“Brother, today I am at the stone bench of our house”

Patrick Pethybridge

Middle School

The Spanish language has been part of my identity since I was born. The language’s words always floated in the form of little commands, endearments, and objects around the house, but I never spoke it fluently. In 7th grade, my identity as a Latino was questioned and challenged by some of my classmates because of my light skin, my British ancestry, and my limited knowledge of la lengua española. They kept coming at me with statements like “You’re white!” or “Cubans are not Mexican!” and I felt saddened and somewhat hurt by them, and their use of stereotypes about what different people of color should look like against me; this seemed especially messed-up coming from a majority-BIPOC class. To push back against their attitude toward me, I decided to study Spanish through daily practice on Duolingo, and through conversations with my mother. A couple months later, I wrote my first bilingual poems and read them at the school talent show, and all my classmates rejoiced and relaxed their misconceptions about me. It was a great end to the 7th grade.

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Undersea Lair IX

In Denver, we have a thriving camaraderie of surrealist poets. Among our best friends are Eric Baus and Andrea Rexilius; Eric has mentored me on the concepts of surrealist and peculiar visions, raising animals and plants (cats and cacti, respectively), and the creativities of the world and the city; Andrea has mentored me on pretend-play and drama and feminist art. Together, they influenced my creative and activist endeavors in childhood and teenage-hood. They live in a carriage house that has gone by many names, including the Dept. of Astonishing Poetry, the Attic of Wonderment, Baustralia, and Undersea Lair IX. When they go out of town, they ask me to feed and play with their cat Marigold, which is always heart-warming. When we’re hanging-out and, I have a unique idea or joke, they will elaborate on it with statements that are fun to imagine. For example, we came up with a fast-food chain called Cirque de Burger that serves apocalyptic meals like mime/mind-burgers (with predator sauce), seaweed tenders, and baked brie milkshakes; it evolved into a whole imaginary business as inside joke that lasted for months; we even held an end of the fiscal year corporate party.

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La lengua sedada

I first began to translate Spanish when Eric sent me a Spanish translation by Marta Núñez Pouzols of his book The Tranquilized Tongue. It is a book of small paragraph-sized prose poems that contained simple sentences and words like “cristal”, “huevo”, and “nube” for “crystal”, “egg”, and “cloud”. It was easy to translate back into English for the most part, and I enjoyed looking at the sentences in English and learning about how American surrealist poetry is written, having never read the book before. I texted several of the poems to Eric, Andrea, Jeffrey, and Carolina, and they all encouraged me on my translations; Eric even liked some of the translated sentences better than his originals citing “relieving the pained cougars” in relation to the original “soothing aching pumas”. I got more into it the more I read it and I got to really learn Eric’s poetry and the ways he writes these weird imaginaries.

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Anti-Nightingale

In the summer of 2018, while I was experimenting with new kinds of poetry, I typed a poem on my paternal grandfather’s Smith-Corona––his college typewriter––with a long chunk of paper folded like an accordion. The poem was titled “Anti-Nightingale” and it delved into the menacing appearances of the European bird in relation to Satan and President Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. In another moment of seeking the warmth of camaraderie, I texted the poem to our group chat called Groove Healing, which included Carolina, Jeffrey, Andrea, & Eric. Eric wrote, “It is definitely a death metal poem. It is also like a lost [César] Vallejo poem full of deep emotions running into the core of the earth.” This was a heartfelt juxtaposition of my budding surrealist poetry and the poetry of César Vallejo.

The gray owl eviscerated the night wind with its rambunctious velocity,

wut, what is the velocity of a nightingale? 

Better yet, its color–––– 

grey represents the devil’s soul, one who would eviscerate. 

To be a nightingale isn’t to slice the souls of Europe, 

but to sing for the continent and its myriads.

The word ruiseñor can either mean nightingale or mockingbird, 

but which is worse to slay? 

The devil can slay both, though the owl will accuse him 

for slaughtering the bird with the name of its home, the night. 

The sun and moon determine the faith of the devil, 

but the moon does only but determine the faith of the ruiseñor and the búho.

All the beings here have a rhythm, 

but not all live in the forest, the land that rhythm rules.

For Europe, the nightingale upholds the night, 

the rhythm, the forest, and the wind. 

As you can see, Mr. President, to be against your nemeses, 

the ruiseñor and its myriads of culture is not only to pro-devil, pro-demon, 

it is also to be anti-nightingale, and to hate all their talismanic credences.

