VOCES - Antonio Porchia

In an interview carried out in Mexico City in 1987,¹ the Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz tells of a rare occasion when a prestigious Buenos Aires magazine wanted to publish a few of Porchia’s texts. “Porchia sent them immediately,” Juarroz says. But then, “time went by, and as Porchia was someone unable to complain, he went over to the magazine’s offices, and enquired whether they were going to publish him after all. ‘Yes,’ they told him, ‘but there’s been a few issues. And well, also a few grammatical points…’” Juarroz goes on to explain: “The editors of that magazine saw ‘faults’ in Porchia’s extraordinary texts, and corrected a few of them.” But just as interesting was Porchia’s reaction: “He listened, and didn’t say anything, didn’t complain, didn’t argue: all he did was ask for the originals back and he left.”

I think Juarroz’s anecdote captures three crucial aspects of Antonio Porchia’s voices: first, their strange and unique form; second, their ability to carry multiple meanings and resonate in different (or countless) ways; and third, the temptation they exercise on any reader (or editor, or translator) to “interpret,” “normalize,” “adjust” or even “rewrite” them.

In this last case—I’m thinking here specifically of a poet “rewriting” or “adapting” modern foreign texts, keeping what suits his or her alien “poetic purpose” (or what is easier to understand or translate) and throwing out the rest—Juarroz’s anecdote would also seem to fit what happens to the original work: silent and defenceless, it is taken away, lost, suppressed. But then a particular voice comes to mind as well:

The voice is relevant for two reasons: first, on a purely linguistic level, even for a faithful translator,² the temptation to use “twice” instead of “double” in the first part of the voice is almost irresistible: vivid meaning, tighter sound—an overall win.

And yet, looked at carefully, the original expression, “He perdido doble,” without an antecedent “el” (“el doble” as “a double amount”) or “por” (“por doble” as “doubly” or “twice”) is just as uncommon in Spanish as in English: double how?

Is it double of what I’ve won, or what I’ve lost? Double because I have had to overcome both my own self, and someone else’s, to win? Or because I’ve shown up both my own cravings and those of others? Or maybe because, losing my old, now-satisfied desires, I’ve only lost myself again in new, yet-to-be-satisfied ones? Is it double because to win, I must win—and win again—and again, and keep losing my old and new selves in that race?

There is no single answer: each reader will take the voice where he or she chooses—in a philosophical, poetic or personal direction—and one could argue it is precisely via their strangeness and open-endedness that Porchia’s voices clear the ground of obvious and stale language, and create the space needed to unfold their endless meanings and resonance.

But then, in addition, there is also a broader or moral point, which the voice above embodies in this context: namely, the choice any translator faces when he or she sits down to work on a foreign text, especially of unrhymed twentieth-century prose.

It is an “either/or”: either you accept the failure inherent in the task, but still work to the best of your abilities to create the most faithful translation possible, to mirror the original qualities of sound and sense—and lose only once (that is, singly, responsibly, ethically); or you can call on your rights of “knowing better” or “being a better writer/thinker/poet” than the author, trample, cut, forcefully win over—and lose double: both the original and your bad copy, both the wronged author and yourself.

During the same interview, Juarroz mentions how the voices seem to break all boundaries of genre: they contain “poetry,” “philosophy,” “expectancy,” “a sensitivity”; reluctantly, Juarroz risks offering a provisional definition: “they are fragments of wisdom.”

And he adds: “What is more, wisdom expressed in a most peculiar language, which is not afraid of apparent reiterations: Porchia believed that synonyms do not exist, and that every word changes according to its position in the syntactic structure.”

Besides “narrowing” or disambiguating grammar and semantic values to fit standard usage—obtaining the “quick aphoristic fix,” so to speak—another great temptation for a translator is to get rid of repetitions. In Porchia, words are repeated in almost every voice, not just once but three, four, five times. Elsewhere,³ Juarroz wonders whether these repetitions might be a requisite of the “precision of depth”: the more profound the thought, the closer it gets to “a disconcerting alchemy of exactness, where synonyms no longer exist, and each word becomes itself, slightly transposed, with a light inflection or almost imperceptible change of location in the sentence.”

