Translating Neruda: Femininity and Sensuality ... - Triceratops Home

Mueller 28
However, there is less explicit sexuality in “Oda a la madera” than in “Poema 7,” and
therefore less potential temptation to expurgate material that might offend the
contemporary social values of the intended reader.
Certain moments in this poem point specifically to the influence of a translator’s
own understanding on the reliability of a translation. While many differences between
translations are simply the result of choosing one form of equivalence over another when
moving between languages, some reflect an apparent error on the translator’s part. In the
fourth stanza here, Nathaniel Tarn translates “tus pálidas espadas muertas” as “your pale
dead shoulders.” The word “espadas” means “swords” in English, and the other three
translators render it thus. Tarn’s use of “shoulders” could potentially be the result of
misreading “espadas” as “espaldas,” which means “backs,” but does not otherwise make
sense. It has the result of increasing the corporality of this stanza, however: when
followed by “your gathered hearts, / your silent multitude,” Tarn’s translation gives this
stanza a more concrete sense of humanity than is present in the original, interrupted as it
is with the unnatural image of “dead swords.” This example serves to illustrate how the
translator’s own comprehension of the poem is ultimately the primary determining factor
in whether or not an image comes across in translation. The abstract nature of Neruda’s
images means that this apparent mistake does not sound particularly out of place from the
rest of Tarn’s translation. This is one of the great risks of reading translation: the
monolingual reader has no choice but to trust that the translator has correctly understood
the entirety of the source text.
The subsequent stanza contains another difference between Tarn’s translation and
the other three. In Neruda’s “Soy yo ante tu ola de olores muriendo,” the other three