Women Poets in Translation. An Introduction

Forked Tongues The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the support of the following institutions in the publication of this volume: The Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, which has funded the research project on contemporary Irish and Galician women writers FFI2009-08475/FILO. The Asociación de Escritores en Lingua Galega (AELG) for their financial support to the translators of Galician poetry in this anthology and for their long-standing endorsement of our research. The Ramon Llull Institute for the grant for the translation of the poems by Vinyet Panyella, Susanna Rafart, Gemma Gorga and Mireia Calafell, translated from Catalan into English, by Michael O’Loughlin, Paula Meehan, Keith Payne, Theo Dorgan and the supervisor of the Catalan section, Dr Diana Cullell. Forked Tongues Galician, Basque and Catalan women’s poetry in translations by Irish Writers Edited by Manuela Palacios Shearsman Books First published in in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Shearsman Books Ltd 50 Westons Hill Drive Emersons Green BRISTOL BS16 7DF Shearsman Books Ltd Registered Office 30–31 St. James Place, Mangotsfield, Bristol BS16 9JB (this address not for correspondence) www.shearsman.com ISBN 978-1-84861-241-9 First Edition Introduction © Manuela Palacios González, 2012. All rights reserved. The translations printed here are copyright © 2012 by: Maurice Harmon (poems by Pilar Pallarés), Lorna Shaughnessy (Chus Pato), Anne Le Marquand Hartigan (Lupe Gómez Arto), Máighréad Medbh (Yolanda Castaño), Mary O’Donnell (María do Cebreiro), Celia de Fréine (Itxaro Borda), Catherine Phil MacCarthy (Miren Agur Meabe), Susan Connolly (Castillo Suárez), Paddy Bushe (Leire Bilbao), Michael O’Loughlin (Vinyet Panyella), Paula Meehan (Susanna Rafart), Keith Payne (Gemma Gorga), Theo Dorgan (Mireia Calafell). Cover photograph copyright © Arturo Casas, 2012; landscape art copyright © José Crespí Rodríguez, 2009. All of the original-language texts contained in this volume are copyright © by their individual authors. We are grateful to the original publishers for permission to reprint such texts as have been published previously, and also for their permission to publish the translations in this volume. Full details of the source volumes and permissions granted may be found on pp.183–184. 5 Contents Introduction by Manuela Palacios 7 Galician Poets Pilar Pallarés (Maurice Harmon) 23 Chus Pato (Lorna Shaughnessy) 33 Lupe Gómez Arto (Anne Le Marquand Hartigan) 43 Yolanda Castaño (Máighréad Medbh) 55 María do Cebreiro (Mary O’Donnell) 65 Basque Poets Itxaro Borda (Celia de Fréine) 77 Miren Agur Meabe (Catherine Phil MacCarthy) 91 Castillo Suárez (Susan Connolly) 103 Leire Bilbao (Paddy Bushe) 113 Catalan Poets Vinyet Panyella (Michael O’Loughlin) 125 Susanna Rafart (Paula Meehan) 137 Gemma Gorga (Keith Payne) 151 Mireia Calafell (Theo Dorgan) 161 Notes 170 Authors and Translators 171 Sources and Permissions 183 I speak with the forked tongue of colony Eavan Boland, The Lost Land Tides came and went with me listening to those whispering was it possible to speak with a forked tongue to sing with a tongue not soaked in milk? Marilar Aleixandre, Catalogue of Poisons 7 Women Poets in Translation. An Introduction The trope of the forked tongue hovers over this bilingual collection of poetry. It is primarily intended to suggest the relationship between the source and the target languages—between the vernacular tongues of Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia on the one hand and English as a lingua franca on the other. But the notion of the forked tongue arises also of the bilingual condition both of the writers and of the communities involved in this anthology. Galicia, the Basque country and Catalonia each have two official languages, and so has Ireland. Their writers’ mutual understanding in this respect, alongside these communities’ sundry political and cultural bonds, lie as the main motivations for the present selection of writers. In these four communities, the vernacular tongue coexists with another powerful language—Spanish or English—which has spread throughout centuries over many other nations. It is to this postcolonial condition that the Irish poet Eavan Boland alludes when she says: “I speak with the forked tongue of colony.” The Madrid-born poet Marilar Aleixandre, on her part, delves into the choice of Galician as her literary language, though it was not her mother tongue: “to sing / with a tongue not soaked in milk.” Historical and political circumstances have made of Galician, Basque and Catalan minoritized vernaculars, a phenomenon which justifies the necessity of positive action towards their visibilization and dissemination, such as the one this anthology aspires to facilitate by including the original texts. Translation also seems to be an apt trope for intercultural relationships. “The common language of Europe is translation,” affirms the Italian philosopher Giacomo Marramao in a statement that acknowledges cultural diversity and difference in the face of homogenization. The meeting point of the languages spoken in Europe—with or without a state, official or not, vernaculars or foreign languages imported by immigrant groups—is translation because, otherwise, there is no genuine encounter but submission. Translation is a performative act by which the Other is acknowledged. It is also a new opportunity to renegotiate our cultural bonds on fairer terms. The encounter favoured by translation necessarily entails some conflict too, as it is rarely a meeting of equals. The enormous gap between a world language such as English and the vernaculars in this anthology clearly illustrates this conflict, but the international language is also putting its extraordinary power of dissemination at the service of the more geographically-restricted vernacular tongues. A bilingual edition like this one circumvents the risk of the bear hug, which would consist in allowing the dissemination of vernacular literatures through monolingual translation but would conceal their languages, thereby adding to their further suppression. There has been some debate about whether poets should translate other poets. