Translations into Spanish of

Gerard Manley Hopkins Poetry

The poem of Hopkins whose translations into Spanish I like to talk about, The Wreck of The Deutschland, was written a century and a quarter ago, yet there are surprisingly few translations into Spanish of what is generally recognized as Hopkins’s greatest poem and one of the landmarks of English poetry in general.

Patrick Sheeran University of Valadolid, Spain

I would like to begin this talk by taking a brief look at the state of translations into Spanish of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry at the beginning of this new millenium. At the outset, I think it can be fairly said that Hopkins’s poetry with its advanced technique and startlingly new approach (which wasn’t so really new at all), ushered to an end a millenium of Anglo-Saxon poetry and pointed a way for writers who were willing to take the cue.

The poem of Hopkins whose translations into Spanish I like to talk about, The Wreck of The Deutschland, was written a century and a quarter ago, yet there are surprisingly few translations into Spanish of what is generally recognized as Hopkins’s greatest poem and one of the landmarks of English poetry in general. This lack of translations is both surprising and explicable.

It is surprising in the first place given the importance of the poem and of the poet in the canon of English Literature, and in the second place given the affinity of the theme with that of much of Spanish poetry: poetry of religious or mystical import abounds in Spanish literature from the time of San Juan de la Cruz to Miguel de Unamuno. On the other hand, the lack of translations is explicable due to the simple fact that the poem is difficult and idiosyncratic. I will come back to this point in a moment, but first I would like to elaborate a little more on the surprising lack of translations.

Hopkins's poem was, as I said, written a century and a quarter ago, yet I have been able to trace only two translations into Spanish and one into Catalan, in the catalogues of the Biblioteca Nacional Española, in Madrid.

The three references are:

The point I am making, in any case, is that the Hopkins poem, given its importance, is surprisingly little translated into Spanish. Granted that it was not brought out in book form until 1918, when it was first published by Robert Bridges, yet it antedates both The Waste Land and Ulysses by four years. Both these mould-breaking works suppose difficulties for the translator equal to or greater thanThe Wreck of the Deutschland, and this is especially the case of Ulysses, yet Joyce’s novel, under the title, Ulíses, has been translated three times into Spanish – by Salas Subirat, published in Buenos Aires in 1974, by José M. Valverde, published in Barcelona in 1984, and latterly by García Tortosa published in Madrid in 1999. Eliot’s poem, in the same period has been translated, under the title, La tierra balídia, at least four times into Spanish, and even once into Bable, the dialect of Asturias, in the north of Spain, under the title of La tierra ermo.

Translation has been a mainstay of Spanish letters for many centuries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the bulk of the translations were from the French, because the main literary currents flowed from that country. But in the past century the majority of translations into Spanish from any language and on any subject are logically from English.

These translations, like translations anywhere, are sometimes good, sometimes bad or, in the majority of cases, fairly correctly done but totally insipid and unmemorable. Up until recent times practically no attention was paid to the science, or the art, of translation in Spain; translations were done as the whim took the translator or as the needs of the market stipulated, and the finished work was rarely subjected to the scrutiny of informed critics with a good knowledge of the source language.

But things are changing; there are now Departments or Faculties of Translation in many Spanish universities – Madrid, Granada, Salamanca, Valladolid, etc., etc., - the teaching of English in the schools is compulsory from the age of five, there are numerous academies and translation agencies dotted throughout all the big cities and the people travel more frequently to English – speaking countries. Also, the reading public is better informed and more demanding; standards are expected to be achieved and maintained, and they generally are except in the cases of translations of authors like Agatha Christie, James Hadley Chase or Barbara Cartland, where more or less anything goes.

Let us now return to the subject of Hopkins and specifically to that of translations done of him into English and at the same time let’s look at the three categories of translators mentioned by Nabakov in his The Art of Translation, published in 1941. Nabakov categorizes possible translators as

Hopkins, because he is first, a poet, second, a difficult poet and third, for all his importance, of interest only to a minority, has been favoured with the attention only of the scholar-type translator. The four translations I want to look at today were done by the academic-type translator; not by professional writers and certainly not by "hacks": Mª Jesús Pérez Martín was Professsor of English Literature at the University of Valladolid until recently and the late Manuel Linares Megías was a member of the Society of Jesus, who wrote extensively on Hopkins and his work. Of the other two translators I have no biographical knowledge, but judging by what they hve produced, the translations are obviously a "labour of love", though the results may not always do justice to the original. The four translations, then, though different in their approach are, for different reasons, quite faithful either to the spirit or the letter of the original, and in the best of the cases to both, though that of Pérez Martín, as I hope to show, is the better translation in almost all respects.