Juarroz’s insight is key: the same term may gain or disclose a different aspect, image, or meaning depending on its position in the sentence, and depending on what has come before (and what comes after). But then the Porchian repetitions are also pitched and placed perfectly to carry Porchia’s slow, deep, resonant rhythm and tone of voice.

With both of these roles in mind (of sense and sound), the rule followed during the translation has been: only change or suppress a repeated word or set of terms if the qualitative harm done to the voice (in tone, rhythm, fluidity) by the repetition warranted its quantitative omission.

In the original, the repetition of “mar”—besides opening up that other “sea,” and all its possible meanings—also finishes the Spanish voz in a clean, elegant curve—a deep and resolute gesture.

“And I’ll go on sailing on foreign seas until I’m shipwrecked in my sea.”

the three monosyllables at the end sound like a clumsy finish, a series of hiccups or tentative bracings, rather than a real foundering or shipwreck.

This was one of those instances in which faithfulness to quality seemed to allow for a small sacrifice, or betrayal, in quantity.

One of the questions that comes up immediately when reading the voices is: who is speaking? Who is being addressed?

Some voices speak of “I,” others of “you,” others of “we” or “they.” In a newspaper article on Porchia, the surrealist poet Alejandra Pizarnik—who was acquainted with Porchia and was in correspondence with him from Paris—writes: “Porchia is a man who has been able to make of his own sufferings an instrument for knowing humanity. No one is as tender or as humble as he is when speaking of human weaknesses. And this ability to give universal validity to one’s own helplessness is only feasible for someone who loves others. […] Porchia talks of ‘the human problem, which is mine, and yours, and that one’s, and everyone’s,’ as Unamuno said.” ⁴

Building on from Pizarnik’s comment, it is vital to let the interlocutors of the voices play their roles of speakers and listeners, questioners and answerers, doers and sufferers, lovers and loved ones, aggressors and defenders, givers and receivers. When translated into English, it is the voices that refer to a third person (“he,” “she,” “it,” or “one”) that present the most difficulties. Unfortunately, quite a few times, it is impossible to mirror the breadth of referential possibilities of the original, as in this example:

Es más fácil levantarla caída que no dejarla caer. Déjala caer y la levantarás.

“It is easier to pick it up fallen than not to let it fall. Let it fall and you will pick it up.”

In Spanish, the pronoun “-la” behind the verbs “levantar” (“pick up”/“raise”) and “dejar” (“fall”/“drop”) may refer to:

My choice of “it” contains only (a) and (b); “her” would contain only (d). To convey (c), you would need to betray the syntax and break up the flow to include a subject like “someone” or “a person”.

This is a case in which the translator is defeated from the start, and has to settle reluctantly for an unsatisfactory approximation.

With impersonal particles such as quien (“who”) or su (“a person’s”), the issue is similar in content, but different in form: ultimately, a choice must be made between:

Where I was able to, I settled on “One who,” as it has the referential breadth of the original, and usually flows quite well:

Exceptions are voices in which a personal or possessive pronoun or adjective forced a choice between “he” or “she” (or “his”/“her”); in these cases, so as not to limit the subject of the voice, I relied on “Whoever” and a corresponding impersonal “they” or “their”:

And it was only when the third-person plural sounded too unnatural, or caused an ambiguity, that I went back to “One who” and used “he”/“his”:

(In this voice, using “Whoever” and “their good” would both harm the sound, and create an ambiguity as to whose “good” is being referred to.)⁵

In his afterword to the French edition of Voices, Juarroz writes: “depth is where the categories and oppositions of the binary mind cease, giving way to correspondences and the totalizing function. And so, rather than Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be,’ the profound question of man lies in a simultaneity and not an alternative: to be and not to be at the same time.”

This “collapse” of binary oppositions and established categories of thought plays itself out linguistically in the voices in (at least) two major ways.

It falls squarely within Porchia’s non-standard (or anti-standard) use of negation and negative structures. The challenge, in English, is to mirror the subtle but extremely subversive way in which Porchia breaks the grammatical rules in Spanish, to create something radical and very hard to fathom.

