It was surprising to see how smoothly the final translation came together in that 45 minutes on the phone. And equally fun to see the cascade of decisions as they came together. The way that an initial decision about a posture (say, the directness of verbs) flowed through the text and forced us to reconsider even lines that we both had translated the same way. The way that we had to be explicit about how we made decisions, perhaps explicit in ways that we hadn’t articulated to ourselves before. Pushing through areas of stuckness that had been stuck from the beginning.

The decision not to look at the poem while working on it seemed to come naturally. We’d already talked about how important it felt for a text to come alive within us, so perhaps we carried that ember and gave it air in this last stage.

Figuring out what to do with “pedir” was a big thing. Propose and ask are two of its meanings, but English doesn’t make it easy to use a plainspoken verb while packing in the layers of meaning. In the end, repeating “ask the hand [of]” felt like the best choice for echoing the word color of the rest of the poem.

Having a common framework was a big help. In addition to the plain words used in situations where there were many choices available, we felt that other key elements of the poem included layered repetition and the subversion of the production/reproduction expected from women. The repetition seemed to come more in additive swells than through repeated words alone, so we tried to capture that cumulative force in the speaker’s words. One question here was whether to make the future tense explicit in all cases: “they will, they will, they will,” or using an introductory future tense before launching into a litany of standalone verbs? In Spanish, the verbs intrinsically contain that subject and future, but in English, it’s a choice. We ended up starting off with the subject and then leaving the rest of the verbs with an explicit future: will dry, will play, will dry. The interplay of will (determination) and will (the creation of future) seemed especially present in English as a result.

Finally, the screen capture: I noticed us typing a little differently than we might have if we weren’t recording the process. We made sure to write, even if briefly, the thoughts that didn’t feel like good choices but did feel like open doors or stepping stones. It’s hard to imagine how the recording will feel to someone who hasn’t been through the same process, but I think that’s okay - the questions and feelings that arise there could be their own conversation.

I’m very glad to have tripped into this collaboration. It felt very close and alive, unlike some others which had started with an end result in mind. And it unearthed conversations that could only happen during the confusion of making, rather than in retrospect. Cheers to that. I hope this all is half as toothy to somebody out there as it was to us.

last fall, I began translating a book by elena (landsmoder) and working with her has been an absolute delight. when j and I were starting to scheme about this collaborative translation experiment, it seemed like using one of elena's poems (from another book) as our source text would be perfect. her voice is urgent, her poems bracing, and she believes in the power and possibilities of poetry off the page. as this project has unfolded, I've been so grateful for elena's willingness to let us experiment with her poem without knowing where/how things will land. if only everyone were so open!

being able to work so freely and so impulsively has been a true treat. it's felt both generative and nourishing, and more importantly, it's been a wonderful way to maintain, sustain, and grow a friendship from afar. it would take ~850 hours for me to walk to j's home. we haven't seen each other in person for nearly 3.5 years. and yet the distance and time feel contracted right now. negligible. creating (together) like this brings me life, Life, LIFE!

as to our final(?) translation: I feel like it has both of our voices. or maybe better yet, all three of our voices (elena's included). for me, it's fun to look at the translation and know that the choices we made were made together. circling back to some previous reflections, it's not a definitive translation (no such thing), but rather a snapshot of how the poem sounded in our mouthhearts at a particular moment. thinking about it this way allows me to be kinder to myself. gentler. if the goal is making a snapshot, I can do that. I can always do that.

j and I started working on this project a month or so ago. a week or two in, I got the feeling that I'd read elena's poem before. but I wasn't sure where I'd read it, whether I'd read it in english or spanish, or, frankly, if I'd read it at all. it was a weird, tip-of-the-tongue, deja-vuey feeling. suddenly, though, it clicked. I had seen this poem in BOTH languages in a bilingual anthology (hallucinated horse) edited and translated by nicole cecilia delgado and tom slingsby. once I realized this, I was tempted to look at their previous translation. i decided not to, though. I didn't make this decision because it would be "bad" to look. but because I wanted to use this project to document the particular process of experimentation and exploration that I was having with j at this particular point in time. i felt that if I read their translation, my focus would end up straying, caught in an eddy. recently, elena told me that another translation (by marianne choque) appeared in another anthology (teatro bajo mi piel/theatre under my skin). now that j and I are winding down with this stage of the project, I feel ready to re-visit the translation from hallucinated horse and read the new-to-me translation from teatro bajo mi piel. It will be an another chance to re-live elena's poem and hearfeel it as it lived in other mouthhearts. I can't wait!

as a final(?) note, it's felt encouraging for me to think about the ability of language and poetry and translation to allow for connection across difference and distance. this project has brought together three people (elena, j, and me) raised in three different places (el salvador, california, arizona) living in three different cities (mexico city, north providence, and phoenix) writing in two different languages (spanish and english). there is some magic here and i love it. in a separate project I'm translating right now, a friend and poet, marlyn cruz-centeno, wrote that in times like these, when we're self-quarantining, keeping our distance, and unable to be with friends and family, writing can be "...otra manera de tocar a alguien (...another way to touch someone)." I have never felt that more deeply than now.