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

Mueller 32
Neruda’s verse in this poem is striking because of the humanizing way in which
he describes the arc of the storm. This clarity of representation comes through in Tarn’s
verse, and the feminine nature of the storm is almost more evident in English, because
while the conjugation of Spanish verbs is the same for the third-person masculine or
feminine, in English the addition of the feminine pronoun is required. Therefore, every
time the storm undertakes an action, such as “quiso,” “llegó,” “quería,” etcetera, in
English it is translated as “she wanted,” “she arrived,” “she longed,” and so forth.
Certain word choices by Tarn seem to further play up the femininity of the storm,
building on the prominence of Greek myth in Western literary tradition. His use of
“quiver of fire” in place of Neruda’s “saco de fuego” (“sack of fire”) plays off of the
Olympian scene of thrown lightning bolts and calls to mind another famous powerful
woman, Diana the Huntress. A similar change later on, from “preparadora de cosechas”
(“preparer of harvests”) to “mother of harvests,” similarly echoes back to powerful Greek
goddesses, this time to Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest. These allusions are not present
in the original text, and can be read as a domesticating attempt both to give the poem a
familiar feel to the target audience, and also to legitimize the use of archaic language. By
alluding to classical myths in his translations, Tarn also associates his text with those
translations of classical texts whose use of archaism is more commonly accepted as it
creates a suggestion of “the antiquity of the original work” (Roberts 268).
In Maria Jacketti’s version of “Oceana,” the most visible translational
transformation is her alteration of the original punctuation. Many of her changes seem to
have a domesticating effect, as they break up some of the longer phrases into shorter, less
complicated ideas. This poem is marked in Spanish by continuous and repetitive verse,