The Traitor, the Translator and the Hero: From Huidobro to Weinberger

Cristián Gómez O.(presentation for XXXVIICongress of Instituto InternacionalDe Literatura IberoAmericana, Puebla,Mexico, June 2008)

The first time Eliot Weinberger decided to translate Huidobro, it was at the behest of

Emir Rodríguez Monegal, in order to include that translation in Monegal’s Borzoi

Anthology of Latin American Literature (1977). But that occasion Weinberger only

translated the third Canto. Then, after a request from David Guss, he worked with the

canto IV to be published in a Huidobro’s anthology in 1981.

Later on, as just one small step in the path that Weinberger has been covering

altogether with the poet of Altazor (1931), our translator would take on the enterprise of

translating the complete text of Altazor, now at the request (and helped by) the Chilean

poet Cecilia Vicuña. Faithfull to his own views about this topic, Weinberger has

translated once and again the same poem, starting from the scratch the undefinitive

translation of one text that no too long ago did not have a definite text either. Suspicion

about Altazor remain till today, even though professor and renowned poet Andrés

Morales has achieved a remarkable work of philology and scholarship in order to

establish a “final” version of Huidobro’s text with Altazor de puño y letra (1999). In the

Introduction to his translation of 2004, Weinberger itself explains why this is so,

It is still not known what language the poem was written in.Fragments were first published in magazines in French; the

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book ultimately in Spanish. The nightingale of the poem, whose middle syllable runs through the musical scale, is not a Spanish ruiseñor but a French rossignol made Spanish:rosiñol. Thus the original of this untranslatable poem mayitself be a translation. (XII)

Among his own “tenets” for the translation process, Weinberger established a set of

rules, very interesting ones some of them, that can help us to understand his reading of

Huidobro and, also to separate it from others that consider Altazor’s voyage as an

existential failure, like Icarus who reaches its highest point acknowledging its defeat.

So let’s start with some of those issues that Weinberger points out about translation.

He might not use these same words, but the first rule indicates that the translator must

highly appraise humility as part of his labor. Even if Weinberger shares the need to

recognize the translation process as a genre with its own normative and statutes (as he

also does in regard the labour demands of translators as paid workers), he stresses that “A

translation is based on the dissolution of the self. A bad translation is the insistent voice

of the translator” (Outside Stories, 60). This is not just about how modest Weinberger

could be, but a proposal about writing and its meaning. Namely: many of Weinberger’s

views about translating, are aimed to put aside any consideration of faithfullness, any

attempt to make prevail the original upon the translated text. “The original is never better

than the translation. The translation is worse than another translation, written or not yet

written, of the same original” (60), writes Weinberger, showing he is in tune with the

contemporary tendencies in the field.

His distrust of the translator entangled with academic erudition pursues the same

goal. Overseers of every translation, the faculty of Foreign Language Departments,

according to Weinberger, they always emphasize in the more or less accuracy of any

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translated text to the original one, wether is right or awfully wrong to translate “lecho” as

“milk” (as once actually happened to a very sorrow Neruda). But more often than not,

they blatantly lack of any knowledge of the poetry written in the language in which the

text will be translated to. Conversely to that cliché that argues that the best poetry

translators are almost exclusively the poets themselves, for Weinberger

The only good translators are avid readers of contemporary poetry in the translation-language. All the worst translations are done by expertsin the foreign language who know little or nothing about the poetryalong-side which their translations will be read. Foreign-language academics are largely concerned with semantical accuracy, renderingsupposedly exact meanings into a frequently colorless or awkward version of the translation-language. They often write as though the entire twentieth century had not occurred. (…) They champion the best-loved poet of Ruthenia, but never realize that he sounds in English like bad Tennyson. Poets (or poetry readers) may be sometimes sloppy in their dictionary-use, but they are preoccupied with what is different in the foreign author, that which is not already available among writers in the translation-language, how that difference may be demonstrated, and howthe borders of the possible may be expanded. Bad translations provide examples for historical surveys; good translations are always a form ofadvocacy criticism: here is a writer one ought to be reading and here isthe proof. (en Balderston, Daniel y Schwartz, Marcy E. (editors). Voice-overs, 112)

