TV times, I wrote in Dolce far niente, romanticizing the experience, typical of the Jurassic period in which the “head of the family” —who, generally, was someone from the Silent Generation— gathered his entire “entourage” for a certain period of time for the purpose of keeping up with what might have happened in the world, written in the past tense, unless it was breaking news—usually catastrophic—that deserved a live broadcast. Thanks to those moments in front of the screen, “for the first time, a distinction was made between where one lives and where one works. The former became established as the interior. The office was its complement. The private citizen who came into contact with reality at the office needed the interior to sustain his illusions […]. For the private citizen, that inner world represented the universe. In it, the individual brought together what was distant in space and time. His living room was a box seat in the theater of the world.”[i]
Despite the value that, much later, I can now attach to this “privacy,” the television, despite its totemic status, actually functioned as background noise. What is missed about that period of time is the event it brought about: being together with the whole family.
As time went by, the idea of the family as a “refuge from a ruthless world” changed, and viewers of the old domestic device fled to cable, others to the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok—replacing that old device with either a cell phone or a Smart TV—while the notion of “privacy” faded away. Paradoxically, it was then that I was able to experience firsthand what it meant to be a viewer of something that did not involve soccer matches.
Every day, after finishing work, I would come home fleeing from everything I could find outside, and then, perhaps to check that I was safe, I would turn on the TV. The nerds from the series The Big Bang Theory appeared in front of me. I remember with particular fondness an episode in which Sheldon Cooper had spent three days awake, searching unsuccessfully for a formula related to atoms. He was completely beside himself. Meanwhile, his roommate, Leonard Hofstadter, finding him in such a state of excitement, came to his aid at a shopping mall with the aim of calming him down.
Sheldon was very close to a pool filled with multicolored balls. When he saw Leonard, he dove into the pile of red, green, blue, and yellow balls. And every time he reappeared, he would look at Leonard and simply exclaim, “Bazinga!” The scene itself seemed very funny to me at the time.
I laughed. Did I know what “Bazinga!” meant at the time? No, but I laughed anyway. Would it have been different if, at that moment, I had known what that interjection meant? No. What made me laugh was the very moment when Sheldon Cooper appeared to dive back into that sea of balls, exclaiming only “Bazinga!” I laughed because of his facial expression, the tone of his voice, his gestures, and not because of the meaning of what Bazinga might have meant at that moment.
After a few minutes, in this trance, I don’t know if I ever saw the end of an episode, I turned on the computer to snoop on the lives of my Facebook neighbors. Once, a good friend from Ecuador, Andrés Villalba, wrote to me: “Mi bro, tú eres muy bacano, ¿me acolitas?” Since, as I said before, Villalba, el Tush, is a good friend, I translated this as an invitation.
Yes, I wrote “translate.” The dictionary does not contain the noun “bro,” the adjective “cool,” or the verb chosen to indicate the action being consulted, that is, “acolitar.” What language is he speaking? It’s not Spanish. But from the moment I responded, “clarín,” all these words began to exist. In Spanish? I don’t know. I think that, much of the time, I always believed that we speak a language that does not exist. If my friend had added something else like, “si me acolitas cáete con algo” (if you’re my bro, give me something), I would have had to translate that into my culture as well.
I think about these memories as I recall the crowds of young people I taught. Half the time they spent speaking in a similar language, but they didn’t explain it to me. Instead, they demanded that I understand it without making any concessions. If I didn’t, I was out of the loop, resigned to never being able to delve into and understand their world because, let’s face it, that was nothing more than an affirmation of their identity.
But what young people say today may no longer exist tomorrow. What is “cool” today was ‘chill’ yesterday and a few years ago it was “awesome, cool, awesome, awesome, good vibes.”
Language is constantly changing, and we, totally at its mercy, must translate it in order to understand it.
Something similar happens in poetry, which is also written against the power of the dictionary. The difference is that the only thing it serves, as Simic pointed out, is to make children hate school and jump for joy on the day they don’t have to see another poem.
