[Glenn Wright]

Oh, Carl, you are so strict! (This is a callback to the movie The Twelve Chairs based on a novel by Ilf and Petrov.)

I like your simplification of S1L3, and will use it.

Shakespeare had Lady Macbeth use “gilt” to refer to smearing Duncan’s blood on his bodyguards: “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,/ For it must seem their guilt.” (Macbeth II, ii, 69-70).

In the original Spanish, the anguish could be construed as belonging to the sky, world, and hour, or just to the sky. The sexual innuendo attached to the torch is complex. “Lúbrica” means “sexually arousing, obscene” (as is seen in the etymology of the English word “lubricious”) but it can also mean “slippery” (as is seen in the etymology of the English word “lubricate.”). I concluded that the torch (yes, Dr. Freud, I know that sometimes a torch is just a torch) is slippery with the tears of blood, and thus is sexually suggestive somehow to the speaker. Thus the tears of blood are the source of the lustiness. Consequently I could justify lúbrica modifying tea as a transferred epithet (hypallage) which I untransferred in the tet translation.

I’ll have to keep thinking to come up with a fix for the inversion in S2L4.
Thanks for your continued guidance!
Glenn

[David Callin]

I like the new version, but not the inversion. (See what I did there?)

I also don't much like the closing rhyme on "prescience". Is that meaning in the original? I can't tell myself, but it just looks like "science" to me.

On the whole, though, the tet version works much better for me.

Cheers

David

[Glenn Wright]

Thanks, David—

I’m still waiting to be struck with inspiration for a way to fix the inversion in S2L4. I think it will probably involve a re-do of the whole quatrain.

García Lorca’s choice of the word ciencia to end his sonnet is significant. The most common Spanish words for “knowledge” are conocimiento or saber. The word ciencia, while not unusual, also means “science,” and carries a connotation of being the kind of knowledge that is useful for making predictions. I thought “prescience” most nearly approximated this nuance. Of course, García Lorca’s word choice is also constrained by rhyme considerations, as is mine.

I liked the pentameter version better, but the tet version is growing on me. It was something I would not have thought to try without you and Carl suggesting it.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

It was something I would not have thought to try without you and Carl suggesting it.

It was actually David and Andrew Frisardi who ganged up on me and made me shrink one of my translations from pentameter to tetrameter. It worked wonders. Of course, English is a much more compact language than Russian. The difference with Spanish may not be so great.

[Matt Q]

Hi Glenn,

Good to read this. I like the tet version more, it's just so much tighter, and seems to better fit the tautness of the original. I started commenting on the tet version, but I've run out of time. I'll try to come back for the sestet another day.

A general comment: I'd try keeping the original punctuation as much as possible. You've changed the full stops to commas and semicolons. I'd keep the sentence fragments of the orginal. It's more terse, more clipped. The mood changes a little with the commas. It softens things a touch, smooths the edginess a little.

I'd say S1L1 is trimeter, or at least ambiguous. "fire" is one syllable, albeit for a diphong -- a more pronounced diphtong for some speakers than others. You might get away with it later in the poem, but as a first line, before the metre's established, I'm less sure. You could put the "hungry" back in, I guess:

This LIGHT, this HUNGry FIRE that deEVOURS,

I guess some might want to read it as pentameter. But if that worries you, you could go with "flame" maybe?

I like the ocean image, whether it's in the original or not, and it gibes with the later "sea". But, for it to work, I do think the ocean needs to be "encircling" to be surrounding the N. Currently it's just circling: moving in circles, revolving. Though to fit "encircling" in, as the line stands, you'd need to lose "grey".

S2L1, I think you need a "that" to keep the sense and the grammar (this is a sentence fragment in the original and without the "that" you lose the fragment and have an active verb). You don't lose the metre by inserting one.

"this crush of waves inflicts such pain"

again, you switch to a sentence where the original has a fragment. Maybe go with:

this crush of waves that inflicts pain;

in the comments I saw you express disatisfiaction with a phyrric foot followed by a spondee, and since that's what I'm suggesting here, so I'll just point out that such a combination is known as a double iamb. A classic metrical move that's been kosher since old Shaky himself.

"this scorpion’s taint my heart has filled"

This seems to say that his heart has filled the scorpion's taint. Whereas in the original it seems to be the other way round: the scorpian has made a nest in his heart.