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz suggests that the creative impulse in literary writers who engage in translation might make their texts stray too far from the original version. Along a similar line, Madeleine Stratford has warned about those renderings which bring into focus the poet/translator’s interventions, while leaving the writer of the source text in an excessively subdued light, and therefore result in the translator’s promotion at the expense of a distorted diffusion of the original author. On the opposite side of the debate and contrary to dismissals that deem writers’ engagement in translation work as amateurish, the Galician writer and academic María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar vindicates the role of creative writers’ translations, which often result from writers’ affinities and mutual admiration, as a necessary counterbalance to the programming and economic interests of the literary market. The English versions in Forked Tongues do not take the original poems as a mere source of inspiration for the elaboration of substantially different texts. Each language has, no doubt, its own rhythm and musicality; its words often have divergent histories and trigger different associations; its literary themes have received distinct elaborations in each literary tradition. For all these reasons, the English versions are necessarily new creations, but they are also co-creations which do not hide their relationship with the source poems: they do not cancel or ignore them, but are attentive and incorporate their concerns and motifs. The English poems thus establish with the source texts an imaginative dialogue in a common search for beauty and authenticity, “contending only for the glory of the language,” as Osip Mandelstam has suggested in his discussion of Russian translations (in McGuckian and Ní Dhomhnaill). The majority of the Irish poets in this anthology had previous experience in the translation of literature from the community they engage with here, especially in the case of Galician and Catalan writing. In addition to their background in the source culture, most Irish poets have received the literal translations and, when necessary, literary and linguistic supervision from three specialists in the vernaculars represented here: Dr. Kirsty Hooper for Galician poetry, Dr. Juan Arana for Basque poetry 9 and Dr. Diana Cullell for Catalan poetry, the three of them from the University of Liverpool. I would like to express my immense gratitude for the enthusiasm and diligence in their collaboration with this project. Forked Tongues is, therefore, a communal, collaborative effort that substantiates the plurality of actors who intervene in the production and dissemination of poetry. § The unprecedented upsurge of women writers since the nineteen eighties in the four communities represented in this anthology has been one of the most decisive motors of change in their literary systems. One cannot deny the importance, for this phenomenon, of the long struggle of the feminist movement since the early twentieth century and, in particular, that of the pivotal second wave in the nineteen seventies. Women’s generalized access to secondary education, and for a substantial number of them to university degrees, has facilitated the broad and solid cultural background needed to become a writer. The gradual, though still incomplete, liberation of women from time-consuming domestic tasks and the commitments of large families has also been a necessary condition in the advance of women writers. Forked Tongues wishes to recognize these women’s contribution to the normalization and consolidation of their respective literary systems. Male writers should do well to involve themselves in this struggle for the visibility of their female counterparts and this is the reason why, while the Galician, Basque and Catalan poets in this anthology are all women, a number of male poets have been included among the Irish translators. The rise of women writers in Spain was in part favoured by the instability of political and cultural institutions after General Franco’s death in 1975. Times of change may become appropriate occasions for emergent groups to elbow their way into literary centres. Galicia, the Basque Country and Catalonia are recognized as historical nationalities in the Spanish Constitution (1978) on account of their respective Statutes of Autonomy before the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). With the advent of democracy after Franco’s demise, new Statutes of Autonomy were passed in Catalonia (1979 and 2006), the Basque Country (1979) and Galicia (1981) which have committed their governments to protect and promote their vernacular languages and cultures. The emergence of women writers in the nineteen eighties, then, coincided with a period of 16 to the deployment of a dynamic and strong literary system of publishers, writers, critics and readers. However, Catalan women writers have not been granted the visibility one might expect in what would, otherwise, seem like a normalized cultural context. A collection such as Corredor- Matheos’, for instance, which claims to be the essential anthology of contemporary Catalan poetry, does not feature a single woman among the twenty-nine writers born in the twentieth century. This suppression of women’s writing has made positive action necessary in the form of women-centred anthologies such as Carme Riera’s and Encarna Sant- Celoni’s. A very productive direction in the poetry of the nineteen eighties and nineties in Catalonia examined seemingly autobiographical experience together with its moral and emotional implications. This main drift persists in the early twenty-first century, although