Anne Hawley Brett

September 18, 2010

Translation: The Art of Disguise
Marella Feltrin-Morris

Robert Bly, “Juan Ramon Jiménez Under the Water”

Poems may be particularly difficult to translate. As a translator tries to stay true to the

content of a poem, she must also be aware of the feel of the poem – its assonance, tone, rhyme,

and more. The translator and linguist Jacobson suggests that “Languages differ essentially in

what they must convey and not in what they may convey” (116). Poetry is generally a distilled

form of writing, careful, and thoughtfully weighted. The translator must delicately work into the

translation what a poem must say due to grammatical constructs or gendered words, and, at the

same time, refuse to butcher the translation by putting in too much information, or leaving out a

scheme of semantically and spatially linked words. A poem must say a lot because of how it is

ordered, so a translator must be alert to what she must convey, what she cannot convey, and what

the translation holds that the original does not.

But the American Poet Robert Bly, in his translator’s note to a selection of poems by

Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jiménez, spends no time at all addressing tribulations of translation.

Instead, Bly jumps right into what I read as an essay on, or introduction to, the lifestyle and

writing style of Jiménez. It is titled “Juan Ramon Jiménez Under the Water”, and is short, zippy,

but very much insightful, reminiscent of Jiménez’s own tone. He suggests that Jiménez’ style is

‘naked’, light in length and word choice but crystalline when it comes to expressing emotion. He

describes Jiménez’ relationship to his contemporary Spanish speaking poets. A brief

autobiography focuses on Jiménez’ love for his wife. Then, in the last section, Bly adds another

significant layer to the translator’s note. He writes that Jiménez’ attitude towards life and poetry
were one in the same, joyful and opposed to jaded brooding. Bly cites Herbert Marcuse’s Eros

and Civilization, which talks of how Americans are, in Bly’s paraphrasing, “crippled because of

the puritanical adherence to duty… They think it is their duty to accept boredom in politics, to

stay inside on a moonlit night, and to be miserable, selling or teaching, doing what they don’t

want to do” (5). This harsh attitude, he says, Jiménez counters with a Spanish temperament that

fosters pleasure, that “pulls the psyche towards pleasure” (5). Here Bly gives us a significant

piece of Jiménez, or rather, an outline of an attitude that will come up throughout the poems of

Jiménez.

Then we’re off into the poems. Five small pages, and with this, the reader can now go

into the text with a few pertinent details on the life of the author, a taste for the character of the

original Spanish, and some ideas of themes in Jiménez. Avoiding clunky technicalities keeps Bly

faithful to Jiménez’ carefree spirit, and Bly successfully matches Jiménez’ voice. Why stay

attached to “boring sobriety, harshness, duty, ‘responsibilities of life’, business” (5), when we

can sense the voice of one of Jiménez’ women, silently asking, “Are you coming? The dusk is so

beautiful! Before it gets dark I want to pick jasmines in the garden” (11).