Joan Brossa made me /a translation by Edward Smallfield
How did you come to translate Joan Brossa made me?
Completely by chance. I bought a bilingual (Catalan-Spanish) edition of the book in a local bookstore and was reading the poems in Spanish. Often, for reasons I don’t understand, when I like poems in another language, I feel a compulsion to translate them into English. Later, when you encouraged me to take the translations more seriously, I wasn’t comfortable working with the Spanish, because the poems are Catalan poems originally written in Catalan. For the final project, I read the poems in both languages, and always treated Catalan as the original version, the real version. I admit that having the Spanish versions helped me to calibrate, having versions in two languages instead of just one.
How did you find that helpful?
Partly to reassure myself that I wasn’t making mistakes. Obviously, in poetry, there are a number of options when you choose a word. Having the option that the Spanish translator had chosen didn’t necessarily determine what I was going to do in English, but it suggested options I might not have otherwise considered.
What attracts you to translating other poets?
You mean why I choose a particular poet, or why I’m interested in translation more generally?
Both.
Okay. Well, I actually didn’t think I was very interested in translation. When we first moved to Spain, as you know, I did something really stupid. I translated Jaime Gil de Biedma, who is, I think, a Catalan poet who writes in Spanish, into English, as a kind of exercise in trying to learn Spanish. The reason that’s dumb is that when you translate something into another language, you puts yourself into the target language and not the source language. I learned a lot about Jaime Gil de Biedma translating his work, and I learned a lot about translation, and I especially learned a lot about the English language and the conventions of English poetry, but that didn’t move me toward learning Spanish a lot faster. To actually learn the language, I had to do what everybody does—make mistakes, try and fail, make more mistakes. Not so different from writing poetry.
As for translating particular poets, it’s completely intuitive. I just felt drawn to translating Gil de Biedma, probably because his tone and sensibility are very different from what I was accustomed to in Spanish language poetry. Strangely enough, I was also drawn to these poems of Joan Brossa’s even though Brossa usually is a poet who writes a kind of poetry that I wouldn’t translate.
Tell me your thoughts about Brossa and his work.
Well, as you know, Brossa is perceived in Catalunya (because he’s not really very well known in the rest of Spain) mainly as a visual poet. So much so, that you’re more likely, ito see poems or pieces of Joan Brossa’s hanging on a wall in a museum, or as a poster, than in a book. But actually, for me as a poet, the visual work that he has in books is super interesting, and I don’t think we have a very rich tradition in English of that kind of poetry. (I apologize to those who have written and are writing visual work in English!)
Since visual poetry is definitely not a poetry that I write, it’s not something that I would be drawn to translate. But these poems of Brossa’s feel very American. Brossa was still very much in the days Franco years, when writing in Catalan was in itself a political act. The poems were also very much in rebellion against the the formal academic quality in Catalan poetry in that moment. There was a desire to use absolutely colloquial language, the language of the street, which is a of course a very American project. As you know, though, that’s not the kind of poetry I usually write. It was a little bit counter-intuitive to me that I got so excited about translating these poems. But there’s also a certain kind of surrealism in these poems. Much less the surrealism, interestingly enough, of Joan Miró, and more the surrealism of René Magritte. And I think that did draw me to these poems. But for me, it’s always mysterious, it’s never rational, it’s never conscious, I just kind of start.
I just want to say a few more words about Brossa. Like another important Catalan artist, Antoní Tàpies (I mention Tàpies because Brossa collaborated with him), Brossa was very much an artistic and aesthetic rebel. But his aesthetic rebellion was very much linked with political rebellion: anti-Franco politics, of course, but also very leftwing politics, and a very strong commitment to Catalan nationalism and Catalan independence. It would be misleading to talk about Brossa without remembering that.
Can you speak a little bit about your general approach to translation, and how you do it?
Yes. I start by blundering ahead. I just begin. I don’t think about it. That means that it’s a cumbersome process because I make a mess and I make mistakes. I have to go back, over and over again, and fix things. My approach to translation, which a lot of people do not agree with, is that I have to be able to make a real poem in English. Rendering the prose meaning doesn’t interest me at all. By a real poem in English I mean a poem in which all of the language is working and that emotion and more mysterious things are communicated, not just literal meaning. But of course I also have to respect the original meaning of the poem. If I can’t get both—the original meaning and the real poem—I have to stop. I just can’t translate the poem. I think there are 40 poems in Brossa’s original text and about 25 translations. With the other 15 I just couldn’t get there. The selection process is simply that I can make English language poems out of the original.
