Continuation of "A TRANSLATION MEMOIR: 45 YEARS WITH CESAR VALLEJO"Dr. Clayton Eshleman
I was close to completing a first draft of the Poemas humanos around March 1963 when I had a strange experience. After working all afternoon in Yorunomado, I cycled over to the pottery manufacturer where I taught English conversation once a week. Whenever I had things to carry on the cycle, I would strap them with a stretch-cord to the platform in back of the seat. That evening I strapped on the poem-filled notebook, my dictionary and a copy of the original, when I left the company. It was now dark and the alley was poorly lit. I had gone a half block when I heard a voice in Japanese cry: “Hey, you dropped something!” I stopped, swerved around, to find the platform empty—even the stretch-cord was gone! I retraced my direction on foot—nothing. I looked for the person who had called out. No one was there. While I was walking around in the dark, a large skinny dog began to follow me. I was reminded of the Mexican pariah dogs and that gave an eerie identity to this dog. Was it Peruvian? Was it—Vallejo? I went back the next morning when it was light out and of course there was not a trace of the things I had lost.
In the following twelve months, I completed three more drafts of the book. Cid Corman went over the second and third drafts and to Cid I owe a special debt, not only for the time he put in on the manuscript but what I learned about the art of translation from him. He too lived in Kyoto at this time, and used another coffee-shop, The Muse, as his “office” every evening. If you wanted to see Cid, you visited him there. At this time he was translating Eugenio Montale and Basho’s last hike journal, which included some of his most famous haiku poems, Back Roads to Far Towns. I spent an evening with Cid about once a week.
Previous to talking with him about translation, I thought that the goal of a translating project was to take a literal draft and interpret everything that was not acceptable English. By interpret I mean to monkey with words, phrases, punctuation, line breaks, even stanza breaks, turning the literal into something that was not an original poem in English but—and here is the rub—something that because of the liberties taken was also not accurate to the original itself. Ben Belitt’s Neruda translations or Robert Lowell’s Imitations come to mind as interpretative translations. Corman taught me to respect the original at every point, to check everything (including words that I thought I knew), to research arcane and archaic words, and to invent English words for coined words in the original. In other words, to aim for a translation that was absolutely accurate and up to the performance level of the original. I learned to keep a notebook of thoughts and variations on what I was translating, while I was working, to keep this material separate, for there are impulsive urges in every translator to fill in, pad out, and make something “strong” that more literally would fall flat, in short, to explain a word instead of translating it. By reinterpreting the original, the translator implies that he knows better than the original text does, that in effect his mind is superior to its mind. The “native text” becomes raw material for the colonizer-translator to educate and re-form.
During these years I was undergoing a double apprenticeship, to poetry and to translation. Since I was so psychically affected by Vallejo, turning him into a figure in my own poetry, it was very important to keep this use of him and his work out of the translating proper.
I returned to Bloomington, Indiana, in the fall of 1964 and lived there until the end of the following summer at which time Barbara and I went to Peru. At this point some textual details need to be mentioned concerning Poemas humanos. The poems that made up this manuscript were left by Vallejo at the time of his death in April 1938 in a heavily-corrected typescript. When his widow Georgette published them in 1939 there were many errors and the order in which the poems were presented was often arbitrary. These errors were repeated and amplified in subsequent editions mainly it seems because Georgette would not cooperate with publishers and thus some pirated editions came out. By the spring of 1965, I was working from four fundamentally the same but differing editions of Poemas humanos, having seen neither the first edition or the worksheets.
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