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

Literary Review, Spring, 2002 by D. Nurkse

Monologue implies dialogue; dialogue turns oblique. A girl complaining to her mother may be playing an elaborate game, talking to safe ears, but secretly intending to be overheard by a servant who will report back to her lover; a woman confiding secrets to a fawn or a dove could be hoping `the breeze' will carry her words to their intended, forbidden destination.

The point may be the flouting of a set of laws that are invisible to us--too distant or too close. Or the play of voice and silence may be orchestrated by a male author arranging a panoply of characters to embody and charm his own terrors.

This is the polyvalence we read of in Judith Butler: "`Sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of the body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize `sex' and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of these norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled." (3)

In this world of crooked mirrors, where the anonymous voice from the other side of history may be our own desire whispering to us, the translator learns a deep respect for `anonymous'--the bluntest and most devious signatory to the human text.

The last word is Walter Benjamin's, though its ambition is far beyond the scope of this work: "translation instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel." (4)

(1) cf. Introducing Bakhtin, Sue Vice, Manchester University Press, 1997.

(2) "The Task of the Translator" in Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, Schocken Books, New York, 1968, p. 73.

(3) Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler, Routledge, New York, 1993, pp.1-2.

(4) Benjamin, op. cit., p. 78.

D. Nurkse is the author of seven books of poetry, including Leaving Xaia (Four Way Books, 2000), The Rules of Paradise (Four Way Books, 2001), and The Fall (Knopf, 2002).