For the “1/3rd the way there” post, this one is going to be pretty different from the other 32.
Lately, I have been attending a weekly Spanish language learning and international solidarity group that has been really awesome. It is anti-authoritarian in structure and very dependent on everyone taking responsibility for generating activities and discussions. I have had a long standing interest in translating the poetry of Mexican feminist writer Rosario Castellanos. I fully intend to work up to translating one epic poem of hers called “Trayectoria del polvo,” but have been bringing in some of her shorter ones to share with the language learning group to discuss and practice vocabulary and grammar as my activity. I finally have translated one of her poems that I feel like speaks to me in a thoughtful way, that I could, maybe should, have tried to submit to some literary journal somewhere if I ever want to work in academia again…but I think it is relevant to this blog project, and so instead of just presenting my translation, I think a blog is a neat space to share a translation, because I can also share some of my process and thoughts behind my translation at the same time…which will also include a discussion about patriarchal misogyny, so I think it will all come together in the end.
I will start by sharing the Spanish language version of this poem, then my translation, then a discussion of my process/thoughts about the poem.
El día inútil
By Rosario Castellanos, published first in her collection Lívida luz, 1960.
Me han traspasado el agua nocturna, los silencios
originarios, las primeras formas
de la vida, la lucha,
la escama destrozada, la sangre y el horror.
Y yo, que he sido red en las profundidades,
vuelvo a la superficie sin un pez.
My translation:
The fruitless day
I have been pierced by the night water, the originating
silences, the first forms
of life, struggle,
shattered scales, blood and horror.
And I, who have been a net in the depths,
return to the surface without a fish.
So who am I to translate this poem, why, and how does a poem about a useless day of fishing have to do with patriarchal misogyny?
First of all, I don’t claim to be a great translator! In fact, my Spanish is terrible not great, and dependent on looking up everything, multiple times, word by word. However, this is a poem of hers that has no translations available online, so even a bad translation is better than none, I hope. I think American feminists have ignored the work of Rosario Castellanos for way too long, probably because not much of it has been translated into English, so even if I am not the best translator, at least I am trying to be a translator and make her work accessible and discussible to my English-speaking peers. Rosario Castellanos is a really interesting writer, academic, diplomat, and I am not here to recount her full biography, although you can get a glimpse of it here.
The poem I translated above, “El día inútil” was the first poem published in her 1960 collection, Lívida luz, which includes a dedication “A la memoir de mi hija” (to the memory of my daughter). At the time of this books publishing, she had had 2 miscarriages which weighed heavily on her, so a reasonable and common reading of the poem is that it responds directly to this experience.
The first time I translated this poem though, I didn’t know anything about that context, and, in my first read, the poem struck me as being a critique of a patriarchal understanding of heterosexual sex: as being a cold, and violent allusion to how men use women’s bodies as essentially a tool for the purpose of procreation. After learning the context of her life around writing these works and what inspired them, it makes even more sense to me that she would start a collection of poems that processing the pain and loss of miscarriage with such a harsh portrayal of the circumstances that lead to it. “Inútil” is most commonly translated as “useless” but in the context of both miscarriage and a view of procreation as the ultimate purpose of heterosexual sex, I think the less common definition of “fruitless” does a much better job of getting the reader to approach the poem as a more embodied, and disembodying experience, hence why I went with “The fruitless day,” instead of “The useless day.”
There are a number of other, pretty nerdy linguistic choices that I made in my translation process that I don’t want to get too in depth with here, because readers are here to think about and discuss patriarchal misogyny, and not whether “originating” is really a better translation of “originarios” than “original,” or if I should just use “original” because it might sound better and more poetic, or whether I should have used more “the”s or less. However, I feel like the ways Castellanos draws attention to the objectifying and callous way that patriarchy expects men to look at and use women’s bodies is more transparent in the more directly and easily translated sections of the poem than in the complex areas I am less certain about. For example, I don’t think most people think of a net as being penetrated by the water it is being tossed into, when they think about a net being used as a tool, but that is exactly how Castellanos invites the reader into the poem in the first line with “Me han traspasado” and the narrative perspective remains with net, the object being used for the purpose of catching a fish. This is particularly an interesting perspective when considering the “silencios originarios” and the “primeras formas de la vida.” These are just things, passing through or piercing the net along with the struggle, the blood and the horror.
So while I totally see and agree that the poem is definitely dealing with the feelings of loss from a miscarriage, I feel like the cold harshness of the language is not just about bodily disassociating from that specific experience, but a critique of how a woman might well need to be able to bodily disassociate from the entire process of baby making and its risky horrors, because from the perspective of a patriarchal society, the end result of having tried to use the net is all that matters, another fruitless day.