their - The University of Texas at Dallas

stitching your silence over the street. You go
covered in your skin as white as a church candle.
It’s as if your skin announced death. As if death,
because it’s in your eyes, is also in your destiny.
And now, only I can tell that your face is
beautiful. Pablo and I. The two of us. That face
with lips as thin as a sword cleaved to your face
with a kiss. Ruth, so secretive. With the black
mystery of your life. With your soul, now doubly
in mourning. Again, you look as severe as a
Spanish house, like a stone wall. So beautiful and
so self-possessed. So terribly full of yourself.
Now I know that you’ve made love many times.
That a man’s hands have cut through your icy
aura. With your alabaster body under your black
dress. You wear your pain like a nun wears her
rosary. I don’t know if you’re innocent or guilty. I
don’t believe you’re ever innocent. And there’s
that man you say is your uncle, watching you go
by, as if he gave you a deadline to have you again.
As if only the mornings were yours, because he’s
awaiting your return. That man that looks like the
night. The player who’s always bet his life on a
pistol shot or a card. I don’t know if he’s innocent
either. He, who survives wrapped in your same
aura, walking in your same silence. Always
playing with life and death. Is he really your
uncle Is he your lover Is he your uncle and your
lover That man you’ve loved and hated, feared
and desired. Your god and your demon. I wonder
if you’ll accompany me in my insomnia again.
You, the survivor of another world. You, who has
murdered life. You walk wrapped in your love of
death. That’s all that’s left for you: your love of
death. Your love of the things you possess. Your
disdain for all that is human. Your attachment to a
dead mother who, after all, who knows if she was
your rival, and if you hated her and that’s why
you sit with her every day at the cemetery in your
loneliness. Now only you and he know that. Both
of you tempting God with your enormous sins.
You, Ruth, the one who fled the Bible.
Although hauntingly similar, this passage is not an
exact replica of the first. On the surface it appears
nearly untouched: repeated structure, equal tone,
familiar words and comparisons. But much like a
translation, at its core it is different. Not better, not
worse. Just different. As if Amelia, given what she’s
witnessed, is compelled to acknowledge her new
perspective in the selection of elements included or
omitted and attempt to compensate in some way for
Ruth’s continuing ambiguity.
Notes
1 Fluency is viewed as the coupling of vocabulary and
grammar most appropriate to the communication at hand,
leading in turn to Transparency, which allows the reader of
a translated text to embrace the illusion that he or she is
reading the original itself. (Venuti, Lawrence, The
Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York:
Routledge, 1995).
2 “Nothing lost, nothing sacred,” Times Literary
Supplement, Sept. 6, 1996: 9–10.
3 Ibid.
4 “Entering the Pale of Literary Translation.” Manoa 11.2
(1999): 89–94.
5 Italics added for emphasis. “It doesn’t sound like English.”
Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 6, 1996: 11.
6 Cynthia Migueléz. “Translating for Interpreters.”
American Translators Association Chronicle (February,
2000): 20–23; 41.
75