Volatility, `folk,' sexual landscapes: notes on translating anonymous lyrics from medieval Spain

Literary Review, Spring, 2002 by D. Nurkse

It's the future that we see, unconsciously, as strangely set in stone; a painted paradise or no paradise. The past is wildly volatile. As teenagers, we remember desperate childhoods; by the time we reach middle age, our parents were saints. We are at various moments bitterly ashamed and bitterly proud of our origins.

This dynamism is central to the translator's challenge. It isn't just word meanings that change, but the context, the implied listener, the notion of self, every level at which literature functions. The `folk' fragment once seen as serving to inspire Lope de Vega may later be considered devalued by his use of it.

The translator who had been prepared to crack one code and replace it with another had better be aware that he or she is riding a wave. The notions of fidelity and music remain constant, but each age fabricates them and projects them onto the past, like a lover reading eternal truths in the loved one's nervous tics.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the translator's job is especially exciting. Never has the text seemed so polymorphous.

Mikhail Bakhtin has shown us how the act of reading is itself transformative, a probing of the self that leads away from the known rather than towards it. To read is to dissolve the I in an entranced dialogue, to manufacture strangeness not familiarity.

"Right understanding," Bakhtin wrote, "is not putting oneself in the place of the author (with a loss of one's own position); it is not translating from the author's language into one's own." (1)

The translator's clumsy mediation has special weight for American poetry. Our tradition is omnivorous and wildly opportunistic--in Louis Simpson's words, "a shark that can digest a shoe." We invent our own rules in a vast continent of abolished tongues. We're ersatz enough to be profoundly transformed by problematic translations--Pound, Waley, Rexroth's renditions of fabricated "originals." One thinks--sometimes with trembling--of Walter Benjamin's insight that "of all literary forms [translation] is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own." (2)

2

The anonymous lyrics rendered here are taken from sources including Lirica Espanola de Tipo Popular and La Cancion Tradicional de la Edad de Oro. They are--in the original--gorgeous poems. Though couched in "everyday speech" they construct--almost in proportion to their simplicity--wildly tricky psychic landscapes where the light always changes.

The Spanish `folk' lyric begins in the ninth century, when Mocaddam de Cabra added the colloquial jarya or jarcha in mozarabe--a patois of Castillian and Arabic--to give the classical Arabic moaxaja "salt, amber, and spice."

From the beginning, meaning flashed in the tension between public and private languages--each of which implied a different speaker, a different audience. From the beginning, `folk' wavered between authenticity and artifice, cherished by sophisticates who felt themselves safe from what Louis Simpson called "the poor man's nerve tic of irony."

The most ancient work has often come to us most recently, and changed our views of our heritage. In 1948, Samuel Stern discovered a trove of ninth-to-twelfth century Sephardic songs.

In the later middle ages, `folk' poetry developed dialectically. Attracted to a perceived candor and exoticism, the court appropriated its images in wildly mannerized games of psychic doubling, where courtier played shepherd (for a beautiful comment on gender and pastoralism in Spanish poetry, see the contemporary work of Giannina Braschi). But in Galicia, `folk' was a reaction against stylization.

`Folk' poetry was informed by the religious lexicon, and in return lent it preternatural directness. Saint John of the Cross's brother, Francisco de Yepes, reported an ecstatic trance in which angels appeared singing popular melodies.

Finally, in the age of Lope de Vega, consciously manipulated `folk' set-pieces--notably the seguidilla--ended the immense variety and informality of the `folk' lyric. Childhood was tidied up and the past represented as `formal.'

3

These poems share a charged and emblematic landscape: the sea, the pines, the stag, the fountain, the fawn, the heron. The cast is restricted: the unhappily married woman, the lover, the mother. Inevitably, to our culture, they speak of a sexual code, threads in a maze of repression.

Many of these poems are alive with the voices of women, under the influence of the chansons de toile, the chansons de femme, the Frauenlied of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the Iberian peninsula, these became the Castillian cantar de doncella and the Galician cantar d'amigo.

But gender is dynamic, constantly positing not just a new voice but a new audience. The troubadours idealized the belle amie, but reduced her to a haughty heroine, overdetermined by the poet's aggressive submission. Soon the poet's laments were really meant for posterity, not for the paramour.

Power loves to escape into its opposite, and may inhabit a serving girl's voice as easily as a shepherd's. The `millstone' poem offered here is a fragment of a woman's colloquial voice, but it partakes of medieval male assumptions about sexuality familiar to us from the Wife of Bath's Tale.