- Monday, February 13th SWBA (Swarthmore Buenos Aires), Idaes, Paraná 145, 1st. floor: Arrival/Reception
- Tuesday, February 14th Orientation/Spanish level exam
- Wednesday, February 15th Orientation/Spanish level exam
- Thursday, February 16th Orientation/Spanish level exam
- Monday, February 20 st SWBA: classes begin
- April 2th – 6th Spanish mid-term exams
:: THE TRANSLATOR´S KITCHEN / POEMS´ TRANSLATION
In the course “La cocina del traductor”, with professor Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, great Works were done, and now we introduce you to a selection of them. These are the best translations made by Mai Schwartz and Nathaniel Sufrin.
Israel 1969
--Jorge Luis Borges
Poem translated by Nathaniel Sufrin during the first semester of 2010. This production was published by nachtmagazine.org
I feared in Israel would be lurking,
with insidious sweetness,
the nostalgia that secular diasporas
accumulated like a sad treasure
in the infidel cities, in the ghettoes,
the twilight of the steppe, the dreams,
the nostalgia of those who longed for you,
Jerusalem, beside the waters of Babylon.
What else were you, Israel, than that nostalgia,
that will to save,
among the inconstant shapes of time,
your old magical book, your liturgies,
your loneliness with God?
Not so. The oldest nation
is also the youngest.
You have not tempted men with gardens,
with gold and its tedium
but with rigor, the final land.
Israel has told them without words:
you shall forget who you are.
You shall forget the other you left.
You shall forget who you were in the lands
that gave you their afternoons and their mornings
and to which you shall not feel nostalgia.
You will forget your parents’ tongue and learn the tongue of Paradise.
You will be an Israeli, a soldier.
You will build a homeland of swamps, raising it from desert.
Your brother will work with you, he whose face you’ve never seen.
One thing only we promise you: your place in the battle.
The following are the best translation made by Mai Schwartz, during the second semester of 2008.
Chamber Music
--Néstor Perlongher
Like that slime that spills rippling, chokes the creases: of that camp:
on one side: the ubuesque polyhedrons:
on the other: the Polish lice:
on that side: to the side: that icy hillside: where it seeps:
the slug:
licking the brown negligee that perched so many years in the wardrobe among the camphored dresses: and those that carried pistols in their sleeves:
dresses of Russian leather and chinchilla fur:
the wedding dress:
brown negligee that shifting like a tentacle
– like Lorca’s flesh – reveals the alacrity of a ring:
mincing mustard: or the yellow mark of a dwarf that retches
and sets off: on those raids – with the brown negligee – and
undone in hotel hallways scorched by a
knotted wind – and undone there on the landing: he gropes it,
knotted
like that slime that spills rippling: beneath that hand: chokes, creases:
at the margins of those aureate lands: laurel groves
crushed by passing moles, by a swift gazelle: by some tropes;
those clothes thrown at the edge of the camp
– when they were stripped and told
it was to take a shower –
tell me, Delia
do you believe in songs that ring out like death itself when before the executions we raise our batons: don’t you believe in them? and do you?
tell me if you believe
Tell me now, Delia:
I believe in those notes that like lice cower in the armpits of those wretched who condemned to the gas undressed in the chambers and inhaled the fine – the fierce – stench of midday: I believe, tell me, in the melodies of chamber players that take up their bows and sound the violent violins and the ventral winds when they writhe, naked, in the gas: tell me more: tell me, I believe in the batons brandished by the executioners in that air that with its delicate hints of gas spits from the music chambers where the audience, naked and disfigured, lies: tell me, don’t you believe? tell me you do: that I believe in that naked audience that lies disfigured when the misty rattles pierce their ears, the cloying violins of the cradle, of the gas: tell me now
XV
--César Vallejo
In that corner where we slept together
so many nights, I now sit down to wander.
The bedstead of those who were once lovers
has been taken, or perhaps that happens later.
At other times you came early, for other
things, and now you’ve gone. This is the corner
where, at your side one night, lying there
amongst your softest places, I read
a story by Daudet. This is the corner
we loved. Don’t mistake it for another.
I’ve only just begun to remember
those gone days of summer, your coming and going,
slight and pale and angry through the rooms.
On this rainy night,
already far from us both, I am jolted…
There are two doors opening closing,
two doors answering to the wind, swinging
shadow to shadow.
Ode to Walt Whitman
--Federico García Lorca
By the East River, through the Bronx,
the boys were singing with their waists exposed,
with the wheel, the oil, with leather and hammers.
