What an Unexpected Rose!

Last spring I worked on my first-ever poetry translations, in a class with Myra Sklarew of American University. Since Spanish is my strongest (one might say only) language, I chose a Chilean poet who deserves far more attention in the English-speaking world, Gabriela Mistral. Part of the reason for my choice was the odd and wonderful juxtaposition of Mistral's work with that of her most recent translator, alternate-reality writer Ursula K. LeGuin. I was intrigued by this pairing, almost as intrigued as when I found out that Langston Hughes had been among Mistral's first translators into English.

Even more intriguing, though, is the other-worldliness of Mistral's landscape, with its roots in pre-Columbian mysticism and its branches arching out to embrace Catholicism, Classical literature, and common child's play. Indeed, Mistral worked with and on behalf of children most of her life; part of her genius lies in the way she marries a child's magical thinking with the vast body of human experience, especially our experience of the natural world.

Pablo Neruda was an acolyte and life-long friend; they met when Neruda was only a boy and Mistral was the principal of his high school in southern Chile. They share a lush aesthetic that washes the reader's senses clean and renders the world anew. Compare this excerpt from Mistral's description of a fig with some of Neruda's work about the natural world:

Touch me: it's the softness of fine satin, and when you open me, what an unexpected rose! Doesn't it remind you of a king's dark cloak that blazed fiery red underneath? ("El higo"--"The Fig")

At the same time, the cycle of life and inevitable mortality are never far from the poet's sight:

After many years, when I am a little mound of silent dust, play with me, with the clay of my heart and of my bones. If a bricklayer picks me up, he will put me in a brick; I'd stay forever fixed in a wall, and I despise quiet corners. If they make me a brick in a prison, I will blush with shame to hear a man sobbing. If I am a brick in a school, I will suffer too, because I won't be able to sing with you in the dawns. ("A los niños"--"to the Children")

Stephen Tapscott did the translations of the above-quoted prose poems. I will be tackling some of these myself soon, and if the results are reasonably credible, maybe I will slap up a few here for responses.

categories: teaching thought words