It's Always Raining Somewhere by Nicole Arocho Hernández

On Literary Translation

If the poems are hauntings, then
the translations are hauntings of hauntings.
—Raquel Salas Rivera
 
Cae la lluvia sobre los roperos de los jueces.
Rain falls on the wardrobes of all judges.
—Ricardo Maldonado

Poet and translator John Keene, when asked to pick an object that represents his translation work for a panel, chose a tether. That which restricts but allows movement. Push and pull. Give and take.

Translation is a series of give-and-takes. You are pushed by the author’s language to “truthful” choices and your language pulls you to other avenues of meaning based on “feeling.” Both driven by a search for authenticity, love for literature, and passion for language and its possibilities. Born out of this kaleidoscopic motion is a language of community. A language built by many. A language that transports many.

If I had to pick an object to represent my approach to translating poetry, I would choose the rain cycle at my grandmother’s house in Moca, Puerto Rico.

Humidity runs like madman.
Corporeal clouds cover the sky.
Sun hides in their feather muscularity.
Wind arrives in sharp gasps or long, supple ohs (or both!), always mischievous.
Thunder calls light as light calls thunder.
Roar and strike.
Usually late to the party, rain douses everyone, jealous that the festivities have begun without them.
Ferocious in its revenge.
After a few hours of rampage, the clouds part ways, sound following their tracks.
The sun metabolizes the fragrance of pour into forest.
Foliage forgets the weeping and embraces the delicious taste of aftermath.
Late afternoon dew on their fingertips.
Their mouths licking their solace vibrant. Indestructible. For now.

*** 

Growing up in a colony, in a Caribbean archipelago, in a nation inflicted with two language wounds, shapes your communication in cosmical, quasi-comical trappings. Poetry, what filled my grandfather’s notebooks, boxes upon boxes of interiority, is a natural vehicle for the language-wounded.

                Living in between English and Spanish, in a remarkable futurism called Spanglish—

                             Living in poetry, a radical geolocating language embodied in trust seeking—

                                    Living in truth, a work of translation from state to self to land to ghost—

Translation is my inheritance. Translation is where I have always lived. Translation begets my reimaginations, reconfigurations, recalibrations. My survival through dreaming of what’s on the other side of the compounding language-wounds.

***

Don Mee Choi, in her pamphlet Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, talks about Korean being a motherless tongue without power and a “site of power takeover, war, wound, defamation.” Using cornbread (oksusuppang) as a broader image of language in the neocolonial zone, Choi acknowledges the embodied expression of translation from an oppressed being, an oppressed mouth (emphasis mine):

            [O]n a local, bodily, tongue level, it creates involuntary longing, a life-long craving, which can easily be translated as a desire to be colonized, and it is certainly translated
this way at the level of US foreign policy, particularly at the level of military maneuvers. But my tongue deforms, it disobeys. I translate this longing, entangled with
neocolonial dependency, as homesickness, which is a form of illness, a form of intensity.

Translation is a labor of disobedience and longing.

***

Translating my grandfather’s work has been a dream of mine. My grandfather never published his work. I’m not sure if he wanted it published, seen and analyzed by strangers. His prolific creative output came on the tail-end of a period of heightened visibility and impact of poetry on the Puerto Rican cultural landscape. However, he was poor and living in the rural mountains, without access to the vibrant scene in the capital.

He might’ve been inspired to write first while truck driving in the United States, with his growing family in Chicago. Maybe it was those long nights alone, with only the moon as witness, that brought him a desire to weep. To say something. But, as a man raised thickly in machismo, he could only do so on a page. Externally. Disassociate. In strict rhyme schemes. Maybe it was this opening, however slim, that gaped his soul and brought him back to his island home, never to leave again.

Abuelo, I hope you forgive me for sharing this poem with the world.

***

My grandfather’s language speaks for itself. I conduit memories—living codex—into its next life in English.

 In the first attempt, I go with the gut. Trust the animal instinct. The ancient knowledge of clouds and wind; its atmospheres, its love.

Some may think an emotion as volatile and fragile as love should not be involved in translation. I believe the use of language is an attempt towards intimacy. A reaching out. In breakage or cohesive, human expression tries to share. To get closer. To love in its contradictory—violent, tender—multiplicities.

Abuelo’s poem, titled “A mis hijas” on the left, and my first attempt at translation on the right.