I have used this long quote due to illustrates various aspects that will allows, now, to

study the Weinberger’s translation of Altazor. Before to proceed, I would to call the

attention into what seems to be a small but decisive contradiction of this translator and

also theoretician of translation. One of the principles that Weinberger considers to be of

the utmost importance is the one claiming that a poem translated into English should not

sound as one originally written in English. Once and again, interspersed in different

publications related to the topic, Weinberger repeats this sentence: “A translation that

sounds like a poem in English is usually a bad translation”. (Outside Stories, 59)

However, this formula has some nuances and they also have their own justification.

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Weinberger itself explicites the nuances, from the very moment when he discusses that

the reading of a translated text generates a “specific kind of distance” (59): for him, there

is a voluntary interruption in the reader of the implicit agreement among him/her and the

author, so he/she does not forget not pne split second s/he is reading a translation, not an

original text. Further on we will examine more closely this statement. By the present

time, one other of those nuances that I wanted to point out is the fact that Weinberger is

always talking about texts translated into English, a language for whose readers a work

coming from a foreign language it might become “exotic”-I am using exactly the same

term than the author of Outside Stories. It looks like Weinberger is echoing Lawrence

Venuti, since this other theoretician arguments that the translated text should keep visible

that exoticism instead of domesticate it, so as to do not just vertirlo simplemente en

moldes familiares for the second language readers.

On this particular point, Venuti’s sees a three centuries tradition overrating the

transparent translation in the Anglo Saxon reception, that kind of translation that seems to

have been written in English and sounds like English literature. To follow Miguel Ángel

Montezanti,

la traducción, en consecuencia, anula la diferencia y complace al público en el afianzamiento de la propia cultura dominante. Es lo quese llama una estrategia de domesticación, de modo tal que las huellas del operador de los textos, el traductor, se esfumen totalmente y el textocree la noción de limpidez, de diafanidad entre las dos lenguas. A esta estrategia opone el tratadista [Venuti] la de extranjerización, con la queel texto traducido retiene huellas del traductor, se conmueve por las diferencias que lo separan de la cultura de la lengua de origen, disciernesus propias limitaciones en el empeño por interpretarlas y en fin, poneen tela de juicio los presupuestos culturales, lingüísticos e ideológicosde la lengua receptora, con lo que naturalmente esta se enriquece y plenifica. (en Bradford, 162)

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Even if he has to underscore that the translated text is always a translated text (and

not a poem that sounds fine in English), it seems like Weinberger wants to avoid in all the

extent the co-option of cultural differences that are usually manipulated in order to

familiarize the translated text with the target language and its readers. In spite of the

theoretical scruples of Weinberger, there is no doubt that “la expansión de los horizontes

de lo posible1”, one of his own premises, this is, the introduction of something till that

moment not available in the target language (this case, English), is successfully

accomplished in his translation of Altazor (2004): therefore the debate should be focused

on whether Weinberger’s version 1) it does become one of those “advocacy criticism”

that he mentions, a term that he understands as criticism for a cause, this time the cause

fro the need of reading Huidobro, being taken by the discoveries of his poetic, more or

less close to his creacionista creed. And 2) to pay attention to the contradiction of

Weinberger as theoretician, not as a practitioner of translation, because he has written a

conspicuous poem in English, even though he vocally advocated to keep a differentiated

reading statute whenever we read a translated text, different from the one we agree with

meanwhile reading a poem written originally in English.

