Innovative Translation Workshop Brings Together The Writer’s Center Students and Latino Poetry Community

 By workshop leader Yvette Neisser Moreno, who leads the Translating Local Latino Poets workshop beginning January 24.

 Starting this month, I am excited to offer a new, innovative workshop that strives to bring together translation students with the local Latino poetry community. Instead of my usual workshop format—in which students select works to translate from any country and any time period—this class will focus on translating poems by local Latino poets included in the recent Spanish anthology Al pie de la Casa Blanca: Poetas hispanos de Washington, DC (At the Foot of the White House: Hispanic Poets in Washington, DC).

I developed the workshop in close collaboration with anthology co-editors Luis Alberto Ambroggio and Carlos Parada Ayala, who hope to have an English edition of the groundbreaking anthology ready for publication by the end of the year.

  Co-editor Carlos Parada—a Salvadoran poet and organizer of the local artistic collective Para Eso la Palabra—will attend the first class (January 24^th) to talk about the anthology, the poets, and the collaboration with the class. Essentially, the editors see this workshop as an opportunity for budding “translators from the community to translate local poets,” thus building on the anthology’s original concept of showcasing the rich community of Latino poets in the DC area. Over the course of six weeks, each student will translate and workshop two to three poems, which will then be submitted to the editors and poets. If the poets are happy with the translations, these will be included in the English edition of the anthology.

My desired outcomes for the workshop are:

• to introduce students to the work of talented local Latino writers
• to help local Latino poets find good translators in the community
• to give students an opportunity to publish the work produced in the workshop
• and, ideally, to foster ongoing relationships between students and local poets

Al pie de la Casa Blanca (published by the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española in 2010) includes over 300 pages of poetry by 24 distinguished Hispanic poets who live in or have strong connections to the DC area. The following are just a few of the many prominent poets included: Francisco Aragón (Nicaragua/US), Director of Letras Latinas; Naomi Ayala (Puerto Rico), award-winning poet; Rei Berroa (Dominican Republic), Professor at George Mason University; Consuelo Hernández (Colombia), Professor at American University; and Milagros Terán (Nicaragua), winner of Nicaragua’s Premio Nacional de Poesía Mariana Sansón, among others. The book is available at Busboys and Poets (14^th & V Streets NW), Pórtico bookstore (1350 New York Avenue NW, at the IDB), and from literaryvision@cox.net.

The workshop will run for six Monday evenings at The Writer’s Center, starting January 24th. Students should have some experience with either writing poetry or translation (of any kind of text), as well as working knowledge of Spanish.

Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Beltway, The International Poetry Review, A River & Sound Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her translation of Argentine Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in 2009; one of her translations was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Moreno works as a freelance writer and Spanish interpreter, and teaches writing at the University of Maryland University College and at the Writer’s Center. Most recently, she co-translated (with Patricia Fisher) South Pole by Venezuelan poet María Teresa Ogliastri.

The Difficult Beauty of Translation: An Interview with Yvette Neisser Moreno

As readers of this blog may know, translation and international literature are near and dear to my heart. As readers may not know, The Writer's Center offers translation workshops taught by Yvette Neisser Moreno, the Pushcart-nominated poet/translator of Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty. (Incidentally, since Yvette introduced him to us, we've also brought Luis into the fold as a workshop leader. He teaches a poetry workshop exclusively in Spanish.)

Kyle Semmel: In your translation of Ambroggio’s Difficult Beauty, there’s a beautiful poem called “Conversation” that would probably ring true for any writer: “I know how it hurts to be tortured by words,/ to use them, to live insufficiently in their weak outlines,/ to want to eat them again, convinced they will taste of needles.” When a writer writes, it’s obviously a matter of finding the exact right word. For translators the process is really the same—though textured by an extra layer of cultural and linguistic skin. What advice would you give to a young translator?


That’s kind of a tough question. In my translation workshops here at The Writer’s Center, I spend about six weeks answering that question!

The best brief answer I can give is to spend the time trying to find the exact best word or phrase for every key word that you translate. This is especially true for poetry. Literary translation is not to be rushed through—take your time to dwell in the words of the original language, and then take the time to dwell in the possible ways to convey the meaning in the target language. When I’m translating from Spanish to English, I find a good English thesaurus indispensable.

KS: Though you are the translator for the majority of the poems, some poems are translated by other translators (including Writer’s Center workshop leaders C.M. Mayo and Naomi Ayala). Can you talk about the collaborative process of working, as editor, with so many translators? What if you disagreed on the translation of a line, for example?

