On Awareness

Every language has its special qualities, not only in the musical sense, but also in the manner in which through the language, a whole country interprets its history and expresses its reality—what it saw, what it didn't see, and, therefore, what it named. In translating a poet like Yusef Koumanyakaa, one has to be aware that he comes from the Deep South and, even more importantly than this, one has to know that he is bringing to life a form of awareness, which, though specifically his own, is connected to his family line and to the history of African Americans in the United States.

Although each language in some way establishes rules of order—that is to say, of succession—poets almost always seek to somehow upset the succession, to modify language and reinvent its possibilities. It could be said that, if languages are like chains of DNA, poets are (or ought to be) the ones in charge—I wish someone would put them in charge of something!—of making strides in the organization of information and the generation of new chains that might possibly establish a new order: an order that is not forbidden exactly, but an order that simply has not been imagined. Bringing the DNA analogy into the discussion of a poet like Komunyakaa helps to highlight the way he combined his memories of war and of growing up in Louisiana with some aspects of the style and the imagination of a surrealist. As Komunyakaa's world does not exist in Spanish, translating his poems means creating chains of meaning that can attach to those that exist in a very different historical, cultural and linguistic context.

A major problem that stands in the way of doing this is the fact that the possibilities of word association and combination in one language completely change or perhaps disappear in another. This rules out literal translation. Although, in a text on chemistry, for example, it works to substitute one word for its equivalent, in poetry this is not possible because when the association possibilities are lost, the poem no longer exists. Therefore, the poet-translator has to take risks, sacrificing some options in order to take advantage of other possibilities of analogous association that can save the life of a poem. In order to carry out this "salvation process" it is necessary to find the poem's core. This makes translation a process of investigation.

Before translating verse, a poet must find where the original's key image is, how the force of association within the lines was made possible and how it was accomplished; the translator must realize, too, that this is a process that is unique to each poet. The translator can investigate by focusing on syntax, or on image association. But what she discovers must be saved in the grammar of the new language. The most important thing to save, however, is what I would call the point of view and the context (Octavio Paz used to say that the connotative meanings can be preserved if the poet-translator can manage to preserve the verbal situation).

The verbal situation in Komunyakaa is everything. The core of a Komunyakaa poem is always the human heart (and this should be the norm so poetry doesn't loose forever it's ability to move us emotionally). The fact that it took him fourteen years to be able to write about his experience in Vietnam, and that it was after this that he was able to write about his childhood, means that his memories fermented like a good wine, and that what he writes is never a direct observation of reality, but rather observation enhanced by time and imagination. For the translator this presents more than a challenge; it also provides valuable clues about the mechanism of his poems, as she, the translator, strives to preserve the way the poems move in time and to make the main focus of the translated poems the special "awareness" of the world, or of the nature of poetry, that the originals communicate.

In a poem like "My Father's Love Letters," for instance, the...