Pérez Martín and Linares Megías were in many senses pionneers in their field: the translation of the former of the Wreck of the Deutschland, written in 1971, is the first into Spanish of that poem, and the anthology by Linaes Megías is the only one to date of Hopkins' complete poetic ouevre. Emilio del Río, together with his co-translator, Angel Martínez Baigorri, include only nine poems of Hopkins in their book, whileEdison Simón in his book translates seventeen poems of Hopkins together with fourteen extracts from his diaries and five extracts from his letters.

Translating poetry is at the same timeone of the easiest and the most difficult types of literary translation, and it is the kind to which those with a bent for literary translation generally first turn their hand, very often at university in student magazines. It is easy in the sense that a poem may be short, even extremely short, and yet be a complete text, which "says something" and fills its translator with the satisfaction that he or she has done something of import, has, in a sense, assisted at a new birth. But it is also difficult, as all translation is difficult. To quote Eugene Nida, in his book Towards a Science of Translating,

The translator's task is essentially a difficult and often a thankless one ...successful translating involves one of the most complex intellectual challenges known to mankind

Poetry translation, like any translation, must comply with the four basic requirements, mentioned by Nida:

he format of the four translations, as I mentioned before, is different. That by Pérez Martin is published in a literary review and the other three in a book. Three of the translations are in parallel texts, with the original and the translation on facing pages, but that by Edison Simón is a single-language text. And here I may say that presenting a translation in a parallel text is an act of bravery when not of foolhardiness, as a reader with some knowledge of both the source and target languages may more easily fall to marveling at the ingenuousness rather than the ingenuity of the translator. Yet, I must also say that the final result of the three parallel text translations of The Wreck ...is on the whole, satisfactory.

The translations by Pérez Martin and Linares Megías contain explanatory notes, in the case of the former, extremely copious, lengthy explanations, and in that of the latter, much briefer and fewer, there being eighteen in all the poem. Neither the translations by Emilio del Río nor Edison Simón contain notes of any kind" which I think is an important omission, as Hopkins is a poet who requires explication. Consequently, the number of pages devoted by each to the translated poem differs widely, from the seventeen pages in Edison Simón's single-language text to the massive 156 pages which the Pérez Martin translation takes up, principally with her interpretations. In fact, she titles her translation El Naufragio del Deutschland; una interpretació; the other three title theirs simply El Naufragio del Deutschland

Hopkinss poem, as you well know, opens with a dedication:

To the
happy memory of five Franciscan nuns
exiles by the Falck Laws
drowned between midnight and morning of
Dec. 7th, 1875

These are slight but niggling differences and omissions, though there is no reason why they should exist, since it is the translators' duty to make sure that his version respects the original as fully as possible. It is however the body of the translation that is important and in which we can see how well the translator goes about his or her task. Hopkins' poem is of 35 stanzas of eight lines each which rhyme ABABCBCA and with a determined number of stresses in each of the lines. He also makes great use of metaphor, alliteration, neologisms and, above all, of grammatical conversion, which Robert Bridges felt caused his verse to be obscure. Robert Bridges said:

English swarms with words that have one identical form for substantive, adjective and verb and such a word should never be so placed as to allow of any doubt as to what part of speech it is used for; because such ambiguity or momentary uncertainty destroys the force of the sentence...

As F.R. Leavis commented, This criticism assumes that poetry ought to be immediately comprehensible and, of course, there is no reason why it ought. In fact it is this very use of converted words as well as some coinings and dialect words that gives Hopkins's verse its vigour. Now, grammatical conversion is practically nonexistent in Spanish, with the infrequent exception of adjectives or verbs being converted into nouns. For instance, one can say: El joven pidío un corto = The young man asked for a small glass of beer, where the adjectives joven and corto are converted into nouns, or Tiene un andar pausado = He has an unhurried walk (or gait). This latter is a case of an infinitive being converted into a substantive. But substantives, adjectives, adverbs or prepositions are not used as verbs , nor are nouns ever converted into adjectives as they can freely be in English. Word?coining is also frowned upon in Spanish, something which makes it difficult for the person who has to translate Hopkins and sheer agony for the one who tackles Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake, though the "Anna Livia Plurabella section of this has been put into Spanish quite cleverly by García Tortosa.