I didn’t actually collaborate with most of the translators, but I did have the chance to collaborate with Naomi Ayala in editing her translation of “The Poem Bodies Make,” which was a real treat, as Naomi is one of my favorite poets. In this case, the editor at Cross-Cultural Communications, the book’s publisher, had pointed out to me some aspects of the translation that he wanted me to revise. I then went through the (English) poem carefully and made notes for Naomi of how I thought those issues might best be addressed. Then we sat down together and went through it line by line, discussing options, brainstorming, and then coming to agreement. It was fun and very interesting!

KS: In the Ambroggio translations there is an admixture, to me, of playfulness, sexuality, and social critique. This may reflect the range of translators, perhaps, and Ambroggio has many books. How did you determine which poems to include, which to leave out? The poems demonstrate significant range, in other words. For readers unfamiliar with Ambroggio’s work, how would you describe it? What should they look for or expect to find in his poetry?

That’s very true—Ambroggio has an incredible range of topics and styles in his poetry. Sometimes it is hard to believe from one page to the next that you are reading the same poet. This is partly because his writing style has changed over the years, and Difficult Beauty covers a period of 20 years.

What readers should expect to find in this book are all the features you mentioned—an appealing sense of humor, poems of love and sexuality, poems about social issues—as well as beautiful lyric poems, poems about the human condition, about human relationships, about death… What you will encounter is a poet fully engaged with the world around him at the macro and micro levels—a poet concerned about what happens in all parts of the world, and also who is moved by the flight of hummingbirds. You will find moments of surprising tenderness and beauty, moments of social outrage, of political commentary, of musings on ancient myths. You will encounter short lyric poems and long prosaic poems. You will find wisdom and insights, and beautiful language.

KS: To shift to your own work, you’re also an emerging poet in your own right. How has your translation work inspired or influenced your own poetry writing?

First, reading good poetry—and translating is a form of very close reading—often inspires my own poetry.

Second, the play of words and attention to words required in translation may indirectly influence my own poetry, as the words I use and discover while translating get stored in my head and added to my poetry “word bank” if you will.

And finally, one of the reasons I encourage young poets to translate is that by translating you get to try out a style of writing that might be different from your own. You get to take on a new, different voice. The words in the translated poem, to some extent, become your own. So, while I can’t trace a direct influence from Ambroggio’s poetry to my own, I do think the experience of translating has probably influenced the way I write.

Can you tell us a little bit about your poetry translation workshop here at The Writer’s Center? What should participants expect when they take it? How much of a foreign language do they need to know?

I LOVE teaching the poetry translation workshops. In the first session or two, I give an overview of the various approaches to translation used by well-known translators, as well as the major issues that one has to consider when translating poetry. Then we usually look at a few different translations of the same poem as a way to see how a translator’s choices can impact the poem’s effect in English. And I typically do a translation exercise where I ask all the students to do their own “translation” of the same poem. (To find out how I do this when the students don’t always know the same languages…you’ll have to sign up for the class.)

After these introductory sessions, I run the workshop very similarly to other types of creative writing workshops, in that we spend most of our class time reading and discussing students’ translations, and giving suggestions for improvement/revision. Students choose which poet/poems they want to translate.

Also, I’d like to point out that I teach two different versions of this workshop: the Spanish-English translation workshop (which will start this month) and the general poetry translation workshop, in which students can translate from any language into English.

In the Spanish-English workshop, obviously we focus on these two languages only. The emphasis is on translating from Spanish to English (my specialty), but students are also welcome to translate from English to Spanish. In this workshop, we have the opportunity to delve more deeply into the two languages and how they are used in poems.

In the general translation workshop, English is the only common language among the students, so we concentrate mostly on the English translations, with context about the original language provided, as needed, by the student-translator.

For both workshops, however, anyone who can read a foreign language with the help of a dictionary is welcome. My personal experience has been that the act of translating itself can improve your knowledge and comprehension of a language.

Finally, I’d like to mention that students can expect to be part of a diverse and fascinating group of classmates, from whom I always learn as much as they learn from me.

***
Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her translation (from Spanish) of Argentinian poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in May 2009. In addition to working as a professional writer/editor, Moreno teaches poetry and translation at The Writer’s Center and has taught poetry in public schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Thursday Night Live: The Earth in the Attic

On Thursday, November 19 at 7 p.m. The Writer's Center and Split This Rock will present a discussion of The Earth in the Attic  (Yale University Press) by Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah.  This, the first in a series of events discussing work by authors who will attend the Split This Rock festival in 2010, will be held at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, in downtown Bethesda, Maryland.  Future programs in the series will be held at other venues around town.  Poet and translator Yvette Neisser Moreno will lead the discussion.  Copies of The Earth in the Attic and The Butterfly's Burden, Mr. Joudah's recently published translations of the work of Mahmoud Darwish (Copper Canyon Press) are available for sale at The Writer's Center. Farrar Straus and Giroux also recently published another collection of his translations of Darwish's poems, If I Were Another.