it is being enriched with alternative proposals, some of which are illustrated by the poems in Forked Tongues: “a more profound exploration of the narrative possibilities of the poem, which is now conceived with a longer length than the conventional epiphanic poem; an increase in the number of learned allusions; a shift of attention to a neater definition of the relationship between literature, reality and the statute of art; finally, a gradual weeding of the anecdotal elements in the poem in the benefit of a meditative style which may prove more apt for poetry of a metaphysical tenor” (Ballart and Julià). Although Catalan-language poetry is not limited to that produced in Catalonia and has also had important writers in the Valencian Community and Balearic Islands, the already broad scope of this anthology with writers from three Iberian autonomous communities has swayed me to choose four poets from Catalonia whose first published collections have come out in the last twenty years. Apart from being a writer of poetry and essays, Vinyet Panyella (1954) has co-organized art exhibitions and has written on painters such as Picasso, Cézanne, Dalí, Rusiñol and El Greco. For Forked Tongues she has selected two poems from her 2007 collection Taller Cézanne [Cézanne Studio] which evince her interest in the visual arts and their possible intersections with literature: Panyella reads a painting and through her verse we conjure shapes, colours, lines and textures; she considers her feminine gaze in relation to that of the male masters of painting in their rendering of the female body; she inquires about the process of identification between the subject and object of representation; she instils emotions in the silent art of a still 17 life. Panyella’s poems from her other collections are songs of experience which delve into pain and endurance, the flux of life and identity, and the blurred line between author and text. Michael O’Loughlin’s versions have none of the superfluous words or periphrases that we sometimes find in translations. While accurate and attentive to Panyella’s writing, his powerful re-creation of her poems reads like an original text. Susanna Rafart (1962) is a widely acclaimed poet and fiction writer. Her lyric style has been described as “elegant and delicate words, very well chosen and cut with precision for their place within the verse like the tesserae of a mosaic. […] free of dissonance and fanfare, vulgarity and outbursts, everything is said with the subtlety and tenderness of a cat caressing a hand” (Forcano). For Forked Tongues, Rafart has selected poems that dialogue with various literary traditions and, in particular, with female writers such as Emily Dickinson and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, with whom she shares a meditative style and a metaphysical yearning about the soul’s quest. Paula Meehan excels in her rendering of Rafart’s exquisite imagery and the Irish poet’s accomplishment in the rhythm and rhyme patterns of poems such as “Senyor, no m’abandonis a l’amor” [Lord, do not abandon me to love] constitutes a true homage to the craft of translation. Gemma Gorga (1968) combines the metapoetic creation that confers with literary traditions and writers from a distant time and space, as in “Llegint Matsuo Bashô” [Reading Matsuo Bashō], with poems about the proximity and complicity of bodies and the physical and emotional sensations they arouse. Keith Payne is especially effective in his attention to the pace of Gorga’s phrasing and the sensorial impressions of her verse. Gemma Gorga feels at home in the liminal space between language and the real world where they nourish and inspire each other. She construes a desiring female subject who is aware of her agency in shaping her life and her relations. Susanna Rafart has said of her 2005 collection Instruments òptics [Optical Instruments]: “[this] is a book of poems of rewarding convalescence. Convalescence produces guiltless inaction and envisages wonder, reflection and detachment from existence. Gemma Gorga opens for us a chamber in which stillness, as a category, conjures a different realm.” Although Mireia Calafell (1980) is the youngest poet in this collection, her work has had a significant reception in the Catalan literary world and has already been anthologized (García, Alemany, among others). Both in her academic writing and her poetry, she has been concerned with the 18 way the body is construed through discourse and with the inscription of identity, gender, sexuality and class, among other categories, in the body. She acknowledges the influence of former Catalan women poets such as Maria-Mercè Marçal, Montserrat Abelló, Felícia Fuster and Teresa Pascual, who have cleared the way for her as a writer. The poems she has selected for Forked Tongues interrogate still prevalent notions of romantic love from an ironic stance that suggests revealing comparisons with the Basque poet Leire Bilbao. Theo Dorgan handles sound patterns with a seasoned skill and masterfully conveys emotional yearning, wry humour, the sensuality of the body, and the pain of knowledge. Some stylistic features and thematic concerns may seem recurrent in this selection of thirteen poets: free verse and speech rhythm, the prose poem, the irregularity of stanzas, the splitting of the poetic voice, the urban setting, the meditative approach, the renewal of imagery, the inter-arts analogy, the ironic stance with regard to ideals —whether public or private— and the exploration of alternative discourses about the female body, to mention a few. There are also some fascinating examples of familiar patterns of rhymes, rhythms and stanzas which evince an ongoing dialogue with literary tradition, with its tropes and subject matter. This anthology does not intend to provide a simplifying and homogenizing survey of women writers’ poetry since the nineteen nineties that echoes the editor’s personal taste. 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