Is there anything about translation that you especially enjoy or find especially challenging?
I find everything challenging. Because whenever you translate–I learned this immediately in translating Gil de Biedma–you make choices. And when you translate, let’s say from Spanish to English, because that’s mostly what I’ve done, more than from Catalan to English, you make choices, and you lose things. You have to be careful: you can add things, but if you add too much, you’re losing the original. So, for me, one of the reasons that we need to have lots more than one translation of a poem is because each of those translations represents a series of options. I don’t think any number of translations can ever capture the original poem.
Do you find that translating has an impact on any facets of your own writing?
Maybe. Maybe the very simple language of Joan Brossa Made Me is showing up in the simple language of the dream poems that I’m now writing, the ones I call “night void messages.”
So, speaking of your “night void messages,” you have a number of projects going on right now. Could you speak a bit about them?
I have the “night void messages,” which are essentially me trying to write dreams down without changing anything. So, it’s a very odd poetic project for me, because I usually feel that I’m totally free in a poem, and in this case I’m not free. I can only write down what I remember from the dream. I can’t fill in, I can’t invent, I can’t do things which I think would make the dream more interesting or make a better poem. And strangely enough, I’m very much enjoying the process. I’m also continuing with a series called meditations in an emergency, stolen from Frank O’Hara’s great book with that title, which is essentially a journal of the plague year: poems written during the time of lockdown and COVID. And then there’s another project that I have a hard time defining, which is to write a particular kind of very spare, very lyrical, abstract poetry, which I’ve also been working on for quite a while, but I’m not sure how that one’s going.
Could you talk a bit about your writing process?
As you know, I’m obsessed with writing process. But I think I should frame the conversation about my writing process in terms of my own history. I’ve been writing for a really long time. Now I have the luxury of having a very unstructured life where I can do what I want to do whenever I want to do it. Those two things, the fact that I’ve been writing for a really long time and the fact that I have very few external commitments, mean that I can write whenever I want to write. For me, that means that I don’t really need to structure my writing, it just happens naturally. But that wasn’t true for a really, really long time. It took me a really long time to learn to begin poems, to learn to write poems… For most of my life I had a very structured life, and for both of those reasons I needed to have a very structured writing process: going to cafés, writing at certain times, everything you would do to try to make writing happen. And of course, making time to write; everything else was scheduled, if writing wasn’t scheduled, it wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t suggest the way I write now as a way to write when you’re beginning, or middle, or when you have the demands of a busy life. By the way, it’s also great to have a busy life, there’s nothing wrong with that. The fact that I’m at an age and point in my life where I’m not very busy is also great, but only if that is what you want. The other thing that I think I should say is that I like to write in a notebook now. For many years, I just loved writing at the computer, but not now. Now I prefer to write in a notebook. I think I partly prefer it because it’s messier, because it also for more mistakes, and it permits for a built-in revision process of looking at the poem and reading it while I’m typing.
Could you talk a little bit about how other art forms have influenced your work?
When I was younger, and struggling to write, I wrote a lot of poems about paintings. Paintings were almost a source subject for me, a way of getting out of myself and getting into something else. I still look at paintings, as you know, and you and I still use postcards, we still use visual images combined with words to trigger writing, though I think I’m now less explicitly engaged with the paintings. I’ve written to and about pieces of music, but I think at a certain point in time that I would have said that certainly painting was the art form, other than literature, that was the most important to me. But now it’s music, and it has to do with two things about music that I think are contradictory. One is the beautiful abstraction of music. In a way, poetry is the least pure of the arts, and that is beautiful, and something that I love. And in a way music can be the purest of the arts. The freedom of a certain kind of musician, the freedom of a Thelonious Monk or a John Cage, is very inspirational for me. But the freedom, not just conceptually in Cage’s writing, or in Monk’s “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes,” but in the music itself. The intimate experience of the music and the freedom of the music.
In your work as a teacher and editor, and also as a friend and collaborator, you’ve helped a lot of writers get started and keep going. What’s been important about that for you?
First of all, thank you for saying that. I feel that the writers I’ve known, the writers whom I happen to have taught at a point in time, because they’re younger than me, would have gotten to where they’ve gotten to anyway. And I wouldn’t give myself any credit. I feel that they’ve been a huge inspiration to me; I’ve learned a huge amount from them. What’s important to me about teaching, and what’s important to me about editing, is neither is particularly generous on my side—other people have given me so much when I’ve read and talked about their work.
