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A Tribute toAmerica Ferrari It is a pleasure to offer an homage to the scholar, translator, and professor Americo Ferrari, on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Geneva. Those of you involved in the School of Translation and Interpretation are certainly awarethat in many instances two heads are better than one when it comes to translating a difficult text. In my experience, it is not uncommon for a poet to work with a scholar in the process of translating poetry. American poets are often, as am I, selftaught in the languages from which they translate. While we mayhave an ability to approach the performance level of the original in our own language, we may lack the vocabulary range in a foreign language, as well as a firm background in the literary and historical matrices out of which the poet to be translated comes. Americo Ferrari is the leading scholar in the world on the poetry of Cesar Vallejo. Suffice it to sayhere that he has cotranslated Vallejo into French, written a number of superb essays on the poet, and masterminded the definitive Cesar Vallejo / Obra Poetica (Collecion Archives, 1988). I discoveredVallejo in the early 19605. Over the past thirty years as a poet as well as a translator I have carefully studied his poetry, and published a translation of his European poetry in 1968 as well as a retranslation of the same poetry in 1978. In 1988,1 decided to translate Vallejo's most difficult book, Trilce (1922), making use of Ferrari's edition and his annotations to Trilce. I originally decided to team up with Julio Ortega, a Peruvian writer and editor whom I had known since 1965, currently a professor at Brown University. Our plan was to do a cotranslation, as a poet/scholar team. After working out several drafts of the translation, it became This piece was written for a special issue ("Melanges en Phonneur d'Americo Ferrari") of Cabiers de I'Ecole de Traduction et d'Interpretation, Universite de Geneve, 1996. 148 C O M P A N I O N S P I D E R apparent that Ortega and I had different ideas of what a Trilce translation in English should be—and we also had different amounts of time to put into such a translation, so we ended our association. Ferrari can tell you of the perils involved in a reading of Trilce, let alone a translation of the book. It is more like a new planet than a book of poetry. One is convinced that it makes, if not common, uncommon sense—that its density and bizarre associations do not boil down to nonsense, but, rather, register an imaginative synthesis that is still a bit beyond the reach of most earthlings. Such a situation for a translator is daunting, for responsible translating presumes a constant level of understanding of the original text. Once on my own, on planet Trilce, I discovered that in most cases, drawing on a battalion of dictionaries, the glossaries of Ferrari (1988), Meo Zilio (1967), and Larrea (1978), along with what had been written about the book, I could find my way.However, "in most cases" means that in some cases I had to make translating decisions without any solid ground on which to stand. At this point I determined that the only person in the world who could, and did, help me was Americo Ferrari. This may seem like an overstatement, but it is not. Ferrari wasthe only person I dared count on to be rigorously honest with me, to access sources—often a time-consuming task—that I did not know existed, and to then try to think through "Trilce knots" that for all we knew no one had ever thought through before. My first letter to Ferrari, in March 1990, contained thirty-seven questions, all of which he answered completely or at least partially. That exchangeis much too long to be printed here. There were several more exchanges of varying lengths, and the last, in November and December 1991, consisted of eight questions and eight responses. I think the clearest illustration of Ferrari's mettle, in this regard, is to share this exchange with you, offering first my question (asked in English) and Ferrari's response (made in Spanish). The roman numerals refer to poems in Trilce which are roman numeraled but otherwise untitled. i. VI: 4th line from the end: Capulide obreria. Is this phrase in anyway idiomatic, or, as I...

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