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53 The Self Made Strange: On Translating Tomasz Różycki’s “Iterations” Mira Rosenthal My awareness of translation as a vital activity began, as is fitting, when I left the country for the first time to participate in a reforestation project outside of Matagalpa, Nicaragua. I arrived alone at night into Managua, the capital city. Deplaning on the tarmac, I felt like I had landed on a movie set filled with ambient pink light and fake palm trees in rows along the perimeter. There were even extras dressed as guards in khaki who were clutching rifles and pointing the way to the terminal—only, when I asked one of them in English, “Where’s baggage claim?,” no subtitle automatically appeared in twenty-five characters or less at the bottom of my vision. The guard grinned and chuckled. And suddenly my classroom Spanish was no longer an exercise of filling in the blanks but had become something real and necessary for everything I would do, and this realization scared me. Not only had I been transplanted to a new land and culture, but I had also been dislocated from myself: I could no longer articulate my needs or thoughts or emotions with precision. Our group of eight college students from the United States traveled to a small mountain town to prepare transplant beds with seedlings. Every day we dug dirt and placed the small trees in rows that looked like neatly writtenparagraphs,runningonandondownthepageof land.Andatnight, we each returned to our separate host families, ostensibly to sow the other kind of seed, that of cultural understanding between individuals. But no matter how earnest I was about learning why the youngest daughter in my host family wasn’t attending school, or what exactly had happened to make her right foot lame, or why the mother in the family reused the same coffee grounds—boiled in a tin can and kept by the side of the fire—for an entire week, my Spanish was ultimately inadequate and my gallant attempts at )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 mira rosenthal 54 communication inept. Nor could I explain to them how I actually wasn’t that tall for an American woman nor that old to be single, or why my twenty-first birthday that they were helping me celebrate was so important, or what had prompted me to come to Nicaragua in the first place. And not being able to be myself, I became even more aware of myself: that I was a woman and single, that I was twenty-one, that I had chosen to come here, self-knowledge like the surprised oh! of pain in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about reading the National Geographic as a child in the dentist’s waiting room.1 In her companion essay “The Country Mouse,” which ends with the same story told in prose, the strange foreign pictures in the magazine prompt “a feeling of absolute and utter desolation” and the realization that “you are you and you are going to be you forever.” Such a thought on the fundamental nature of what it means to be a human being is “like coasting downhill . . . only much worse.”2 Although it is a cliché to think of translation as defamiliarization and dislocation from the self, I am, however, intrigued by the extension of this idea. As a writer, what draws me to translate is the experience of ultimately being refamiliarized andrelocated in connection to myself—what Vilashini Cooppan talks about in the context of world literature as coming to know our own selves made strange.3 When I translate a poem, I step out of my own habits as a writer, my own formulas for lineation, cadence, image, epiphany, and follow another writer’s voice and sense of form, a writer who can rescue a poem where I would most likely let it founder. And when I step back into my own poem, I’m never quite the same. This sense of losing oneself also happens with the exercise of copying out longhand the work of a poet writing in one’s own language, although the effect is exponentially greater when translating. In struggling to refashion sense-for-sense a poem from another language, nothing is automatic. Often I have said to myself that a translator is ultimately a very close reader, one who works to become conscious of the nuances in language that are often unconsciously felt and understood. Reading with a translator ’s mind heightens my relationship...

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