So shouldn't it be: "My heart the scorpian's taint has filled"?

I'd say neither of these versions in an inversion, because, again, this is a sentence fragment. There's no active verb. There's an implied "that" in each:

The scorpian's taint that my heart has filled

My heart that the scorpian's taint has filled


best,

Matt

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Matt—

Wow! This was the thunderbolt of inspiration I was hoping for. I incorporated many of your suggestions and feel that they greatly improved the tet version to the extent that I now prefer it to the pentameter version. Your advice to return to García Lorca’s punctuation was inspired. My English teacher compulsion to correct sentence fragments was getting the better of me. The periods slow the tempo and help each image to shine. Your point about the scorpion line was also a revelation. I was able to get rid of the inversion, clarify the image, and get rid of the “gild” that was annoying Carl.

I decided to expand the ocean imagery, even though it moves the translation away from literal toward adaptation. It all hangs on one reference to the ocean in S2L3, but I added the gray ocean in S1L2 and the shipwreck in S3L3. I decided that a gray seascape was more desolate than any gray landscape I could imagine, and I like the image of the “shipwrecked heart” even though it stretches the meaning of hundido almost to the breaking point.

Thanks so much for your inspired help. Thanks, too, to Carl and David. All three of you constant readers have taught me a great deal as I do my apprenticeship as a translator.
Glenn

[Carl Copeland]

Matt’s an ace, isn’t he? The translation is really looking good, with two reservations:

I’m glad you recovered the “shipwreck,” which you blamed me for losing, but now there’s a wreck too many in that line. Can’t we find something to replace “wreckage”?

I’m afraid I may have misled you. Do I understand you to be saying that the tears of blood paint the lyre and the torch? If so, forget everything I said yesterday and make it: “the lyre unplucked, the torch profane.” Without the parallelism, it’s unclear grammatically what “the torch, profane,” especially with a comma, is doing. Sorry for the confusion.

[Matt Q]

Hi Glenn,

I like the switching of "grey" from landscape to ocean, a clever solution that keeps the image, and I'd say even improves it. It's still clear that the landscape is grey.

Very happy my thoughts were helpful. In which case, I'm encouraged to double down on them a bit. I notice that your second stanza is still made of fully formed sentences, whereas Lorca's continues the fragments of the previous S. So, my suggestion would be that since you can follow Lorca on this, you should.

Here's your second stanza as fragments, with none of your word choices changed, just the occasional "that" added.

These tears of blood that obscenely paint
the unplucked lyre, the torch profane.
This crush of waves that inflicts such pain.
My heart that's filled with scorpian's taint.

It's all still loose iambic tetrameter, though you have the option of tightening that in places if you like.

In relation to this, I'll throw out a suggestion for L4. Because the scorpion has made its home in the N's heart, you could use "hosts", which also adds alliteration, and is a little less expected than "fills", since we often say hearts are "full" of something. So:

My heart that hosts the scorpion’s taint.
(or "a scorpian's")

L1: Should you wish, you now have the option of replacing "obscenely" with a two-syllable word. "darkly", "crudely", "quickly"? ("splatter-paints" would accurate, given that these are tears dropping, but too comical I think!). Trouble here is you're having to invent an adjective, as you do with "obscenely", because "paint" already fully covers "decorate". I wonder if there's a way to keep "decorate"? For example:

My heart that hosts a scorpion’s hate.
(or "that's filled with a scorpian's hate)

Though that maybe overlays the image with interpretation, or:

My heart that holds [bears] a scorpian's weight

Though maybe that's a little off, sense-wise.

Any just throwing out some thoughts. I also looked for rhymes with "nest" and "lair", but can find anything that would work as a subsitute for "decorate".

I hope to get to that sestet eventually!

best,

Matt

[Glenn Wright]

More great ideas! I like returning to “decorate” and the original sentence fragments. I’m not thrilled with “scorpion’s hate” because in the next line the speaker is declaring his love, but it will do until I can find something better. Thanks so much for your help, Matt.

P.S. I changed “hosts” in S2L4 yo “bears.” That way the speaker is the victim rather than the perpetrator of the hate.

[Carl Copeland]

This is now reading so well! Two thoughts:

This landscape, a gray, encircling ocean.

Without “like,” this is going to be read as two things: landscape and ocean. A colon would clarify it.

How about replacing the fillerish “such” with “me”?