Katherine Howell recently interviewed Mr. Joudah for First Person Plural in connection with the upcoming event.

KH:  You were born in Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. After college, med school, and medical training in Georgia and Texas, you now work in Houston, when you’re not doing field work for Doctors Without Borders. How did the places you lived affect your sense of identity? Did this affect the way you view your Palestinian heritage? Do you feel, as Louise Glück described you in the forward to The Earth in the Attic, that you hold the position of “outsider,” that you are “not at home, not among [your] people”? How does this sense of contemporary exile, by circumstance and by choice, affect your view of the world and of poetry’s place in it?

FJ: I’d like to begin by saying that “when I am not doing work for Doctors Without Borders” requires pause. I have not done field work for them in 4 years and do not expect to do so again for some time now that I am married with young children. To have joined Doctors Without Borders on the field is not an act of nobility or heroism; it is for those who have done it either an act of common decency or an expression, a representation, of self-survival. Louise Gluck described me as an “outsider” because I am. How can I be an insider when I have not for one hour of my life been a displaced person or a refugee in the political definition of the term? True, I am not “among my people” and that adds a particular dimension to all this: so many of my family are still displaced and refugees, and my parents were refuges; it is no doubt a degree of association (or separation), an identification that makes me, as outsider, a particular kind of insider; but it risks righteousness from the pulpit of suffering, and as a Palestinian I know too well the unfortunate race to the crown of suffering, and in so many ways I do not want to partake in it, not even at the level of becoming a subject for the validation of the victimizer or the deification of the victim. “Exile” first and foremost is the condition of the poet, whether in internal or external form. Often it is in both forms, which I hope would guard a little from an aloofness of asceticism, or from the ostrich syndrome.

KH: Do you still work as an ER physician at a VA hospital? How does seeing war from that remove, particularly after seeing its bodily effects up close through your work with displaced persons, shape your thoughts? I feel like the poem “Night Travels” speaks to the experiences at the VA. How is the experience of writing these poems different poems different from the ones concerning DPs in the immediate place of war? Do you connect the displaced persons you serve with Doctors Without Borders to the veterans served at the VA? If so, how does that connection come out in your poems?

FJ: After eight years, I no longer work at the VA. The DP’s as you call them (and in so calling them they are further displaced) are “foreign” to us in America, truly “other.” They suffer a different type of oblivion than the Veterans do; a different kind of dehumanization, even when made “holy” like the people in Darfur are, for example; they are subjected to a utilitarian absence, exploited for purposes of power and moral display (and arguably, as in The Earth in the Attic, for aesthetic display). I write a lot less about Veterans because one is bombarded by media discourse on such matters that it leaves less room to maneuver outside the dominant “narrative” per se. There is something to be said about our focus on Veterans in a manner that further absents the ubiquitous victims of war, the civilians and peoples, of Iraq or Afghanistan, for example; the Oliver Stone phenomenon. However, when a window opens up for the fabular, as in “Night Travel”, I feel more able to write about it. Of course “Night Travel” is also a play on the Prophet Mohammad’s overnight journey from Mecca to Jerusalem before his ascension to meet God; an “Ascension” in the so-titled prose poem that follows “Night Travel” in the book. This is not to enforce specific readings of the two poems, but to explain how restrained I feel regarding the comparison you make.

KH:  Your work as a doctor shows up in the content of your work. Other than providing material, how do medicine, or science in general, and poetry intersect for you? What comes of those intersections?

FJ: The language of medicine, with its Greek and Latin obsessions, is fascinating. It was also quite metaphorical in its nascent days, in the 18th century for example; even if it likes to denounce that flowery lexicon and pretend a kind of certain specificity, it was originally bound to metaphor and translation in order to achieve a sense or illusion of inevitability, of objectivity, of truth. In that manner it resembles many aspects of poetry. Of course medicine is far more utilitarian than poetry is. Still medicine is a window into the dialogue between power and knowledge, and the politics of knowledge, from which poetry is not exempt. I think Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic or Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor are each a case-in-point.

