The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet transed. by John Rutherford (review)

The vexed issue of literary translation has stimulated the minds of a wide diversity of writers and critical theorists. From John Dryden to Paula Gunn Allen, Jorge Luis Borges to Houston A. Baker Jr., Joachim du Bellay to John Knox, many figures have sought to celebrate and denigrate, propagandize and dismiss, interrogate and explicate the act of modulating text from one language into another. This is unsurprising, if we consider what translation entails. Incorporating principally engagement and interchange between two discrete languages, it also involves engagement and interchange between texts, writers, cultural contexts of production, and even reader responses. While grimly rendered in David Wyllie's translation as "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin," the first line in the original of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis purportedly had its first German-speaking readers rolling around the floor in fits of laughter, exemplifying how the moving of one piece of writing from one language to another can have a profound effect on its reception.

Complexities accompanying the act of translation are doubly intensified when considered within the parameters of verse, and in particular a form as tightly-bound as the sonnet. For here, as John Rutherford observes in his new edited collection of Spanish Golden Age poetry, the translator is seemingly faced with a lose-lose situation: "Conventional wisdom insists that translators of sonnets have to choose between reproducing form and reproducing content, […] [and as a consequence] simultaneous accuracy in both areas is impossible" (12). What one gains in verbal accuracy or fidelity to the source text, one (almost inevitably) loses in relation to the key features of form—cadence of metre and musicality of rhyme.

In The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet, Rutherford seeks to address this dilemma of translation by adopting aspects of both methods. In the first instance, he attempts to utilise sonnet modes with a long tradition in the English language, namely Shakespearean and Petrarchan, allied with a maintenance of iambic pentameter rhythm. In the second, linguistic aspect, Rutherford attempts to approximate closely the source language while revelling in the "new insights" brought about by the differences between Spanish and English. "If […] we think of the original work as the best that a fallible human being could manage in circumstances that were inevitably trammelled by linguistic, cultural and personal limitations," writes Rutherford, "our attitude to literary translation will be different" (13). Ultimately the author attempts to "rewrite" the poems of lyricist such as Garcilaso de la Vega, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Luis de Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz "as I imagine their authors would have written them had they been twenty-first century English poets" (16).

Such an aim is, as Rutherford himself freely admits "immodest, impossible and perhaps absurd" (16). Nonetheless, it provides a context in which to judge the success of Rutherford's translation, for if the very act of translating itself eludes standardised critique, authorial intention at least offers (in the case of translation if in no other) a framework in which to consider the volume on its own merits. And Rutherford's work is a lively and engaging take on some of the finest poetry in the Spanish language. Perhaps the collections strongest point is its accessibility. Rhetorical flourishes inherent in the source text and made possible by the etymological roots of the source language, such as Góngora's hyperbaton, are reconfigured to interpose a readable, elegant syntax. Moreover, Rutherford's retention of rhyme is a fundamental positive—the musical qualities of sonneteering are a vital (in every sense of that word) aspect of the form.

Meanwhile each entry is burnished by a pen biography of the writers translated, detailing their life, works and influences. Accessible and erudite, these sections help to illuminate the sources of the translated poems and their colourful lives. Here, the uninitiated reader unfamiliar with the milieu anthologised learns of the close relationship between Juan Bosc...