It is the second sentence of the voice above that is key, and Porchia’s move can be laid out in four steps, the fourth and last being the one where the breakdown takes place:

By placing más before nada, Porchia is destabilizing both the grammar and the semantics of that “nothing”: is it a concrete thing, or nothingness itself, or something else?

Some possible answers to that question mark in 4), which end up making at least this translator dizzy, and all of which fall short either on grammatical aptness, or conceptual faithfulness (and here I use “aptness” and “faithfulness” in the negative sense of capturing the subversion that occurs in the original):

“I won’t ask for more nothingness.”
“I won’t ask for nothing more.”
“I won’t ask for more nothing.”
“I won’t ask for any more nothing.”

I chose the last, simply because the emphatic “any” seems to aid comprehension, while “nothing” leaves the nature of that entity open—or as open and unfathomable as in the original voz.

This last point on entities links in with the second way in which the voices shift or rupture standard linguistic, conceptual limits—which is also the final aspect to be discussed in this note: Porchia’s use of substantivized verbs, adverbs and adjectives to create new, boundary-breaking entities and images.

where “el no saber hacer” means, literally, “the not to know how to make.”

A possible, not very faithful translation: “ignorance in making,” or “ignorance in how to make.”

Another option might be to leave out one of the terms, and create a pseudo-philosophical noun with a suffix like “-hood” or “-ness”: “unmadeness,” for example.

In the end, for this voice, I resorted to hyphenating the string of terms, in a visually odd but (I’d argue) fluid and conceptually faithful solution:

One of the (infinite) ways in which this voice might be read is as a caveat: the meaning of words travels over time, or rather needs time to unfold, and come across—and (sometimes) hit you. It would be illusory for any translator to assume that a job is ever “done,” but this is even more so with the voices, whose perspectives and meanings are impossible to capture with only two eyes and a single, translation-bent mind. A voice’s rendering into another language can always be polished, improved, widened, finally discovered, or made more faithful as one learns about Porchia and the other voices, for ultimately they are all interlinked, and all resonate and build off one another.

And so, in reality, all the issues in sections 1-4 above are only an extremely partial list of the more difficult points any translator of Porchia faces; there are of course more—and more will come up in time, as words are newly heard or heard for the first time—but hopefully the choices made to this date manage to preserve Porchia’s tone and quality of voice.

Coming back to the distinction between translation and adaptation, I believe the goal for any translation of Porchia must be: not to “rewrite” the voices in a foreign language (normalizing their strangeness, choosing one from amongst a plurality of meanings, attempting to “fix up” or “better” what is there), but to “carry them across,” with as little loss as possible: not a labor of creation, foremost, but of attention, study—and subjection, to Porchia’s unique style and syntax, grammar, euphony, rhythms, semantic nuances and ambiguities and philosophical richness.

For his generous help with all of the above, and for his invaluable comments and suggestions during the translation (begun for the first time in the fall of 2006), I would like to thank Daniel González Dueñas, editor of the Spanish-language Voces Reunidas [Collected Voices].⁶

¹ Daniel González Dueñas and Alejandro Toledo, La fidelidad al relámpago. Conversaciones con Roberto Juarroz, Segunda edición [Faithfulness to the Lightning. Conversations with Roberto Juarroz] (Mexico: Juan Pablos Editor/Ediciones Sin Nombre, Colección Los Libros del Arquero, 1998).

² (And I confess my first translation draft of this voice fell into the mistake I describe.)

³ Afterword to the French edition of Voices (Voix. Paris: Fayard, 1979).

⁴ Alejandra Pizarnik, “El iluminado Antonio Porchia” [The Visionary Antonio Porchia].

⁵ With regard to voices in which Porchia employs the Spanish “hombre” as a collective noun, the use is faithfully mirrored with the English “man” and related particles (he/his/himself). As an example: El hombre igualaría a su digno maestro si, al hacer su obra, hiciera también el infierno para su obra., is translated as: “Man would equal his worthy master if, when making his creation, he also made the hell of his creation.”

⁶ Antonio Porchia, Voces Reunidas (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2006).