KH:  In March, you wrote a reflection for the Beloit Poetry Journal on “Translating Gassan Zaqtan.” In it, you say that “[f]or [you], the tantalizing tale is elsewhere: at the simple level of word order in a sentence: subject, verb, object in English vs. verb, subject, object in Arabic, for example…” and that “[n]either fidelity nor infidelity is the question per se; rather it is the “new” poem: the thing itself.” Was the process of translating Darwish’s work (I’m speaking particularly of If I Were Another) similar? What kinds of issues does translating long poems, like Darwish’s Mural, have? I have several students who are translating poems for their final projects in my class, including one who is translating poems from the Bosnian war. I’d love to know if you have any advice for the young or inexperienced translator.

FJ: The impossibility of rendering Darwish’s Arabic into English demands another question: in which ways is it possible? The answer lies, in part, in one’s own harmony within what Rilke calls “primal sound.” If I am able to sing Darwish’s poem as if it were another in English, then I have succeeded. That faith, even if illusory, is necessary for the poem, in translation or otherwise. The long poems demand a more liberated approach in that the primary concerns with orality and tonality, cadence and music, are distributed over a longer period of mind and breath, if mind and breath are a kind of time. A translated poem has to be owned by the translator, as if it were a form of functional hallucination, where one believes the voices one hears are his, are real. It’s a relationship of hospitality (and not simply tolerance) between guest and host; or a hope for oneness between (organ) donor and host.

KH: In your piece for the Poets Against War Winter 2006 newsletter, you write that “[t]he marginality of humanitarian aid, as relief or as neo-nobility, parallels that of poetry. Humanitarian aid measures its interventional impulse on the number of the dead. An afterthought of variable insightful slowness. Impartiality is its charter. And sometimes, when death is not the worst thing that can happen to you, it is the number of the living dead that determines intercession. It is part science (part statistic), part aesthetic.

And like humanitarian relief (and science), poetry often revels in its myth of independence from the communal theatre of the political, and ends up parroting the illusory separation between self and state. How does poetry heed forty million displaced persons in this world while struggling with Roman choices at home in the ‘I.’”

In an interview with the Poetry Foundation you state that you “think the discussion over the function of poetry is… half-absurd. Poetry (like Medicine) is often linked to elite and power structures; it is these structures that often “write” us in poetry, and often participate in determining the poet’s “longevity” even if we’d like to think otherwise sometimes.”

All this long quoting of you to you is to frame another question: It seems that both the good we can do with poetry and the good action we can undertake in the world are governed by a power relationship that names those goods as necessarily limited in some way. What are the limits of poetry? What can poetry do inside those limits, and how can we, as poets and readers of poetry, both seek those limits and push beyond them?

FJ: If I knew the limits of poetry, I wouldn’t write poetry. If I think poetry knows no bounds, I have already failed. “The personal is not personal. / The universal not universal” as Darwish says in Mural.

KH: In the intro to The Earth in the Attic, Glück writes that “[u]nder other conditions, one could imagine this elegant austerity, this precision, this dreamy inwardness absorbed entirely in the natural world. But the earth and sky here are… haunted landscapes of a lost homeland.” Throughout the book, trees, birds, and water (in the form of rain, wadis, and the sea) are repeated images. What power do those images hold for you? How does nature inform, or act as foil to, the harsh political and human realities at play in the poems?

FJ: Nature is a wonder. It seduces the gaze, whether “harsh political realities” are present or absent. Reading those lyric epics in Darwish’s If I Were Another with eyes and ears for his trees, birds, and flowers, away from their subjugation to the political and the dispossessed land, is necessary. (Aren’t all “nature poets” also after the “dispossessed” in one form or another?) Darwish’s Take Care of the Stags, Father is far more than an elegy. It is also praise of the earth and of chrysanthemum in particular. His ‘“The Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech” is also a celebration of the earth and of nature. Nature is an inevitable juxtaposition or adjacency to what we call or seek as “progress.” Another dimension is the private lexicon of a poet: I choose my recurrences to embrace ants, spiders, hoopoes, for example; and I hope to add live oaks and magnolias to them in the future.

Biographic Profiles:

Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her foreword as, “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession ... have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” He is the winner of the 2008 Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish collected in The Butterfly’s Burden, published in a bilingual edition by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Copper Canyon Press in the US. The US edition was short-listed for PEN America’s poetry in translation award in 2009. His most recent translation is of If I Were Another: Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). He was a field member of Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005.

Katherine Howell is a poet, the Communication and Development Assistant for Split This Rock, and a Lecturer in Writing at the George Washington University. She lives, writes, and teaches in Washington, D.C. You can read her reviews of Split This Rock featured poets here.