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Intensidad y altura

The next day on Groove Healing thread, Eric sent us a photo of a César Vallejo poem in Spanish along with two English translation by Clayton Eshleman, titled “Intensidad y altura”. My knowledge of Spanish was well enough to hold a conversation, and I recognized some of the words in the poem. I decided to translate the poem from scratch, and I looked up unfamiliar words and chose the ones that were most compelling for the complex text. It was relatively easy because it was 4 stanzas long and repeated phrases like “Quiero…”, “No hay…” and “Vámanos…”. I sent my translation in reply to the photos and the thread all loved it. This was the beginning of my series of translating Vallejo throughout that summer, and it was fascinating & .

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O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Translation is a cognitive and selective process with any language. To get the most out of it, I like to read only the Spanish as I work on translating a poem. So while reading poems from a bilingual collection of César Vallejo, I use a white card-size envelope with the words “I work for no man” stamped on it to cover the English translation and have only the original Spanish visible, while propping the open book inside a book stand. The words are a line from the blind seer working on the railroad in the 2001 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? responding to the protagonists who ask who he works for. I didn’t think of it at first––I used the envelope ‘cause it covered the page perfectly––but the phrase has come to serve as a kind of a motto for me about how surrealism can fight against the oppressions within the histories of colonialism and the war-machine. The luminous accident is one of the powers of surrealism and translation both.

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Essential Destruction

I began this while translating Los heraldos negros / The Black Heralds and found it a contemplative practice; it allows for cognitive search and decision of words in the mind. In other words, seeing just the Spanish text allows (and forces) me as the translator to make difficult decisions on which words and phrases would best render the line and stanza into English. Often when there is a word that I’m unfamiliar with, I will go to Google Translate to learn its basic translation. If there are multiple common or medium-frequency translations, I will select a word that is well fitting for the English text. Other times I will peek behind the envelope to see how another translator has rendered a word. The process of translating a poem is about working both around and with linguistic differences to find compelling—but also grammatically sensible—words to render into the lines and stanzas of the translation. It is a difficult process that takes a lot of critical thinking and decision-making skills, as well as a sense of creativity—all of which are believed to be essential skills in a workspace. Translation is the art of the essential destruction of language barriers towards speech and writing that folks can understand.

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Calabrina tesórea

By noticing one’s writing styles, you can get a sense of who they are as a writer and a human, as I learned with Eric, and translating the Spanish translation of his book. I also noticed this with Vallejo; he is a writer of politics, and family, and emotion, and also dream-like imagery. Vallejo also uses a lot of neologisms and sensational spellings of Spanish words (especially in Trilce) to create surrealist images and also to blend his ancestral Quechua language. In the first poem of Trilce, he writes the phrase “la simple calabrina tesórea” to describe the smell of the feces at the local prison in Trujillo, Peru. I could not translate calabrina as it was an archaic word with no common translation or definition in either Spanish or English. But recognizing his use of neologisms, I decided to translate the phrase as the “simple treasured offer-squid” as a blend of “calamar” and “brinda” for “squid” and offer.” By trying to embody his vernacular as best as I understood it, in this way, through translation I felt a camaraderie to Vallejo, and developed a form resilience against the difficulties of translation, of getting lost or giving up.

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Near Future

Translation is the process of writing words from writing a foreign language text to another language; one that is easily understood by the translator and their community. But in that large process of human translation, there are several other hidden processes that surprise the person when they don’t expect it. While working at the translation station, they are just working on the main objective; to render words/phrases from one language to another. This is a phenomenon that machine translation greatly lacks; machine translation & artificial intelligence do not feel emotion or curiosity or flexible logic. Yet somehow we use these machines in everyday life when we want to text a friend in their primary language, to know important phrases before traveling abroad, or to play with language in general; these are fleeting moments of curiosity that we experience and the technology makes them valuable. But translation is a concept that demands multilingualism, curiosity, creativity, human logic, the feeling of making a difference, and understanding of literature in general; they are some of the expected skills in the workplace today but we often fail as a society to harness them without knowing. And the human workplace is disappearing with the rise of AI in the service, retail, and food sectors, which will affect millions of American workers in the near future. Humans need translation as much as translation needs humans, and this will always be true as long as people are translating with a pen and the page.

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Emotions/Envoi

As a poet, I have developed a camaraderie to other poets, and I have experienced different poetic styles. I know poets who write about nature, politics, real life, and everything in between. I feel proud to know them. I also feel proud to be able to translate Spanish-language writers because I get to know their writing styles compared to those who write in American English and to recognize their vocabulary. All poetry is different; but the language use, the framework, and the voice in which the poetry is delivered is how a person is found outside to others. Translation allows me to connect these emotions from written language and to read them in spoken language in triumph. By knowing the person’s writing we know the person themself, and we can forma resilience around them to keep the friendship alive. Translation is the ultimate bridge.