Since the translation study field set sail through the Wide Sea of comparative

literature, although according to Susan Bassnett (1993) the relationship tends to be

exactly the opposite, being comparative literature just a branch of Translation Studies, we

would like to take a little bit farther the analisis of the tranlation of this huidobrian poem,

to set the question for the genealogy of this translation, and furthermore, to ask why

Huidobro didn´t make it to that selective group (Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado,

Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, César Vallejo) when Robert Bly “discovered”

1 The translation is mine.

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Latin American Poetry in an Oslo library. Even if we take in consideration the personal

and aesthetic gaps between Huidobro and Neruda, for instance, the question remains the

same if the obvious affinities with other poets like Vallejo are brought to the front.

This would be a fascinating research to take on, in so far we would have to put in one

and the same diachronic perspective both the poetry of those picked by Bly (an

heterogeneous group on its own), altogether with Robert Bly’s poetry, looking forward to

address the formal analysis of the eventual exchanges occurred in that translating process.

Neither could we disregard the public role that some omnipresent figures had, such as

Neruda and García Lorca (by definition epitomies of the Left), keeping in mind too how

much cost to Huidobro his private feud with the Chilean Nobel Prize and his withdrawal

from the Communist Party.

Also a factor in the fate of Huidobro’s poetry in English, are the translations of other

authors close to Huidobro’s atmosphere (this word comes handy when you are talking

about Altazor), especially nowadays when the time past by has smoothed things over.

Today the dispute between Huidobro and Reverdy for the ownership of creacionismo is

outdated, but neither their work nor Max Jacob’s are, another French author both

translated into English by John Ashbery, among others. As a matter of fact, the influence

of French surrealism in this American poet has been extensively studied, but we are not

so sure when it comes to the study of up to what extents his work as a translator has

impacted his own poetry.

Therefore, we cannot make a valid assessment of Weinberger’s translation if we go

line by line or deciding on a whim, randomly to separate one verse, that out of its context

can be easily be put under the microscope of any point of view that in this way shows its

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irrelevance. Is in this sense that any attempt to translate Altazor implies, either implicit or

explicitly, an interpretation of it. This could be somewhat redundant, but there is more in

it than we can suppose without paying some close attention to this matter. Some

reserchers like José Quiroga assume, that Altazor can be understood as the sequence of a

long trip through the possibilities of language, its death and renaissance. Thus, Altazor

would be a poem purportedly about literature, according to Quiroga (in Balderston,

Daniel y Schwartz, Marcy E. (editors) Voice-overs, 164). From this position he reviews

the translation done by Weinberger as a sheer example of that mix that blends nostalgia

for orality and the presence of écriture, a concoction that, again according to Quiroga, is

in the essence of much of the Latin American poetry. Following this line of thought, the

elegant translation that Weinberger does of the sonority of Huidobro’s Altazor, is nothing

else than the manifestation of that inner tension in our poetry among writing and sound,

meaning and orality. The alleged essential heterogeneity of language in Altazor, leads

Quiroga to deny Weinberger any chance of being at the same time faithful on one hand to

the sounds of the poem, and to its meaning also.

What is worrisome to me from the conclusions of Quiroga, has not much to do with

his assessment of the more or less accuracy and/or faithfulness of the translation, but the

implicit assumptions underneath his rationale.

For Quiroga, Weinberger’s translation is the evidence of an aporia (169):this paradox

would be that the Latin American text is always the result of a previous translation, this is

to say, before being translated to any given language (Russian, Chinese, English or

Croatian, or any), every single Latin American text is –beforehand- a translation from the

plenitude of orality, the Latin American text is nothing different than nostalgia for that

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out-of-reach totality , undermining, at the same time, the very idea of an original.

However, this attachment to a lost and unreachable totality seems to us suspiciously

patronizing, as far as it contemplates a common source (“a primal scene”, 165) to a

variety of poetics that do not belong necessarily to the same root notwithstanding their

shared label as Latin Americans. This involves as well the reproduction of an image of

Latin America associated to the arcaic, primitive, natural, intact and virgin: however, for

better or worse, from its very beginnings as Latin America –and not as Indigenous

America- hibridity and blend, sincretism and heterogeneity have been its trade mark. And

I do not believe neither that in the symbolic sphere could be acceptable this kind of

reckless return to the origins, because this nostalgia usually is a modernity dream, a

desire and a spin-off produced from the very same process that is trying to escape from.

