Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

grammatical rules, for example — would make
them very difficult to translate.
JL: Well, the important part of Gelman’s poetry
for me when I began to read it was that it
transcended so much of yesterday’s poetry and
instead offered what Gelman calls “el candor de
otras épocas.” That intimacy of tone I
recognized even if I’m not porteña and missed a
lot. And the circling back — I saw him as
writing song cycles the way Mahler had taken
German poetry and incorporated it into cycles.
The same themes, the same language over and
over again, extraordinary music. Gelman was an
incredible challenge. I could see that this was a
major voice, and here is the journey of exile. So,
I put aside my objections to the machismo and
the objectification of women, particularly of the
early works, because I remembered the story
that the Irish poet Evan Boland told about the
manager of the hotel where she once worked in
Dublin. That was a man with a secret wound.
Nobody ever talked about it, but everybody who
worked in the hotel knew that at 2:00 o’clock in
the afternoon, after lunch, he would repair to his
room to dress this wound. I remember
something that Adrienne Rich had written in a
book called The Dream of a Common Language.
In a poem called “Natural Resources,” which is
a significant title, she says that it was never the
rapist; it was the brother lost, the comrade twin
whose palm will bear a life line like our own. I
related this to Gelman’s terrible derrota —
defeat — his impotence at having his son and
his seven-months-pregnant daughter-in-law
disappear, having himself had to go into exile so
that he was not there to protect his family. But
the poetry revealed to me that he himself was on
the path to discovering through exile many
components of himself. I keep trying to put
Gelman aside and to get over, and to get into
other things; but I keep finding poems that have
to be translated, and this is why I found myself
going back again and again. At the beginning
there was a limited number of poems that I
would translate, a lot of the poems were simply
untranslatable. Gelman plays with language; he
uses the feminine when he should be using the
masculine. Those games would be wasted on an
English-speaking audience. Unthinkable
Tenderness contains about 150 poems, but to
choose and to translate them I had to read and
study at least 500. My role was not only as a
translator but as an editor. What Gelman
discovered on his journey was part of his own
collective past. He discovered the poetry of the
Jewish Diaspora and he did wonderful things
with it. He has written something called
com/posiciones, in which he has translated
poems of the Sephardis into Spanish. And he
knew so well that every poem was not one poem
alone, that every poem contained its translation,
as he himself says in com/posiciones: “to
translate is inhuman — no language or face
allows itself to be translated. we must leave this
beauty intact and yet another beauty to
accompany it. their lost unity lies ahead.”
MCS: How was your translation of Gelman’s
work received by colleagues in the field of
translation and in literary circles?
JL: I have paid for translating Gelman at home.
Many thought that other poetry should have
taken precedence. Among a lot of my feminist
friends, and particularly my gay friends, my
Mexican friends, I have been considered a
“traitor … translator/traitor.” Unthinkable
Tenderness was not listed in the New York
Times Magazine, but it elicited many
compliments. I have a letter from Adrienne Rich
in which she told me that she was profoundly
appreciative of the experience of reading
Gelman, and that she was going to incorporate
him into her lectures. Another thing that
happened when the book came out is that the
poet Edward Hirsch and Robert Coles, a
professor of Child Psychology at Harvard
Medical School, wrote me a letter asking for
more poems of Gelman to publish them in their
magazine Double Take. And lastly, I sent a book
to John Berger, who was so affected by the work
that he incorporated Gelman into his writings on
Frida Kahlo, two artists who had “confronted
pain head-on.” So Gelman’s poetry has reached
and touched some great souls. Translating it was
8 Translation Review