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Lisa Rose Bradford translates from


the Spanish of Guillermo Boido

Lisa Rose Bradford


Lisa Rose Bradford teaches Comparative Literature at the Universidad Nacional de
Mar del Plata and Translation Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba,
Argentina. Her poems and translations have appeared in Poetry Now, Thorny
Locust, Faultline and Calque. She has also published two books in Spanish on
literary translation in Argentina, Traducción como cultura and La cultura de los
géneros, and is currently working on an anthology of U.S. women’s poetry in
Spanish, entitled Los pájaros, por la nieve for RIL (Chile), parts of which have
appeared in Hablar de poesía.

Translator's Note
Guillermo Boido (Buenos Aires, 1941) published four slim but warmly received
books of poetry in the 1970s and, after what threatened to be a permanent silence,
recently brought out a collection of new and selected work entitled La oscuridad del
alba. Poemas 1970-2000. His new poems maintain the tersely phrased musing of
his previous work, which established him as an essential voice of the ’70s. Boido’s
generation of poets forms an interlude between the social commentary favored by
the poets of the ’60s and the “neo-barroco” that dominated the poetry of the ’90s.
Relying heavily on traditional Spanish poetics and decorum, these poets have often
been criticized for their metapoetic bent and “fuzzy ideology.” Though Boido
expressly denies that poetry should be political, one can’t help noticing the many
references to siege, singing, naming, terror, forgetting, silence, solitude and other
tropes that call to mind the dictatorship and “Dirty War” that raged during the time
he was first writing. These allusions may contribute to a metapoetic or even a
metaphysical argument in the poems, but they often suggest scenes of terror,
particularly in light of their social context. Therefore, the translation of this verse
must maintain this interpretative hesitancy.
Boido’s poetry is challenging to translate because of its precisely balanced
verse and this hesitancy it often provokes. For example, he has a fondness for
using the word “olvido,” which is difficult to convey in English, for in different
contexts it can mean “forgetting” or “oblivion,” and often proves rather abstract or
awkward in English. Moreover, as this term can relate to the private memories of
childhood or love as well as to the testimonials of the public sphere, it becomes one
of the elements of this vacillating angle and so demands special care in its
translation. In “Habits,” for example, “forgetting” worked better than “oblivion,” but
it was necessary to add a noun to save the line from utter abstraction: “love is a
bird that / builds its nest on a forgotten past […]” thereby making for a more
attractive conceit.
In this same poem, the melodic mirroring of “canta” and “calla” (it sings/ it
hushes) is also problematic for the translator, since the English words cannot
recreate a corresponding assonance. Furthermore, Boido’s poems are often built on
a rhetoric of balanced equations—perhaps deriving from the poet’s education in
mathematics—and thus require a similar juxtaposed logic. Here the parallelism is
achieved with directional actions—rise and fall—which emphasize both the bird
imagery and the polarity of song and silence. However, the exact repetition of
“olvido” has been sacrificed:
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love is a bird
that builds its nest on a forgotten past
and
rises into song

forgetting is a bird that


builds its nest in love and
falls into silence

The wavering between the metapoetic and the euphemistic that is produced in
much of Boido’s work is present in several of the poems in this selection. In the
poem “Craft,” the notion of silence is implied by the phrase “transparente de
palabras” (linguistically see-through) which I rendered as “wordbare” to play off the
idea of speech as fabric and thus bring the metapoetic aspect of the poem into
relief. In another poem, however, we find this hesitancy pushing the poem to work
in two simultaneous directions, rather like an optical illusion between the terror of
the clandestine jails and a metaphysical meditation on loneliness:

Someone sings on a distant shore. Someone lights a fire.

We dance. This castaway's grimace looks like a greeting. We dance.


(“4”)

As culturally implicit meanings prove so difficult to carry over to different linguistic


contexts without some prefatory statement, we can only leave the door open for
those possible connotations to enter. These translations of Boido’s work offer an
array of this “castaway’s” voice and its hesitancy while providing fine examples of
his delicate equilibrium and meditation.

FIVE POEMS

Craft

the thread of my life


becomes wordbare
finally
taut

in some childhood patio


I hear the echo of my footsteps
resigned
not to silence myself

death a slow rose


you take me from myself
you return me to the world

for Heber Cardoso


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Habits

love is a bird that


builds its nest on a forgotten past and
rises into song

forgetting is a bird that


builds its nest in love and
falls into silence

The Word’s Compulsion

Nothing can
silence the atrocious, formless
dementia of love and reflection.

Nothing can
name the atrocious, formless
dementia of love and reflection.

And still you write the poem.

Denotation

I exposed my voice to words


and I called you coral apple skin of March

I named you with names of other things


to name the world with your name

A deaf music, a blind flash


soars up a drifting night.

Someone sings on a far-off shore.


Someone lights a fire.

We dance. This castaway's grimace


looks like a greeting. We dance.

We are our own shore, calm.


And the one that calls us, distant.

eXchanges, University of Iowa’s literary e-journal, Spring 2007


<http://www.uiowa.edu/~xchanges/>
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Underdevelopment

between rebellion and fear


a man carries his corpse
on his shoulder

Jacket 35, Early 2008


<http://jacketmagazine.com/35/bradbury-poetry-now.shtml>

First Love

and i’d so forgotten you that you never existed:


i must have dreamt you as the wind dreams birds

Pixnet, April 06, 2009


<http://techq.pixnet.net/blog/post/23584939> (China)

Meeting

and now that love


is dressed in stone
pain comes in
brings its corpses
explaíns its reasons and
together we draw up
the terms of forgettíng

Creed

I’ve never seen the resurrection of the flesh

but I have seen how a man may


between the teeth of pain the whips the hunger
become food for his own flesh
till he reaches the size of the dead

Faultline, Journal of Art & Literature, Department of English


and Comparative Literature, University of California, USA, Spring 2008
<http://www.humanities.uci.edu/faultline/>

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