“let us burn / in indecipherable words”
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When asked to define his poetic language, Spain’s greatest living poet, Antonio Gamoneda (Oviedo, Asturias, 1931), responds, “I only know what I think when my own words have told me. It follows that my language, my own language, is the creator of consciousness and knowledge. In other words, I only gain knowledge afterwards” (Del Pliego and Fisher). He calls this “poetry’s reality,” which he places in opposition to “poetic realism.” The latter, he declares, “degrades poetry,” by reducing “the semantic field of poetic language” and supposing “an ignorance of poetry’s possibilities and its potentialities” (Del Pliego and Fisher).
**
Poetry’s reality is the driving force behind Gamoneda’s lyric, which Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza has described as “marked by non-linear, disjunctive, de-centered, multivocal, self-reflective linguistic acts” (9). Such receptivity to “poetry’s possibilities and potentials,” that is, to openness, to plurality of meaning, to lack of fixity, all seem like impossibilities for the translator of Gamoneda’s work. And yet, while the endeavor is no doubt a challenge, I would offer that poetry’s reality is actually quite beneficial for translation. By its very nature, the act of translation contradicts the illusion of accuracy and authenticity. In what other kind of writing is meaning so explicitly mediated, so much an interpretation from the very start? Pondered in this light, the very essence of translation is artifice. Perhaps this is one of the reasons it triggers so much anxiety and mistrust. Readers know from the first translated word that meaning is up for debate.
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Let’s consider poetry’s reality as translational method. This is precisely what my co-translator Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and I do in Gamoneda’s Burn the Losses (Arden las pérdidas), recently published with Action Books (2025). Even a quick glance at the title, “arden las pérdidas,” and our translation, “burn the losses,” sheds light on our process. In many ways, Spanish syntax is more supple, allowing subjects, for example, to follow verbs. A clear-cut rendering of “arden las pérdidas” into English would be “the losses burn.” By opting to maintain the original’s syntax (“burn the losses”), meaning expands to include the imperative mood.
This kind of “linguistic act” is repeated throughout the collection. Take the first poem:
The light boils beneath my eyelids.
From a nightingale fixed on ash, from its black, musical guts emerges a storm. Descends the cry toward the ancient cells, I sense living whips
and the motionless glances of beasts, their cold needle in my heart.
All is omen. The light is marrow of shadow: the insects will die in the dawn tapers. So
burn in me the meanings.
Often in our translation, as in the title, the original’s verb order is maintained: “emerge una tempestad” becomes “emerges a storm,” “[d]esciende el llanto” is rendered “[d]escends the cry,” and the last sentence-verse, “[a]sí/ arden en mí los significados” is translated to “[s]o/ burn in me the meanings.” In each of these cases, the shifting of standard word order creates a sense of strangeness, of disorientation. Readers in English, accustomed to subject first, do not know who or what is performing the action. By making the verb rather than the subject do the legwork, the translation opts for a degree of undecipherability; to transform the chronology of the sentence structure, accentuating—on the level of both content and form—the “afterwards” of knowledge that Gamoneda highlights in his definition of poetry’s reality. (In other poems, as readers soon discover, something similar occurs when the subject in English sometimes disappears altogether.) Meaning takes on even greater multiplicity in the last sentence-verse. “[s]o / burn in me the meanings,” can be interpreted in at least two ways. “So” can be understood as “in conclusion” and “burn in me the meanings” becomes an imperative addressed to an undetermined you. Or it can be construed as something more similar to the original, “in this way the meanings burn in me.”
Such linguistic play in English is complimented by choosing certain words that ask—or force—the reader to pause; in this poem, for example, “tapers.” The word in Spanish, “bujías,” means candle; “tapers” does too, but a better-known definition is the verb defined as to gradually make smaller or to reduce. Experimentation is likewise offset so as not to lose the reader completely. For instance, by inverting the word order of the phrase “the insects will die” from the original “van a morir los insectos,” the English meaning is straightforward.
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Ultimately, poetry’s reality is translational. In Gamoneda’s definition, the materiality of language takes precedence and only from that language comes knowledge. This inverts the usual poetic process and is not so different from what we do as translators. In fact, it comes quite close to how the great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, describes our work, “[t]he translator’s point of departure is not language in motion (the poet’s raw material), but the fixed language of the poem. Congealed language which is, nevertheless, perfectly alive” (9-10).
Indeed, from words on a page, translators fashion meaning. Paz uses this idea to arrive at a much more controversial conclusion: “[t]ranslation and creation are twin operations” (10). Thinking about it in this way, Gamoneda’s concept of poetry’s reality carries with it serious implications, for it ends up expanding our notions of not just what creativity is but, significantly, how it comes about. And this, perhaps, is its most subversive quality. To think translationally about poetry means to challenge the very concepts that have been its cornerstones in the modern era: inspiration, individuality, ownership.
All translations are the responsibility of the author.
Works Cited
Aguirre-Oteiza, Daniel. “‘No Remedy for My Ills’: Spanish Poetry Beyond Generational Boundaries.” Panic Cure: Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century, edited by Forrest Gander, Otis Books, 2014, pp. 9–19.
Del Pliego, Benito, and Andrés Fisher. “Realidad ‘Versus’ Realismo: Entrevista con Antonio Gamoneda.” Hispanic Poetry Review, vol. 5, no. 2, 2006, pp. 80–90. https://farogamoneda.wordpress.com/2016/09/15/realidad-versus-realismo-una- entrevista-con-gamoneda-por-benito-del-pliego-y-andres-fisher/
Paz, Octavio. “Literature and Literality.” Translation Review, vol. 112, no. 1, 2022, pp. 6–11. Translated by Lynn Tuttle, https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2065842
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