer a satisfying rhythm. I’ve also made some of the contrasts between the vibrant, organic life and colour of the world outside, and the cold, hard, penitentiary geometry of the convent, more explicit.

Most of us thankfully now live in a world where it is not commonplace for young women to be confined against their will in religious institutions to tame their dangerously free-willed spirit. In Lorca’s day, and his Andalusian homeland, that was very much a reality, and so I feel it needs some of the imagery to be laid on a littler thicker to make it more apparent to a modern reader.

I may have gone too far with that — I’m sure many Lorca scholars would be horrified. But that is rather the point — they are scholars familiar with the whole poetic and social context. This is meant more for someone unversed, so to speak, in the milieu from which Lorca writes.

There are also a few terms where I had to take greater liberties. The ‘araña gris’ is an image that proved really challenging. ‘Araña’ means both ‘spider’ and ‘chandelier’, and here seemingly has the latter meaning: a heavy, ornate light fitting suited to the Baroque architecture of the convent. But it inevitably also carries some of the scuttling menace of the spider as well, especially as the place is implicitly likened to a jail, whereas ‘chandelier’ suggests a sumptuous palace.

I opted for ‘cobwebs’, which is not what it actually means. It does, though, reflect a sense of lifelessness, and straight-lined, geometrical forms, which contrast with the swooping flight of the birds, representing light and freedom.

In want of an extra syllable, I turned Lorca’s ‘pájaros’ into ‘starlings’ instead of simply ‘birds’, as their iridescent feathers fit in with the effect of the light split by the window glass into its seven colors. They also have that sense of unpredictable riotousness which works well here.

I’ve likewise made heavier use of alliteration, which feels naturally sonorous in English, while ditching the unfamiliar Spanish assonance. And I slipped in a couple of puns that I cheekily couldn’t resist (crewel/cruel, sew/sow).

I suspect that an academic editor would knock those on the head immediately, but again, they feel like a natural device in English, and I think add to the sense of contrast between two realities that lies at the heart of the poem. Plus, it makes up for losing the double meaning of the araña.

The idea is, in essence, to create what I instinctively feel Lorca might have written had he been an English-speaker, rather than an entirely direct rendering of what he did write in Spanish, and how he phrased that poetically.

Yet, this is an insurmountable paradox — had he been a native English-speaker, with the associated cultural sensibilities, he almost certainly wouldn’t have written that intrinsically Andalusian poem in the first place.

Many of us tend to look down on films dubbed into another language as travesties of the original.

“That’s not their voice! That’s not really what they mean!” we complain.

But whenever we read literature in translation we are also hearing in our heads a voice very different from the author’s, and reading words that will always have a subtly or even radically shifted meaning or impact. If a translator can create a work that feels natural, that doesn’t jar like a poorly synched dubbing track but conveys the inner truth of the original, they have done their job well enough.

So here is my effort to achieve that with La Monja Gitana. I hope you enjoy it. A link to the original text in Spanish alongside a more literal translation into English follows.

The Gypsy Nun

For José Moreno Villa

Silence of whitewash and myrtle. Mallow in the meadows. A nun embroiders wallflowers On a backcloth of yellowed straw. Seven prismatic starlings Swoop through greying cobwebs. The church growls in the distance, A bear stretched on its back. How beautifully, how artfully She plies her crewel needle! What joyous flowers she yearns To sow in the yellowed straw. Sunflowers! Magnolias! Besequinned and beribboned! Resplendent crocuses and moons To drape the altar’s edge! Alongside in the kitchen, Five blood oranges sweeten. The five deep wounds of martyred Christ Cut deep in Almeria. Two riders canter wildly Across her novice pupils. A final, stifled murmur Billows out her blouse. She gazes at the clouds and hills, The parched and distant landscape, And feels her sweet, verbena heart Shiver into fragments. The steeply sloping plains Lie bright with twenty suns. The rivers rear up, racing, Before her dreamy eyes. She turns to tend her flowers again, And in the breeze, light climbs up high, Playing chess on the window bars.

Free translation by Matthew Clapham of the original poem La Monja Gitana, by Federico García Lorca.

Lorca’s original work, and a somewhat more literal translation:

[embed]García Lorca, Federico: The Gypsy Nun (La Monja Gitana in English) We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your…www.babelmatrix.org