For us, we understand the Huidobro’s poem related to the loss of existential meaning

that men and women between the wars had to confront (the text dates from 1918 initially

till its conclusion in 1931), in the middle of a spread feeling of rootlessness that could

only find redemption through an utopia both personal and collective. This approach,

explored before by Cedomil Góic (1992), allows us to read the same fragments associated

by Quiroga to a long lasting aporia in Latin American poetry (an aporia for us wrongfully

and suspiciously established), as the disintegration of that anguished subject in between

the wars, as a previous step for its future resurrection.

This way, we could imagine a crescendo in the seven cantos’ structure of Altazor.

From a romantic anthem written in the creacionista tune, as can be defined canto II,

including also the First canto where the communicative situation is settled, the

unavoidable fall and the recognition of the lyric speaker as subject (“No quiero ligaduras

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de astro ni de viento/Ligaduras de luna buenas son para el mar y las mujeres/Dadme mis

violines de vértigo insumiso/Mi libertad de música escapada”2) till –apparently– the final

decomposition of any kind of communication in the last canto. Skepticism about the

possibilities of language, but mostly an indagatory around the always risky chances of

stablishing a subject, Altazor presupposes a defeat, since, as Guillermo Sucre points, “es

significativo, al menos, que Altazor concluya en la explosión del lenguaje y no en la

creación de uno nuevo” (108). This statement, however, must be kept in mind as part of

the global vision that Sucre holds about Huidobro as author.

For him, Altazor is a watershed point between the most overtly avant-garde days of

Huidobro and its ending with the parachute fly that finishes on 1931. According to Sucre,

the altazorian anguish became meditation. Titles such as Ver y palpar (1941), El

ciudadano del olvido (1941), but principally Últimos poemas (1948), recover for

Huidobrian work that signification seemingly forgotten meanwhile Altazor was written.

Symptomatically, this seems to be (we are speaking in all good faith), the non

declared debt of Quiroga with Sucre: what this last one talks about is the “return” implied

in this new and final period in Huidobro’s poetry after Altazor. Sucre understands the

new nostalgia in which the poetry of Huidobro is drenched as the lesson learned from the

altazorian years, so as to renew again his faith not as much in the “message” of poetry,

but in the word itself, in its capacity of being not only the signifier, but foremost the very

sign on its own.

So critics appear divided among those who see the recognition of the impossibility of

absolute (Altazor’s last moment) as a failure of Huidobro’s entreprise, as Sucre and

2 In http://www.vicentehuidobro.uchile.cl/altazor_canto1.htm

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Quiroga do, and also till some extent Andrés Morales3, and, those others like Weinberger4

for whom the vivid momentum of Altazor and futurity potential is a challenge in that

hereafter, when

poems would be written in bird-language, star-language, airplane-language, and we would all inhabit a “beautiful madness in the zoneof language”. For decades it was thought that Altazor was a noble disaster that admitted its own failure by its descent into gibberish. Lately the postmoderns have used it as a prophesy of their revelationof the fundamental meaninglessness of language. This wasn’t whathe meant at all: once upon a time, the new was sacred, and the future the only mythical era. (Weinberger, 16)

I have no certainty about this, but I do not think that Weinberger knows Juan Luis

Martínez’s work, at least not in detail. All the same, to say that in the future poetry will

be written in the language of the birds, especially in the Chilean environment, looks like

the perfect self-fulfilling prophecy reading some passages of La nueva novela (1977)5.

Is probable worth to bring here what Pedro Lastra said in respect a secret relation

between James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Altazor, in regard the debate around the

origin of Altazor and its supposed nostalgia for some orality that would be some kind of

hidden ideological subtext for its composition.