Yvette Neisser Moreno will lead the discussion on Thursday, November 19. She is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her translation (from Spanish) of Argentinian poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems was published by Cross-Cultural Communications earlier this year. In addition to working as a professional writer/editor, Moreno teaches poetry and translation at The Writer’s Center and has taught poetry in public schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

C.M.Mayo, Luis Alberto Ambroggio, and Yvette Neisser Moreno Reading

Great event at The Writer's Center yesterday. Here are some pictures for those of you who were unable to attend. We have two more events this week. On Thursday we'll host a reading from Grace Cavalieri's play Anna Nicole, and on Friday we'll host a screening of the NEA's Operation Homecoming documentary Muse of Fire. Each event begins at 7p.m., and each is free. Hope to see you there! Oh, and look for an interview with local poet Brandon Johnson on this blog tomorrow.

Luis Ambroggio contemplates.












Yvette Neisser Moreno reading from her translation of Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty.











C.M. Mayo shows us her newest novel, The Last Prince of The Mexican Empire.



For more on this event, check out SavvyVerseandWit. She's even giving away a free copy of C.M. Mayo's book.

Or you can go to Art & Literature to read more.

The Joys (and Challenges) of Translating Poetry with Guest Instructor Yvette Neisser Moreno

Exactly 4 months ago Yvette Neisser Moreno blogged on the topic of translation right here on First Person Plural. Yvette's a translator and workshop leader at The Writer's Center, and she and Luis Alberto Ambroggio, the poet whose work she translates, will be reading this Sunday at 2:00 P.M. at The Writer's Center. They'll read along with C.M. Mayo, who posted here yesterday. Scroll down to see that post, if you didn't get the chance already.

Yvette's book of Ambroggio translations, Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems, will be out this month. Learn more about Sunday's event here.

Now on to Yvette.

Kyle


It's funny. Nearly every time I tell someone (a non-translator) that I translate poetry, the response is inevitably the same: “That must be difficult.”

Well, my friends, I’m here to tell you that first and foremost, translating poetry is a pleasure. This pleasure—like all forms of creative writing—is accompanied by challenges and sometimes frustrations. But isn’t this true of any life passion?

Two of my great passions in life are poetry and languages. For me, reading poetry in foreign languages is a great pleasure. So translating poems into my native English involves many pleasures: the linguistic pleasure of learning new words; the creativity of creating a poem; the pleasure of looking for a way to express a foreign phrase in my own language; and perhaps the deepest reward is the intimate relationship I develop with the original poem.

I had to say all that to preface the actual question posed to me for this blog—how does one handle the difficulties of translating poetry? Well, the “difficult” parts are what make translating poetry interesting. Occasionally, I have run into such a simple poem that I was able to pretty much do a word-for-word translation. That’s easy, but not particularly rewarding! The joy is in the word play, trying to figure out those linguistic puzzles, how to take something particular to one language and transport it into another.

I’ll give a brief example. One of the first poems I translated from Pablo Neruda ["Sonnet 64" from 100 Love Sonnets] included the following line: “Fui de rumbo en rumbo como las aves ciegas”. Literally, something like: "I went from one direction to another like blind birds." The word rumbo means direction, like a compass direction, but the phrase "fui de rumbo en rumbo" would usually be translated along the lines of “I wandered aimlessly”. But this is poetry—in poetry, sound is equally important as sense, particularly with an incredibly rhythmic poet like Neruda. The repetition of the word rumbo seemed important to me. I looked in Roget’s thesaurus for an English phrase with a similar meaning/effect: hither and thither, for example. Captures the sense and repetitive effect, but for the sound of this poem—flat.

Ultimately I decided to take a risk of doing something that poetry translators are cautioned against: I added a couple of images that were not in the original, in order to stay faithful to what I felt was the sentiment, the sound, and the rhythm of Neruda’s line: “I tumbled from limb to limb like a blind bird.” Believe me, I spent many hours pondering possible variations of that line, playing with the “mb” sound from rumbo, considering English verbs to use in place of the simple Spanish fui. But for a poet, what could be a more pleasant way to spend one’s hours than trying to mimic the style of one’s favorite poet?

This line was very difficult to translate, but I thoroughly enjoyed the process. May the adventurous among you find as much enjoyment in your own translations.
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Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Her translation (from Spanish) of Argentinian-American poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems will be published in 2009 by Cross-Cultural Communications. In addition to working as a professional writer/editor, Yvette teaches poetry and translation at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and in public schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. The next workshop she will lead at The Writer's Center is Poetry Translation: Spanish/English.

Her translation Web site can be found here.