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Volatility, 'Folk,' Sexual Landscapes: Notes on Translating Anonymous Lyrics From Medieval Spain

by D. NURKSE

1

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 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.

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 the 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

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' lyrics 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 1949, Samuel Stern discovered a trove of ninth-to-twelfth century Sephardic songs.

In the latter 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' lyrics. 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 centuris. In the Iberian penisula, 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.

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 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 ondition of the body but a process but which 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."

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."

Anonymous Lyrics from Medieval Spain

translated from the Spanish by D. Nurkse

1

Look down from your shame,
windowless face -
pour me a jug of thirst
because I'm dying of water.

2

I'm the little dark one,
the dark one.

They say darkness
is caused by sin
- you can't find that in me
and never will.

I am the rose without thorn
that Solomon praised:
nigra sum sed fermosa,
I shall be renowned.

I am the burning bush,
blazing and never singed,
untouched by the fire
that consumes others.

3

The rose knows
whose hand to rest in.

4

That girl was sighing
and not for me
(that much I understood).

5

If you leave at dawn,
hush, love, step lightly,
don't wake the nightingale.

6

I thought you were a miller, love,
but you're a millstone.

Husband, I know you're happy
when the priest sends you gifts,
but heaven knows
which of us they're meant for:
though he's generous to you
he tastes better to me
since you're a millstone.

Once you start, you'll argue
through lunch and supper-
later, when your mood shifts,
you grind all night long:
I bite my tongue, long-suffering,
and soothe your rough edge
since you're a millstone.

When it comes to my freedom,
you aspire to nobility
and set me conversing
with people of quality -
thanks to such skills
you'll become a great lord
but you're a millstone.

7

The shepherd is new
and wanders in a love-daze.
If he's careless and dozes
who'll guard the cattle?

Tell me, little shepherd,
so polite and well-groomed,
whose were those cows
grazing by the river?
- Yours, my lady.
The sighs are mine.

If he's careless and sleeps,
who'll guard the cattle?

8

I won't sleep, mother,
when day breaks.
My lord Abu-l-Qasim
has the same face as dawn.

Dennis Nurkse is one of the country's most distinguished poets and translators. These poems appeared in a 2002 issue of The Literary Review.

"North American Field Song" - The Innocence Mission (mp3)

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"Rhode Island" - The Innocence Mission (mp3)

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