To My Daughters

Thank you, Lord, for daughters
Because they are a bounty
Giving so much fruit
As your law commands

And if they would have doubts
Of my love for them
Daughters that I love so much
In the depths of my soul

My heart is so full
My daughters are exemplary women
May the heavens bless them
They honor and adorn me

May time not perturb them
Nor change their temperance
May they be exemplary mothers
For the glories of tomorrow

If there were resentments
May they have full confidence
I ask for forgiveness for all my faults
So a new alliance may be formed

I may not have been the best father
I regret my offenses
I bless you in this world
And ask the Father in the Heavens
To shower you with His Grace

***

Abuelo Lencho was a poet of performance. When reading his poems, I remember the declamaciones of family celebrations; of birthdays, weddings, and holidays incomplete without his transformation into language maestro. Sangiving and Crihmah weren’t real without his magical oratories. Abuelo is the reason I am a poet. He showed me poetry could salvage what was breaking, even if it broke a little more in the process. He is my guiding light on translation.

Translation is how I communicate with my ancestors. Translation is a portal. 

***

Poet and translator Jen Hofer alludes to the multiplicity of body, of feeling, of refusal in the act of translation in her translator notes for Dolores Dorantes’ Style: “There is no healing. There is breath. There is body. There is tongue. There is the electrified space between two beings. Or more. Between two modes. Or more. Between two terms.” Hofer goes further and describes the intense, risk-laden landscape translation creates (emphasis mine):

           The more effects there are (and there are more and more effects all the time) the more ripples there are. The more ripples there are, the more valleys there are between
the ripples. Valleys where we can’t see what’s happening. Where we can’t see what’s being done, what’s being made, where to walk, how to breathe inside risk. What the
effects are.

Translation is a labor of refusal and risk. Of unknowing and its reachings. 

*** 

My translation process is rooted in a landscape of homesickness. My impulse to translate is the guttural demarcation of loss. What can I find in the language of my ancestors? Of fellow Puerto Rican writers? Of bilingual motherlessness? How can their mouths appease my craving for independence, for freedom? For liberation from a colonized mind? In my intensity, I long to breathe new textures to my island, which is my body, which is my tongue.

***

Rest is a horrifically overlooked part of creative-making. Writing and, by extension, translation have taught me that doing nothing, simply existing, is part of creation.

After a first attempt at translation, I let it rest. To unfamiliarize myself from the texts. Strangeness and its idyllic circumference: who I want on my corner as the downpour is about to begin.

For this second attempt, I focused on music. Not so much beauty as cinematography. Reading out loud is key. Hear the droplets begging to be released. The clouds thick, ready to let go.

 To My Daughters 

Thank you, Lord, for daughters
Because they are a bounty
With much fruit to give
As your law commands

And if they would have doubts
Of my love for them
Daughters, I love you so
From the depths of my soul

My heart is very full
My daughters are excellent women
May the heavens bless them
They honor and enhance me 

May time not perturb them
Nor change their temperance
May they be excellent mothers
For tomorrow and its glories 

If there were resentments
May they have full confidence
I ask for forgiveness for all my faults
For a new alliance to be formed

I may not have been the best father
I regret my offenses
I bless you, in this world
And ask the Father in the Heavens
To shower you with His Grace

***

 Translation has a never-ending learning curve.

Translation teaches you how to make decisions, big and small. How the small decisions can amount to big ones, somehow, down the line. How to resolve conflict (internal or other). How to understand language as more than utilitarian or poetic or image-driven or metaphor-laden or sentence-built or renumeration tool. How to hear the murmuring under the music. The story behind the narrative. The exuberance of human existence. Its depth, its death.

***

I save all my drafts. When in doubt of a choice, I take a look back. This record is my timekeeper. Each draft a historical language. An ancestor I can lean on, learn from.

***

Poet Nurit Kasztelan, reflecting on her work being translated by Maureen Shaughnessy, describes the reality-bending properties of translation:

            When one translates the mind enters into a different state in which the common impressions of reality become deformed. Translating, like dancing, enables one to purely
inhabit the moment, a here and now in which only exist the original poem and the poem that will become the end result. 

I enjoy this narrowed sense of self, of time, of existence while translating. Immersion in the movement, the breath of language is a delight that translation acutely manifests.

Sometimes I feel trapped by the possibilities of translation, its intensity. Kasztelan hints at how to overcome this: “Translation could be an infinite exercise. Having access to a living author when we are translating is perhaps the only thing to help us reduce the endless possibilities.” 

