 |
| James Womack |
I wrote to a friend after my first year in Madrid, when I was still cockily confident about being able to get to grips with, to feel at home in Spain and Spanish poetry: ‘The more Spanish poetry I read, with its dolor, its brillo, its olvido, its sangre, destino, corazón, infierno, fiebre, insomne, flores… the more I think—why doesn’t anyone write a poem about ham?’ (In the interest of full disclosure, about six months later I found this sentence becoming the first stanza of a poem of mine, about ham.)
In many ways I still think this is true: one of the biggest obstacles to my understanding Spanish poetry—to the extent which I understand it at all—is the way in which it is so much more open to what English writers would see as the fluffiest abstractions: to take a concrete example, even the work of a poet as clearly intelligent and rigorous as Ana Gorría (Barcelona, 1979) seems to be at home in areas where most English poets I know would fear to tread. To me there’s something alien about poems such as this one which reads, in its entirety:
Lentitud que va siendo
lastre del cielo en fuga.
Poco a poco la duda. El equilibrio.
How do you understand a poem like this? Worse, how do you translate it? What does it mean? What does it want to mean? Of course, ‘Slowness that is / ballast of the sky in flight. / Little by little doubt. Equilibrium’, but what more? Translation is the highest form of criticism, a deliberate engagement with, and explanation of, every single word of a text. On some level I understand this poem, but it has something Zen about it, as if it were describing an obvious image I cannot grasp.
James Womack (Cambridge, 1979) studied Russian and English at university, and has lived in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Conil de la Frontera. He currently lives in Madrid, where he teaches English Literature at the Universidad Complutense and with his wife runs Nevsky Prospects, a publishing house which produces Spanish translations of Russian literature. His work features in the New Poetries V anthology (pictured, left), and his first collection will be published by Carcanet.