I was looking for poems in Spanish on sleep and found this one by Borges. I’ve tried my very poor hand at translating it – not word for word, but for the spirit of it.
El Sueño by Jorge Luis Borges |
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| Si el sueño fuera (como dicen) una tregua, un puro reposo de la mente, ¿por qué, si te despiertan bruscamente, sientes que te han robado una fortuna? ¿Por qué es tan triste madrugar? La hora de sueños, que bien pueden ser reflejos y que el día deforma en sus espejos. |
If sleep were (as they say) a truce, a pure respite of the mind, why, if you’re awakened suddenly, does it feel like you’ve been robbed of a fortune? Why is waking so sad? Dawn steals from us They might as well be foreshortened reflections Who will you be tonight in that dark dream, |
Translating this was hugely challenging because ‘sueño’ has two meanings. It means both sleep and dreams. Also because Spanish has so many words for waking: despertar, madrugar, asomar, and the odd one he uses here, ‘vigilia‘. The words associate waking with the time at which one wakes. Madrugar is both waking at dawn, in the morning, and dawning itself. Vigilia has its origins in the religious practice of waking in the middle of the night to say prayers as a discipline. Literally, it means ‘vigil’ – it references the biblical sacrifice of staying awake with Christ after the last supper, or standing witness during the night hours to the suffering he endured after crucifixion.
I’m not very happy with my translation of “tan íntimo que sólo es traducible en un sopor que la vigilia dora de sueños“, and if anyone can suggest a better interpretation, I’d be very grateful.
P.S. Pete (@thextraman) Took a stab at the middle stanzas and produced a much better translation:
Why is waking so sad? Dawn steals from us an unfathomable gift, so intimate that it is only comprehensible in the torpor that awaking gilds with dreams, that might as well be foreshortened reflections distorted by the mirrors of the day.
I love that one. However, my favorite will always be A Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda.
Link: http://tinyurl.com/yhzpvxt
I adore your work.
XxXx
-Mary
Robert Lowell published a collection of poems he called Imitations. They were poems derived from literal translations of poems written in languages other than English. Languages which he did not know. It was, I think, the same concept as making a film from a book. Even were you to try to adhere as closely as possible to the original, the change in medium would force some measure of alteration in the new product.
In my early days with the sadist, as he explored what he could get from his use of me as his private writer, he required me to translate poem of my own into another language. I chose French, as it’s the one I knew best and for the longest. It was a fascinating task, as I found myself forced by the words and music available to me (for every language has its own inherent music) to make changes in the poem that slightly altered the effect.
I’m curious about the choice you both made to render “traducible” as “comprehensible” rather than using some phrase incorporating “translate.” Reading the poem over, I see a series of words implying change, transformation, going from “traducible” (Literally, but klutzily, “translatable”) to truncos (truncated) to deforma (deforms). “Comprehensible” makes sense in English, but it loses what seems to be a deliberate pattern.
RG, I do love what you did with “madrugar” and “la hora” to give close to each other both meanings of “madrugar.” Very nice.
Thanks for this – for the poem, and the translations, and being forced to mull them over in both languages. As always, one way or another, you push my mind.