Galician Songs in English

Small Stations Press announces the publication of Rosalía de Castro’s Galician Songs, considered the cornerstone of modern Galician literature, for the first time in English. The translation was carried out by the Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure, who as well as being an accomplished poet in her own right – winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry and twice of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry – has translated three books by Chus Pato into English, all of them published by Shearsman Books.

Galician Songs forms part of the series Galician Classics published by Small Stations Press with the support of the Xunta de Galicia. Previous titles in the series are Lois Pereiro’s Collected Poems, Álvaro Cunqueiro’s Folks From Here and There and Celso Emilio Ferreiro’s Long Night of Stone.

Galician Poets in English

This week sees the publication in English of two books of Galician poetry. Shearsman Books publishes a third title by Chus Pato in Erín Moure's translation, Hordes of Writing, while Small Stations Press publishes the Collected Poems of Lois Pereiro (the subject of this year's Galician Literature Day on 17 May) in Jonathan Dunne's translation.


These two publications take the number of books of Galician literature published in English translation to 42. This list includes nineteen poetry titles and three mixed anthologies (poetry and prose). In December 2010, Poetry Review, the magazine of the Poetry Society, published a selection of Contemporary Galician Poets, which can be downloaded for free.

Interview with Erín Moure (translator of Rosalía de Castro and Luis Pimentel)

Erín Moure is an unusual name. Is there a story?
Everyone’s name is a story! I think I’m the only one in the universe with my name… it’s simply the product, as I am, of 19th century European hunger and emigration. I’m half Polish/Ukrainian on my mom’s side and Galician/French/Irish/English on my Dad’s… my family name is that of my great grandfather who left Crecente, Pontevedra province (near the Miño… he was already a border dweller) in 1848. All ties were lost with Galicia when that fellow died in 1874 or so. My grandfather, his son, was very young when his widowed English (we think) mother brought her small children to Canada where her brother could help them. When I first went to Galicia in 1994 I decided to learn the language.

You’ve worked with poets from all around the world. What makes the Galician voice particular?
Not quite all around the world! In parts. I don’t believe in a singular Galician voice; for me that would be essentializing a multitude of voices, registers, patterns, movements in poetry. Galician poetry to me is very full, very dense in its imagery… it’s a poetry, overall, that has no problem spanning urban and rural worlds at once, and no problem in leaping borders, though it is, oh yes, grounded in the particularities of its place, of its time, of the history of the poetry that precedes it and on which it builds… it is intriguing to help it leap borders where it can dialogue with (in my case) other poetries in English.

What makes it universal?
I don’t know that I believe in ‘the universal’ as it usually co-opts one version of what is truly universal (that we share a species, that we are animals, we are born and die and affect each other in the space between) in order to browbeat other versions of this struggle. Galician poetry is as various as any other. In it, there are voices that could profitably affect, change, create foment in my own language’s poetry… it is amazing how poetry can leap borders… leaving behind some particularities and gaining others in the crossing.

What was the first text you translated?
From any language? Oh I don’t remember! I think it was trying to figure out what my parents were saying in English, to explain to my brother, 11 months younger than me, in our private language. From a recognized language into English, probably it was in my head, while in France or Spain, and trying to find the sign for the way to the toilet! In poetry, a poem of Neruda’s, before I could read Spanish, actually. I just translated what arose for me when I read what I could not read.

My introduction to the idea of translation was through Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, as at the end of it, there was my first bilingual dictionary: Ape-English (but not the reverse). It was utterly unusable, though I tried. I showed it once to Manuel Rivas, and it makes an appearance, slantwise, in Os Libros Arden Mal… if you recall.

What has translation taught you?
Que somos seres multiples… Je ne sais pas. I translate all the time as I think in three languages, all badly mastered. Temos que deixar entrar o que non somos, para ser, e estar. We have to let what is not us enter us, in order to be, and be present.

What’s your favourite poem by a Galician author, and have you translated it?
Ah I have many favourites. I love the medieval lyric and have made crazy wondrous quiet versions out of parts of Sedia-m’eu na ermida de San Simión by Meendinho, in my own O Cadoiro. And I love the ‘chronology of practice: synopsis’ of Chus Pato from her Charenton, which is on pp. 82-83 of the English… which later I reset in the form of the floor plan for the Dia:Beacon sculpture museum north of New York City… I followed the same floor plan to map my own chronology of practice, and these floor plan maps were published last year in the Canadian journal West Coast Line. Following that, the idea was taken up by Canadian poet Margaret Christakos in Toronto, who runs a poetry salon called Influency… in the most recent Influency program, 36 people were enrolled, and they all made maps of influence after being introduced to Chus’s and mine… Other Canadian poets have made such maps too (I know this by fact and rumour)… Thus something Chus made in Galician, and I got excited about and brought into English, both conventionally and with a leap, makes its way in English as a force field for change and beauty in Canadian literature.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, I think… what moves me later moves someone else, across the boundaries of a given language, and the literature itself changes.

Thank you for talking to us!

Erín Moure to translate Rosalía de Castro and Luis Pimentel

The Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure has agreed to translate two poems for the bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature to be published by Xerais and Galaxia in 2010. She will translate the poem from Follas novas by Rosalía de Castro and the poem by Luis Pimentel.

Erín Moure’s 1988 poetry collection Furious won the Governor General’s Award, and she has twice won the A M Klein Prize for Poetry: in 1990 for WSW and in 2005 for Little Theatres. She has three times been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize worth $50,000: in 2002 for Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (a translation of Fernando Pessoa’s O Guardador de Rebanhos), in 2006 for Little Theatres and in 2008 for her co-translation of Notebook of Roses and Civilization by Nicole Brossard. Little Theatres was published as Teatriños by Editorial Galaxia in 2007.

Erín translates from French, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. In addition to Pessoa and Brossard, she has translated two books by Chus Pato for Shearsman Books in England and BuschekBooks in Canada: Charenton and m-Talá. She was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from Brandon University in recognition of her contributions to poetry.

It is an honour to be able to count on Erín’s presence in the anthology, translating poems chosen for the anthology by Carmen Blanco (from Follas novas) and by Luz Pozo Garza (by Luis Pimentel).

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.