Lastra tells that Borges, in a review about a translation of Ulysses by J. Salas Subirat

published in 1945, praised the options taken to translate some especially difficult pieces

of Joyce´s novel. Borges takes some time to detail the accomplishments of the translator:

"Que no era un árbolcielo, no un antrocielo, no un bestiacielo, no un hombrecielo, -que

3 Morales interprets Altazor’s pass as a “voltaic arc”, and after this his writing became more spontaneous and filled with an emotivity easier to access for the reader.4 Also, the very interesting doctoral dissertation of Mario Ávila Rubio, Altazor: la experiencia del triunfo, in http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/bibVirtual/Libros/literatura/Altaz_Exp_triunf/indice.htm5 Not to mention Pablo Neruda’s Arte de pájaros (1966), although we do not know if Neruda and his flock would be happy to hear about it.

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recta e inventivamente traduce- That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a

heavenbeast, not a heavenman". (233)

What is deeply interesting are the dots that Lastra ties, reminding us that Huidobro

was living in Paris when Ulysses was published, by Shakespeare & co. It would not be

ludicrous, Lastra says, to assume that Huidobro know the work of Joyce, given his

intellectual curiosity and how closely he followed that avant-garde world to which he

belonged too as one of its protagonists. After noticing there is no mention at all of Joyce

in Huidobro’s biography, Lastra cannot help to pose this question: “¿Indicará ese silencio

una cierta voluntad de ocultamiento de un antecedente que opacaría en algo su

originalidad?” (2002). More interesting though is the final observation done by Lastra,

speculating about the possibility that the same Salas Subirats (whose translation of

Ulysses, lets remind it again, dates from 1945, fourteen years later the first edition of

Altazor) could have been a privileged reader of Altazor, wrapping up a virtuous circle

that had begun in 1922 with the first Ulysses, to end (via Huidobro’s work) in the 1945

edition, published by Santiago Rueda in Argentina, brought into Spanish by José Salas

Subirats, a self-taught and insurance salesman, born in Argentina, not in Chile nor

Cataluña as some legend has imagined, right after the beginning of 20th century . He died

in Florida, a town close to Buenos Aires, in 1975.

As a conclusion, we are inclined to see Weinberger's translation as a very close

version of what Jorge Luis Borges thought of translation A conspicuous visitor that

stopped in Argentina in the first part of twentieth century was Henri Michaux, to whom

Borges met in 1935, translating his Un bárbaro en el Asia soon after. Borges said that –

we call the attention upon this due to its importance to illustrate the links between Borges

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and Weinberger– he had translated that book as part of a game rather than a job (“no

como un deber sino como un juego”, Waisman 41). These words ooze the idea that

translation is “like a game, experimentation and a process of discovery (…) and reflects

Argentine culture's polyglot character, especially in those times”(Waisman 41). About the

same time when he translated Michaux, Borges was publishing the essays on which he

exposes his ideas about this topic, namely “Las dos maneras de traducir”, from 1926, “La

versiones homéricas”, of 1932 and “Los traductores de las 1001 noches”, in1935. There

Borges advocates for that kind of translations for whom to reproduce the original in the

target language is not the goal, nor what is lost in the translation process. Conversely,

Borges applauds all those works that in one way or the other “disrespect” the original to

be translated, the ones that don´t try to be faithful to it, but they do feel free to undergo as

many crealtive licenses as they feel/need like –the same that Borges reveled in. Thus, he

will compare the different Homeric versions, emphasizing this word, equivalent one to

each other, all legitimate, and in the long run, complementary. As a matter of fact, Borges

pays special attention, among the translators of the Arabian Nights, to those like Burton

and Galland, as far as they domesticate the original6 –scandalizing the more

contemporary translation theories, always with a politically correct prevalent agenda–,

becoming these translators something similar to a somewhat co-author in their language

of the text they are working with. This is so since Burton, on one hand, meanwhile

addressing an audience of XIX century-white-male-gentleman from London, “make

uncountable substitutions; he works with an extense vocabulary, contradictory and

uneven that holds neologisms and foreign terms; he completely re-writes the first and last

stories; and he made several changes, omisions and interpolations” (Waisman 80).