Abuelo, you are dead. I am trying my best. I think of the rain, of your voice, of your declamaciones. I think of your pride in my writing. I think of your laugh. I think of you. I cannot embody you, but I open myself to your visitation. Become the sky that floods the page. My breath as I swim or drown, lay or stand, get rained on or sunned. Glistening in your light. 

***

After letting the texts rest once again, I think about form and nuance. I contend with the philosophical and ethical questions of translation. I wrestle for the end of the downpour.

***

In translating my grandfather’s poems, I sometimes struggle with the content matter. In “To My Daughters,” at first glance I thought the poem was espousing old-fashioned ideas of womanhood, tightly tied to motherhood and acting “lady-like.” My first thought is, I shouldn’t translate it. And yet, this poem was written in celebration of Mother’s Day. By a Christian, older man with conservative views. Whom I love dearly. Who celebrated his loved ones in the one way he knew how. I wrestle with the implications of his language. This was one of the first poems my mother sent me from his large archive. I can see why she picked it. This translation is for Abuelo and Mami.

***

To My Daughters

Thank you, Lord, for daughters
Because they have been a bounty
With much fruit to give
As your mandates command

And if there are any doubts
Of my love for them:
Daughters, I love you very much
From the depths of my soul

I have a brimming heart
Because they are excellent women
May the heavens bless them
They honor and uplift me

May time not perturb them
Nor change their temperance
May they be excellent mothers
For tomorrow and its glories

If there were resentments
May they have full confidence
I ask for forgiveness for my offenses
For a new alliance to be formed

I may not have been the best father
I regret my faulty lacking
I bless you, in this land
And ask the Father in the Heavens
To shower you with His Grace

 A mis hijas

Gracias Señor por las hijas
Porque han sido una bonanza
Estan dando muchos frutos
Como tus mandatos mandan

Y si es que estuviesen dudas
De que yo no les amara
Hijas que tanto les quiero
En lo profundo del alma

Tengo el corazón muy lleno
Pues son ejemplo de damas
Que asi las bendiga el cielo
Me ennoblece y engalana

Que no les perturbe el tiempo
Ni que cambien su templanza
Que sean ejemplo de madres
Para glorias del mañana

Si hubiesen resentimientos
Que tengan toda confianza
Perdon pido por mis culpas
Para que haya nueva alianza

No habre sido el major padre
Me arrepiento por las faltas
Yo les bendigo en la tierra
Y pido al Padre de los Cielos
Que les colme de Su Gracia  

***

I revise at least three times. When I came back to this third attempt, I felt it. The flickering of the Spanish in the English. The English tries to make the poem its own while the Spanish fights tooth and nail to still be present. A terrain of multiplicity, of inclusion and exclusion. A field after being raged on by torrential rain. Hours upon hours of intensity leading to a wet flux of desire. That’s where I want my translations to live.

***

Before translating my grandfather’s work, I had mostly translated my own poems. In these translations, my approach is less… just less. In self-translation I create a maze with less rules, less expectations, less certainty. What will be the result? The returning? What does that look like? Like unclenching from canon. Wild. Alive.

Language is a body. English and Spanish are colonizer languages, each with their uniquely coarse, violent shapes and sounds. My tongue tastes bitter in each but with subtleties that make a translation from one to the other a place of revelation. It is thanks to self-translation that I have discovered I am more comfortable with the lyric in English than in Spanish. That English has most of my images held hostage. That Spanish wants to be prickly, sometimes even tragic without subtlety. English likes to take a reader by the hand through something difficult, using grief as a bridge, while Spanish wants to slap the reader, kick them into a muddy floor, howl itself free. Both want to break. Both want power. None desire the other. Both lust the other.

Spanglish is my true beloved. The deformed tongue. The unknown and its cosmic possibilities.

***

In self-translation, the poem may not have the same words, images, metaphors, incantations, conjurings. But they are one and the same. Island and diaspora. Ocean and sea.

English lives in my mind while Spanish lives in my heart. My throat their contentious shore. 

In my poem “Haikus isleños,” written in English and translated into Spanish, I can see the hurricane coming through the shore. Its shorn, ecstatic texture working with memory, feeling, intuition, desire. Transversal language. The haiku form kept the translation from flooding. Or drowning. Or both.

