AKaiser on translating Anna Gual

AKaiser on translating Anna Gual

Anna Gual is a Catalan poet and the author of eight prizewinning poetry collections. She has been lauded critically while reaching an ever-expanding pan-European audience as she gives voice to her gifts of sensing, feeling, and expressing awe of, and in, the beguiling quotidian, as well as of and in the timeless. The urge to render seed to star is her compass rose. To experience her words is to join an inventive searching toward the liminal; toward omnipresence and elusive horizons—horizontal and vertical; toward dirt-laden construction and deconstruction sites; toward an often willingly unhinged coursing through time, rivers, and electrical currents, to say nothing of one’s own veins. 

As poet Susanna Rafart remarks, to enter Anna’s work is to enter a “forest of wild rebirths.” She forms part of a Catalan poetry lineage that includes Mireia Calafell, Míriam Cano, Francesc Garriga, Gemma Gorga, and Antònia Vicens. As poet and translator Francesc Parcerisas, who lived under decades of dictatorship, says in his comments on Anna and her generation of poets, born after Franco’s death: “[they] have added to the contemporary literary scene voices of rebellion, insight, and a bright palette of images rescued from a hidden tradition.”

Translating the poems in Unnameable, it was as if Anna was sitting quietly beside me as I read and said her words to discover different ways, in English, to express something akin to what she did in Catalan. These “different ways” are portals before you, surrounding you. Which do you choose? Where do you go? Simply, you go. Whether it be through a doorway, however imposing, or a gateway to further information, enriched emotion, enhanced resources, whether a nexus between the material and the spiritual, from one state of consciousness to another, whether it be venous nourishment before conveying the blood back to the heart. In fact, the process is not unlike what Anna writes in “Inner Forest,” “I’ll grope along the roots to feel the way.” 

In “Aureate Border,” the reader can experience many recurring themes and key images in the poems: running; the notion of path/s, particularly making one’s own, without a map or, in this poem, “following star maps”; nonurban sites such as the interior of the body, magma sites, jungles; images of pregnancy wrought in deep physicality, here, “but the little animal I carry inside / comes with me”, and further on, “to think I will breastfeed / the creature…”; her insisting on the telling of tales suppressed or silenced by society or tradition, “…and tell them tales / you silence.” The poems are intense, and I hope I have brought some of that intensity over. 

They are also not without humor, as we see here: “Immortality must be / not to carry a backpack.” This poem is titled “Límit Herbaci” in Catalan. “Herbaci” means herbaceous. Herbaceous means relating to the quality of an herb in nature and texture, as opposed to a woody plant, as in lacking lignified tissues. My choice of “aureate” in lieu of “herbacious” has a reason for being: First of all, I know from conversations with Anna that she chooses last lines for particular impact. Based on this, I wanted to reinforce through the title the transformation of the “darkest fields” in the first stanza to the last stanza’s “will be the most golden you’ve ever seen.” Secondly, sound. Quite simply (an example of how a translator’s personal lived experience can affect the translation, and as I discussed with Anna), I didn’t like many of the words the suffix “-acious” took me to. Would this also be a distraction for other readers? On top of making “sense” within the context of my translation, I find the word “aureate” itself lovely.

In any case, I’ve been spiritually reenergized by, not to mention immensely grateful for, my involvement with Anna as a person and by translating her work. I’ve been deeply enriched by our relationship as I’ve gathered a deeper understanding of her world, language, and culture. The experience has enlarged and continues to enlarge my ideas of what poetry can be, and yes!, of what it can do.


Photo Credit: Dr. James Heaney.