In this sense, if I am confronted with a poet like César Dávila Andrade and the image is revealed to me: “with a tremor of liquid candelabra,” I am not going to think that Dávila is predicting a flood, perhaps a cataclysm, or that he is referring to a seismic movement. We speak like this to describe an experience outside the law of language, but that which is outside begins to exist as it takes on meaning within a community, however small.
The language of young people and the language of poets are forms of expression used to bear witness to that which cannot be witnessed. Because of the way we express ourselves, young people and poets are foreigners to Spanish. We are seeing it now: we don’t do it in Spanish, perhaps against Spanish.
I start thinking about young people again.
I am sure that if any of them, on a Saturday night, were hanging out at home in front of the TV because they couldn’t get a date or simply because they had no money, and they turned it on and heard (for example) Captain Jack Sparrow saying, “Well, boy, let’s go to the Black Pearl,” they would feel something very similar to someone who, unaware of the background to the love story between Charles Dodgson and Alice Lidell, came across this poem:
Alice (Carroll’s confession)
Excuse me for portraying you with a long neck
or for portraying her as a fetus in a burrow.
tatataaanta your insistence on hearing adventures.
you are the atrocious beauty that stings my conscience
and when I contemplate you like this, lost in thought
it is because I am wondering what dream you came from.
This soul of mine, rude and arithmetic, lives
alone beneath this vulnerable appearance. I am almost
a catastrophe that falls into your
Eden-like path, and contrite, you sense the death
of my love.
“Cut off his head,” your mother sentenced.
Don’t be sad. I can still see how you drew
oniric pictures, rowing there in the isis.
Alicia, you became an eternal instant
in my rerelock. Moms, I never confessed to you the love
that you inspired.
Even though I am a humble tutor immersed
in mathematics and logic,
would you be happy as my wife? (gulp)
Look for me on the other side of your mirror.
I’ll wait for you, Alicia.
I’ll wait for you.
In this case, the poem translates, almost literally, a story. Which one?
Charles Dodgson, Alice’s tutor, a man much older than her, was so shy that he stuttered. Some versions claim that Dodgson may even have asked for Alice’s hand in marriage, a fact that angered the family and ended his relationship with the Liddells.
The poem translates the story, although sometimes it must or wants to use words that do not exist.
A poem, Pessoa said, is an intellectualized impression, or an idea transformed into emotion, communicated to others through rhythm. This rhythm places poetry outside language; it is foreign, as I said before, but what does that mean?
The poem restores language to its status as a “producer of meaning” and enables it to translate real objects that are, at the same time, untranslatable. This is the great utopia of writing.
Just as Sheldon Cooper exclaimed “Bazinga!”, Cage titled his piece “tacet” and Héctor Hernández Montecinos spoke of La Manicomia. These are words that may not have a literal translation but are valid according to the effect they produce and, therefore, the intuition they manage to evoke in us. I do not believe that a poem can be translated, that is, replaced by its version. Both are unique experiences in themselves. I believe, rather, in ideas such as interpretation, transtext, or rewriting, beyond the language in which they occur. I can reinterpret a text from English to Spanish as well as from Spanish to Spanish.
When we study languages, one of the prejudices we are vaccinated against is that of tradutore-traditore. I don’t know if this is true, but I do know that translating poetry is not a betrayal; it is saying what has already been said, but with different words and from one’s own experience. Even in the case of a recreation, it does not betray the original text; it revives it in another space and time, regenerates it in history, and gives it new meaning.
It is a journey and, therefore, it is also a transformation.
Notes
* Talk for students as part of the 4th Hispanic American Poetry Prize, Festival de la Lira. Cuenca, Ecuador.
[i] Walter Benjamin. Quoted in Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1996), p. 52.
[ii] Christopher Lasch, Refugio en un mundo despiadado (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1996).