***

Most times I translate my work from Spanish to English. I have felt the pressure to be publishable in the United States, more so as I leave my twenties behind. With this poem, already published in English, I want an unruly Spanish to take center stage. I want the heart language to pulse freely, in its own rhythm, with less intellectual positionally. Less poise. I let myself be raw, something I have been discouraged from in the past. Something my Spanish is fluent in, something my English has been trained against.

Haikus isleños

Qué puedo decir
cuando mi garganta
tiene dueño

Soy engendro de
cuerdas vocales sin
música            sueño

Sobrevivir con
toldos           papel toalla
boca sin leño

Patria             nombre
en bandeja de plata
sin rima         vacía

My throat is the plat
form for a country with no
name

My throat is the plat
eau for a homeland drenched in
shame

My throat is the plat
ter for an empire with no
blame

Vieques explota
al mencionar ejérci
to                    quiero ser el

tomo que lleva
a la boca del lobo
to’ lo que detona

mi canción de
nota la maravilla
cerro sin bala

si me inundo
podré nadar a través
de mi podredumbre

traicionera
gritando deseando
volver   morir     res                    pirar

Me dijeron que
nací poeta           mi voz
una huella que

How lucky to be
an explosive, no more than
an expletive from

the president’s mouth—
en la boca del lobo
ticking down to sing

how US likes it—
with solemn screaming, mouth
bombing the nuclear

test: can you say A
merica without sparking
a flood in your chest—

to breathe their same air
while swimming across a sea
of rot

I have no more than
four words to my name and my
name’s not one of them

no cabe en la
lengua               anóni
ma        Ma,’ en la is

la          suelo sin
violencia            ya qui
siera yo re

tener el olor
sancocho en mi decir
abre el portal—

ve memorias
ve cuerpos          qué rega
los qué dolores

I am a poet
carrying time under tongue—
uncalled, unlike is

land Puerto Rico
the violence of naming
against soil’s will

Rich port / which portent
can embrace le lo le lo
lai— a portal to

seeing          knot of me
mory constellating each
body a gift a grief

tantos labios
luminosos          nacimos
con estrellas por

dientes   te di
go que somos ilustres
y no les gusta

nos marcan sombra
nos nombran Pue( )o ( )ico
ciudadano

Yo soy del mar    que
no se les olvide    el
español se a

hoga con lo que
borra: pena culpa sed
ráfaga               uno

Seventy-eight stars
in our mouths        we are born
incandescent, crowd

ed light until scratched
ancestral, spoilt abc’s
staining us crimson—

If I kissed the sea
with enough fervor, could I
forget English could

I forget this tamed sight
could I only remember
shame blame thirst first burst—

*** 

Translation is not for the faint of heart. Translation weaves itself into you and you may want to release yourself from its velvet grip. Your heart may say otherwise.  

*** 

Many translators talk about the challenges of translation. Of how to bridge two languages. How wordplay, form, and double entendre pose an incredible point of pressure in the process. Of loss. Of original and not. Maybe even of what’s untranslatable.

I like to think about gains. Not so much of bridges but of the collective knowledge of rain. Every drop is necessary, be it a spring sprinkling or a late summer torrential downpour. The clouds have the language, the first text, and they bless us with hundreds, thousands of droplets, the second text. The rain passes this knowledge to the ground or bodies of water, the third texts. The ground and bodies of water gift it to plants, animals, creatures, the fourth texts. The living gives it back to the sky or ground or body of water. We are texts. We are parts of translation.

***

 References

The first epigraph is from Raquel Salas Rivera’s essay about translating his grandfather’s poetry, titled “Raquel Salas Rivera on “On Churchless Sundays.”” Published on Poetry Daily’s Series “What Sparks Poetry.”

The second epigraph comes from Ricardo Maldonado’s poem “Last Advertisement for the Life Assignment,” from his debut collection The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2020)

Don Mee Choi, Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). Choi’s pamphlet is one I constantly go back to while translating.

 Jen Hofer, “Ex Existence: Notes on Translating Estilo,” Style (Kenning Editions, 2016). Hofer’s notes are at the end of the book, in both English and Spanish. When my curiosity for language fades, I return to Hofer’s words at the very end of her notes: “Language is a force. Language is a violence. Language is an aperture. Language is neutral. Language is charged. Language is an electricity. Language is a spark. Language is a linkage. Language a wedge. Language is nothing. Language is everything.”