Ninety thousand miners drawing silver from the rocks
and children sketching stairs and perspectives.
But none of them could sleep,
none of them wanted to be the river,
none of them loved the vast leaves,
none the shoreline’s blue tongue.
By the East River, across the Queensborough,
the boys were battling the industry,
and the Jews sold to the river faun
the rose of circumcision
and over the bridges and rooftops the sky poured
herds of bison, the wind at their backs.
But none of them lingered,
none of them wanted to be a cloud,
none of them went searching for ferns,
none the yellow wheel of a tambourine.
When the moon comes out,
the pulleys will spin for the sky’s demolition;
a circle of needles will draw close around memory
and the coffins will bear off those who don’t work.
New York of silt,
New York of high wires and death.
What angel rides hidden in your cheek?
What perfect voice will speak the truths of wheat?
Who the terrible dream of your stained anemones?
Not for one moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
have I stopped seeing your beard laden with butterflies,
nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,
nor your thighs pure as Apollo’s,
nor your voice like a column of ash;
old man, beautiful as the mist,
you cried out like a bird
with its sex pierced by a needle,
enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloths.
Not for one moment, virile beauty
that among the coal piles, the billboards and train tracks,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping as a river sleeps,
with that comrade who would plant in your chest
the small pain of an ignorant leopard.
Not for one moment, Adam of blood, macho,
man alone at sea, lovely old Walt Whitman,
because there on the rooftops,
together in the bars,
swarming out from the sewers,
trembling between the legs of the chauffeurs
or spinning on floors slick with absinthe,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, they dream you.
Him too! He’s one! And they fling their bodies
onto your chaste and luminous beard,
blonde boys of the north, negroes of the sand,
a throbbing press of gestures and shrieks,
like cats, like serpents,
the fags, Walt Whitman, the fags
streaked with tears, flesh for the whipping,
the boot, or the tamer’s bite.
Him too! He’s one! Stained fingers
point to the shore of your dreaming
when a friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline
and the sun sings in the navels
of the boys who play beneath the bridges.
But you never sought the gouged out eyes,
nor the pitch-black swamp where they drown the children,
nor the frozen saliva,
nor the curves slit open like a toad’s belly
that the faggots wear in the cars and on the terraces
while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.
You sought a body that would be like a river,
bull and dream who could join wheel with seaweed,
father of your agony, camellia of your death,
who would moan in the flames of your hidden equator.
Because it is just that man not seek his pleasure
in the coming morning’s jungle of blood.
Heaven has shores where life is eluded
and there are bodies that should not recur in the dawn.
Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream.
This is the world, friend, agony, agony.
Dead bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes weeping with a million gray rats,
the rich give to their mistresses
things that are small and dying and bathed in light,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.
Man can, if he wishes, lead his desire
through a vein of coral or a heavenly nude.
Tomorrow love will be stone and Time
a breeze that comes sleeping through the branches.
That is why I don’t raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,
against the boy who writes
a girl’s name in his pillow,
nor against the boy who dresses like a bride
in the dark of his wardrobe,
nor against the lonely men in the casinos
who drink bitterly the water of prostitution,
nor against the men with green looks in their eyes
who love other men and burn their lips in silence.
But yes against you, faggots of the cities,
of tumescent flesh and filthy thoughts,
mothers of slime, harpies, sleepless enemies
of the Love that delivers garlands of joy.
Against you men always, who give the boys
drops of foul death laced with bitter venom.
Against you always,
Faeries of North America,
Pájaros of Havana,
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cadiz,
Ápios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Floras of Alicante,
Adelaidas of Portugal.
Faggots all over the World, assassins of doves!
Slaves of women, dressing room bitches,
spreading in the plazas like feverish fans
or ambushed in rigid landscapes of hemlock.
No quarter! Death
flows from your eyes
and gathers gray flowers at the mire’s edge.
No quarter! Attention!
Let the perplexed, the pure,
the classical, the eminent, the supplicants
close to you the gates of the bacchanal.
And you, lovely Walt Whitman, asleep on the shores of the Hudson,
with your beard toward the pole and your hands open.
Be it white clay or snow, your tongue calls
comrades to the wake of your unbodied gazelle.
Sleep, there’s nothing left.
Dancing walls plow the prairies
and America is awash in machinery and lament.
I want the fierce wind of the deepest night
to sweep flowers and letters from the arch where you sleep
and a black child to announce to the white men and their gold
the arrival of the kingdom of wheat.
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