Retracing the Translation Process: Hugo Lindo’s Only the Voice

Abstract

Sólo la voz is a major work by Hugo Lindo, El Salvador’s best known living poet. It is a volume of forty-seven untitled cantos which are individual poems with intertwining themes and repeated motifs so that they comprise one long poem. As translator I wished to re-create the multiple aspects of Hugo Lindo’s particular aesthetic sensibility and to express his poetic vision. To accomplish this objective I sought to reconstruct the intricate relationships between the poetic elements—visual, auditory or semantic—that compose the internal dynamics of his poem and, further, through my choice of words, to reestablish in English its coherence or inner logic. Hugo Lindo views life experience as composed of polarities such as expectation and disillusionment. His aesthetic ideas and philosophic concepts are not presented as statements but take form metaphorically through a series of images so that his poetry becomes an actual enactment of the poet’s vision of the paradoxical nature of life. Thus, his thought is in constant interaction with his poetic process. Through particular techniques, Lindo creates an imaginary reality which enacts the paradox of life on an aesthetic level. The poet’s poetic process is built on the conflict of clashing metaphors and on the elaboration of opposing images. Within these techniques is an inherent paradox as each image consists of incongruous elements: for example—“cells of ashes.” In a biological context “cells” implies life; in a physical or spiritual context “ashes” suggests death. Through varying techniques whose internal nature is paradoxical, Hugo Lindo creates poems that evoke the multiple and contradictory aspects of life experience. The poet’s view of reality as fluid and ambiguous rather than absolute emerges for the reader through the poem’s successive images as each is undermined by the following one. A short, concrete example is in his phrase “agonies of the bedroom” in Canto XXXI of Only the Voice. The word “agonies” establishes an emotional field which is reversed when it is followed by “of the bedroom,” for this raises a question about the negative or positive connotation of “agonies.” These characteristics of fluidity and ambiguity compel the translator to conserve the antagonistic duality and multiplicity of interpretive possibilities through a choice of words that reflect the dualistic nature and effect the necessary ambiguity or clarity. Such dualism and ambiguity are found in the poet’s images which are brilliant, clear and concrete, yet have expansive possibilities. As an example, in Canto XXXII the nouns chosen for the second stanza are concrete: “muros,” “hilos,” “eslabones,” “abismos”; they represent material realities. Yet they evoke a figurative meaning as well. They must be translated by nouns which are vivid in the image they evoke and also suggestive of an additional meaning. For the translation of “hilos,”· “cords” would not be appropriate; a better selection is “bonds,” which reproduces the double dimensions of the abstract and the concrete. The translated stanza should read: “Why these walls, and these bonds? / Why these links, / these unredeeming abysses?” In each case the words selected have both visual and figurative qualities. Clearly, the strength of Sólo la voz resides in its evocation of emotion through language of apparent simplicity that, nevertheless, conveys multiple levels of reality through its associative quality. Canto II, which explores the poet’s approach to the act of writing poetry, demonstrates problems that may arise in retaining various levels of interpretation. The theme, the act of creation, is projected by a key word which has a meaning that cannot be re-created in English by a single term, “el Verbo,” “the Word.” Clearly “el Verbo,” which is the Spanish term for the Biblical reference to the