6 Original that –according to Waisman- has never been completely established.

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Borges calls these textual procedures as “A fine distortion, since these verbal pranks –and

some other syntactical ones– distract the sometimes overwhelming course of the Nights”

(Waisman 80), this is, an overt eulogy of unfaithfulness as translation strategy.

The erosion of the concept of original associated to these ideas, is fundamental so as

to destabilize the preeminence of a text that must be respected and enshrined and, at the

same time, to keep some artificial hierarchies (North-South, canonical v/s no canonical)

that only echo the interests of private agendas. There are obvious differences among

Weinberger's and Borges' views of translation as a cultural process. There are obvious

coincidences too. None of the two wrote in the same atmosphere either. Even though for

the Huidobro's translator the problem of the reception of a translated text in the target

culture is essential (as far as the target culture is a non Third World Culture), from

Borges' stance things look pretty different. There was no inconvenient in Borges' view of

any domestication since he himself was trying to domesticate or familiarize those texts

from abroad that he was so fond to (in the assumption that the word “foreign” had the

same meaning in the Borges' universe than to the rest of us). But either the Argentine

writer or Weinberger, both of them make very clear the case for a translation that should

be riddle of any pre-imposed hierarchies and that should work as a work on its own,

disregarding any ties to the first language trying to keep a tight hold over the form and

the meaning. The sentence that recommends to keep reading the classics because we

never read them for the first time, but always through the collection of refractions and

interpretation done of them through out History, has never been more necessary, truthful,

and accurate. Whether these interpretations and readings are correct or no, faithful or

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unfaithful, is still a matter for debate The notion of a "definitive text" (lets quote Borges

to end this article) belongs to religion or perhaps merely to exhaustion.

WORKS CITED

Balderston, Daniel y Schwartz, Marcy E. (editors). Voice-overs. N.Y: State University of

New York Press, 2002.

Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature. A Critical Introduction. Oxford & Cambridge:

Blackwell, 1993.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Textos Recobrados . 1931-1955 . Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores,

2002.

------------------------ Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1989.

Bradford, Lisa. Traducción como cultura. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997.

Goic, Cedomil. Los mitos degradados: Ensayos de comprensión de la Literatura

Hispanoamericana. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992.

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Huidobro, Vicente. Translated by Eliot Weinberger. Middletown, Connecticut: Altazor.

Wesleyan, 2004.

------------------------. Altazor. Santiago: Universitaria, 2004.

------------------------. Andrés Morales (editor). Altazor de puño y letra. Santiago: Banco

del Estado, 1999.

-----------------------. Ver y palpar. Santiago: Ediciones Ercilla, 1941.

-----------------------. El ciudadano del olvido. Santiago: Ediciones Ercilla, 1941.

-----------------------. Últimos poemas. Santiago: Talleres Gráficos Ahués Hnos., 1948.

Lastra, Pedro. ¿De Joyce a Huidobro?, in Hiper feria,

http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Publish/hiper/num3/artic/plastra.htm, 2002

Martínez, Juan Luis. La nueva novela. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Archivo, 1977.

Morales, Andrés. “A sesenta años de la muerte de Vicente Huidobro”. In La página de

Andrés Morales. http://paginadeandresmorales.blogspot.com/2008/08/sesenta-aos-de-la-

muerte-de-vicente.html#links, 2008

Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature. N.Y: Alfred

Knopf, 1977.

Waisman, Sergio. Borges y la traducción. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2005.

Weinberger, Eliot. Outside stories. N.Y. New Directions, 1992.

Read, Justin. The 'New Original' English Translation of Vicente Huidobro's 'Altazor.'" Translation Review, No. 71 (2006): 61-65.

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