m-Talá published in English

Spring is in the air and, with it, the second book of Galician poetry published in English this month! Following the publication of From Unknown to Unknown by Manuel Rivas, Shearsman Books in the southwest of England today bring out Chus Pato’s seminal work m-Talá in Erín Moure’s translation, published simultaneously by BuschekBooks in Canada. Shearsman Books brought out the later title Charenton in 2007.

Helena González defines m-Talá on the publisher’s website as ‘a model for all Galician poetry’. ‘The poetics of chaos is an inalienable characteristic of the work of Chus Pato. But in m-Talá she wipes out the borders of literary conventions. The multiple discourses and languages around us erupt into, and construct, the poem. Reading this book is a challenge and play from which humour is never far.’

Erín Moure is the accomplished translator and a poet in her own right with a dozen books of poetry. There will be an interview with her next month on this blog.

You will find a full list of books of Galician literature published in English here.

Interview with Michael Smith (translator of Ramón Cabanillas)

You both write and translate poetry. How similar are the two experiences? Is writing a form of translation, or is it the other way round?
Writing my own work and translating that of others are two quite different experiences for me. How generally true this is I can’t say. For many, Roy Campbell was a very fine translator of Spanish poetry but for me all his translations from the Spanish have a similar rhythm as if they were all written by the same poet. When I am writing my own poetry, I am drawing on my own life. When I am translating, I am drawing on the life of someone else. I am not a literalist nor am I an imitator in Lowell’s sense of that word. When I translate I put whatever language skills I have at the service of another. I see myself as the servant but not the slave of the work I am translating. A good deal of modesty and self-effacement are needed to be a good translator.

A lot of the poets you translate are classical poets. What do they have to tell us that contemporary poets can’t?
In the increasingly dehumanised world of global consumerism, they remind us of what it means to be human in the sense that Shakespeare was human, and Dante and Quevedo and so many others. Of course, contemporary poets may very well do this, poets like Geoffrey Hill and the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella, to mention just two poets whose names come to mind. But there is something deeply human for me, as I translate, in listening to the voices of the dead across the centuries. Translation can be seen as a kind of resurrection of the dead in the case of poets who have not yet been given a hearing in English. Of course, I am speaking metaphorically.

Classical poets often make use of metre and rhyme. How important is it to keep these in the translation, or do they make the translation sound artificial?
It’s my own personal view that poetry essentially dependent on the effects of metre and rhyme , such as Pushkin’s or Eliot’s Possum poems or Edward Lear’s Nonsense Verse, to give extreme examples, cannot be translated into an English that attempts to replicate the prosody of the original. That’s literary taxidermy. What a translator can do, however, is suggest the prosodic regularity of the original without resorting to paraphrase, which is not translation.

You have joined a distinguished list of translators who have worked with Rosalía. How did the Selected Poems (published by Shearsman Books in 2007) come about?
I have admired the poetry of Rosalía for years. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re wrong about there being a distinguished list of translators. Most of what I’ve come across in English is of poor quality and badly dated. Edwin Morgan’s translations are an exception. He has done some faithful and lively versions. The Shearsman Selected Poems was prompted by what I saw as a need to give Rosalía a voice in English. She has been written about by feminists but my primary concern was Rosalía the poet. As I can only access Galician with the help of Spanish cribs, I was lucky to be given great help with the Galician by two Galician friends, José Manuel Estévez Saá and Margarita Estévez Saá.

Do you have plans to translate any other Galician poets (apart from Ramón Cabanillas for the anthology)?
Not at present. But now that I have discovered Galician poetry through Rosalía, I may find some other Galician poet whose work interests me enough to tempt me to try translating it.

Thank you for talking to us!

Manuel Rivas’ poetry in English

Small Stations Press has just brought out an anthology of eighty poems by Manuel Rivas, From Unknown to Unknown, selected and translated into English by Jonathan Dunne (who translates his prose for Harvill Secker in London and Overlook Press in New York).

The anthology has an introduction by John Burnside, the talented and prolific Scottish writer, which is available to read on the publisher’s website.

Small Stations Press, which publishes in both English and Bulgarian, plans a Bulgarian edition of Rivas’ best-selling novel The Carpenter’s Pencil for autumn 2009.

Michael Smith to translate Ramón Cabanillas

The Irish poet and translator Michael Smith has agreed to translate the poem by Ramón Cabanillas for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in 2010.

Michael Smith is best known for his translations of classic Spanish poets, including Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora. He also recently translated a Selected Poems of Rosalía de Castro for Shearsman Books in Exeter. His work as a translator was recognized when in 2001 he received the European Academy Medal.

Born in Dublin in 1942, Michael founded New Writers Press in 1967, publishing over 70 titles, and was founding editor of the influential literary magazine The Lace Curtain.

His own poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies of Irish poetry, including The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry.

It is a privilege to be able to count on Michael’s presence in the anthology, translating a poem by Ramón Cabanillas that was chosen for this anthology by Arcadio López Casanova.

Next week, there will be a short interview with Michael on this blog!

Galician Literature in English Translation

What books of Galician literature have already been published in English? How many of them are individual titles and how many are anthologies by a single or multiple authors?

The number of books being translated into and out of a language is a sign of how much that language is in dialogue with other cultures and languages, so it’s important to keep track of the books in translation that have been published. The Consello da Cultura Galega produced a list in 2003, and Olga Castro of Vigo University produced another list as an appendix to her paper at the Congress on Plácido Castro and His Time held in November 2005. Vigo University also has a database of literary translations published since 1980.

Here Jonathan Dunne has produced a list of books of Galician literature published in English translation, with links to pages of relevance to each individual publication! Something to celebrate, and also something to work towards…

Xerais and Galaxia agree to publish bilingual Galician anthology

Edicións Xerais and Editorial Galaxia, the two main commercial publishers in Galicia, have agreed to publish together a bilingual Galician-English anthology of Galician literature covering 800 years in 55 texts.

The anthology will cover the period from 1196, the date of the earliest written text, to 1981, passing through the Middle Ages (the medieval cantigas or songs), folk literature, the 19th-century Galician revival and the prose and poetry of the 20th century either side of the Spanish Civil War.

The purpose of the anthology is to introduce the general reader to the history of Galician literature, literature written in Galician and (during the Middle Ages) Galician-Portuguese, by means of parallel Galician-English texts.

The editor is Jonathan Dunne. All 55 texts that make up the anthology are chosen by Galician writers and academics from an author (such as Ánxel Fole), from a book (such as Cousas or Follas novas) or from a genre (such as the famous cantigas de amigo or songs of a friend).

The anthology is due for publication in the spring of 2010!