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The Lorca Working
- Wesleyan University Press
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The Lorca Working After Lorca is a puzzling mixture of Spicer's translations of Federico Garcia Lorca's poems and original poems by Spicer himself. Thirtyfour poems, all in all, which are interspersed with six "letters" which discuss Spicer's evolving sense of poetry and function like a kind of chorus behind and between the poems. The first thing to do, in seeing what After Lorca is about, is to decidewhich poems are translations and which are not, and to also see what Spicer has done as a translator and how the translations function in regard to his own poems in the book. So I am going to proceed poem by poem through After Lorca from a translational viewpoint. In the case of poems which are translations, I will point out the page number in the 1968 Aguilar Obras Completas. (Spicer, Robin Blaser tells us, used the 1955 edition, which I have been unable to locate; I assume the texts are the same in the 1968 edition and that only the page numbering differs.) Because there is some evidence that Spicer used other translations ofLorca poems while he wasmaking his own, I will also note if a particular Lorca poem had been translated and wasin print previous to 1957. While Spicer's translations are never imitative of others, existing translations may have spurred him to make certain interpretations in order not to appear to be imitating Honig, Merwin, or Belitt, etc. The other translations I have been able to find are: New DirectionsAnnual #8 (1944, about 40 pages of Lorca translations by Edwin Honig), Selected Poems of Garcia Lorca (New York: New Directions, 1955, versions by 18 different translators), and Poet in New York (New York: Grove Press, 1955, translated by Ben Belitt). Paul Blackburn did some Lorca translations in the early '505 which were to appear in Selected Poems (which were blocked from publication by This essay was written for die Fall 1977 Jack Spicer issue of Boundary 2. 9 8 C O M P A N I O N S P I D E R Lorca's brother because he thought they were inaccurate and inventive ), but to my knowledge none of these versions appeared in print until I ran 14 pages of them in Caterpillar #5 in 1968. The Bellit translation of Poet in New York is not of much concern in this context, as Spicer translated only one poem from that book, Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman." I have a hunch that the appearance in 1955 of not only the Aguilar Obras Completas but also the New Directions and Grove Press volumes had something to do with Spicer's Lorca working. Since there are only a couple of Spicer poems dated 1956, and since After Lorca is the only work dated 1957, it seems fair to assume that he became involved with Lorca in 1955 and completed this involvement two years later. Perhaps I should mention that the books I list above were not the only collections of Lorca translations in print in the early and mid '505; however only the ones I list contain poems translated by Spicer. Poem #i: 'Juan RamonJimenez" (Aguilar Obras Completas,/?. 384). A typical Spicer translation: the greater percentage of the poem is accurately, if uninventively, translated, with patches of mistranslation, some of which appear to be meaningful, some of which appear to be arbitrary . Perhaps the best thing to do here is to set Spicer's version against my own consistently literal version of Lorca's poem: Spicer version: Literal version: In the white endlessness In the whiteinfinite, Snow, seaweed,and salt snow, spikenardand saltmine, He lost his imagination. he lost his fantasy. The color white. He walks The color white, walks, Upon a soundless carpet made on a silent carpet Of pigeon feathers. of dove/pigeon feathers. Without eyes or thumbs Without eyes or gesture He suffers a dream not moving unmoving he suffers a dream. But the bones quiver. But he trembles inside. In the white endlessness In the white infinite, How pure and big a wound what a pure and largewound His imagination left. his fantasy left! Snow, seaweed,and salt. Now In the whiteinfinite. In the white endlessness. Snow. Spikenard. Saltmine. [52.90.50.252] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:04 GMT) The Lorca Working 99 The arbitrary mistranslations are easy enough to pick up: the meaningful ones may be more difficult to see. On the basis of what Spicer wrote in the third...