Translator's Note on the Sonnets

Translating poetry is a complex process. The translation of a single sonnet, for example, involves dozens of complex decisions, and as each decision may entail choosing one word from among several options, one could reasonably argue that translating a sonnet results from making not dozens, but hundreds of decisions. So trying to explain in any detail how one translates a sonnet is not a practical goal unless one wishes to dedicate an entire book to the endeavor. Nonetheless, it is certainly reasonable, and indeed necessary, that the translator give a brief accounting of some of the principles that guided his or her work.

It is a cliché for translators to invoke an allegiance to fidelity; but it seems equally common to hear its opposite, that fidelity is impossible (traduttore, traditore). And so I ask: fidelity to what and to whom? It is my hope that these translations will make evident my effort to be faithful to the reading experience. (Fidelity to the text is an illusion, unless the goal is to achieve a slavish adherence to literality, in which case the result is almost always a disaster. And the hope of being faithful to the author's intentions is equally illusory.) Of course, each reader's experience is ultimately unique, but all of these experiences share the commonality of having resulted from the evident reality that one has just read a sonnet. This is as obvious as it is significant. If we make no attempt to recreate a sonnet than what we end up with is a kind of gloss, in the best of cases an elegant gloss, but a gloss nonetheless.

In the case of these twelve sonnets by Manuel Alcántara, the reader will not fail to notice the tension that arises from the contrast between a frequently informal and colloquial tone and a direct treatment of the ultimate concerns that weigh on us: love, death, and fate. I felt it was of primary importance to attempt to capture something of this basic tension, and believed that in order to do so the sonnet form must not be lost. The question is a thorny one because Spanish and English have developed somewhat different sonnet traditions, and so the very possibility of translating sonnets from Spanish to English comes into question in a practical sense. Further, in translating these sonnets as sonnets I no doubt expose myself to the accusation of artificiality—that the resulting texts, distorted by the need to conform to a predetermined form, are somehow a less authentic expression of the original than would be the case had less attention been given to questions of meter and rhyme. Perhaps. The decision to use end rhyme in particular entails making some sacrifices, especially because there are so many words in English whose rhyming possibilities are extremely limited. But the opposite is equally true: had I decided to prioritize a stricter fidelity to semantic exactitude, the higher degree of "correctness" gained in this area would have been more than offset by losing the pleasure of reading a sonnet.

Finally, not wanting to end up with versions that have too much of the translator's imagination, and not enough of the poet's craft, in most of these sonnets I have respected the rhyme scheme of the original (always ABBA, ABBA in the quatrains; and CDE, CDE or CDC, EDE in all the tercets excepting those in sonnets 4 and 12), and for the same reason the traditional division of the sonnet into quatrains and tercets has been respected in the English versions. The Spanish hendecasyllables have become lines of iambic pentameter in the English, with some limited and needed variation. However, I felt that to vary too greatly from the original patterns would be to stray so far a field that the reader would be asking, as does the poet in the second sonnet: "Someone tell me why the old paths don't stay / in place?" We do, in fact, need new paths to reach a similar destiny. The reader will judge if the journey has been worthwhile or not. I am indebted to Daniel Murphy for help in...