With regards alliteration and rhyme, the former occurs frequently enough in Spanish poetry as does the latter, but Spanish rhyme is predominantly assonantal, like Gaelic verse, and, as Austin Clarke said, "assonance takes the clapper from the bell of rhyme. Now, both alliteration and consonantal rhyme are important in Hopkins' poetry, so a translation which ignored these two elements would lose quite a bit. Of the four translations here in question, that by Pérez Martín is the one which makes the greatest effort to capture both these elements, especially at the beginning of the poem. Here are the first four lines of the original and the different translations:

Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;

Tu, adueñándote de mí Dios! dador de aliento y alimento; Orilla del mundo, vaivén del mar Señor de los vivos y los muertos Pérez Martín Tu dominándome Dios! Dador del pan y el aliento Orilla del mundo, vaivén del mar; Señor de vivos y muertos E. del Río

Tú me dominas oh Dios, dador del aliento y del pan margen del mundo, vaivén del mar de vivos y muertos Señor; Linares Megías ¡TU maestreando me Dios! Dador de hálito y pan; Mundo-su playa, vaivén del mar; Señor de vivos y muertos; Edison Simón

While the original has two m sounds in the first line and two g and two b sounds in the second as well as the rhyme ABAB, the translation by Pérez Martín has two t sounds in the first line: Tu aduefiandote as well as two ds - adueñandote. The two d sounds are carried forward into the second line and are accompanied by two a sounds: Dios! dador and aliento y alimento. This last minimal pair is also a full consonantal rhyme, which has a pleasing effect as it neatly captures the minimal pair and near rhyme of the original breath ...bread. There is also an assonontal rhyme in her translation - alimento / muertos Emilio del Río also makes good use of alliteration with his d sounds: dominandome/Dios! Dador, as he does of assonantal rhyme: aliento / muertos. As we can see the other two use less alliteration and rhyme. And one of them, Edison Simón, makes use of unusual words and constructions: maestreando to translate mastering, when mastrear really means to direct or manage. The other three translate this more correctly by "dominar" or adueñar. He also uses hálito, instead of the more usual aliento, to translate breath, playa, instead of orilla or margen for strand, and the extremely idiosyncratic, and ungrammatical, construction of a hyphen followd by su to translate the Saxon Genitive: Mundo-su for World's. In using this construction he is probably taking into account that the apostrophe "S" (`s), of the so-called Saxon Genitive originated in Early Modern English, as Paul Roberts in his book, Understanding Grammar, points out from the mistaken belief that the S was part of the possessive adjective, his,with the hi omitted and, by anamoly with the abbreviations used for the contracted forms of verbs, an apostrophe was put in before the S. But the construction with the possessive adjective had never really been used with a noun to indicate possession in English, and much less so in Spanish.

If we now look at the famous fourth stanza, we can see several differences between the four translations. Here are the original and the four translated stanzas:

I am soft sift
In an hourglass - at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
I steady as water in a well, to a poise, to a pane
But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift

(1) Soy blando cerner En reloj de arena -a la pared Ligado, pero minado par a moción, un arrastre Que se agolpa y se encrespa en la caída. Firme soy como agua en el pozo, tensa a un nivel Pero reforzado siempre hasta to hondo desde los altos Escarpes o flancos de la montaña, agua viva Que ofrece del Evangelio, presión un principio, don de Cristo Pérez Martín

(2) Yo soy la blanda arena de un reloj de cristal, sujeto al muro, pero lábil en su descenso sosegado que se amontona y se peina al caer. Y yo quieto como el agua de un pozo reposada como hoja de cristal, alimentada siempre con el alto venero que orilla la montana, con la vena de la Buena Palabra, de la fuente viva, principio, don de Cristo. Linares Megías

(3) Soy el suave cerner En un reloj de arena, en el muro, Fijo, pero minado en su moverse, inmóvil Que se apiña y se peina al caer; Me quedo como el agua en un pozo, cristal y equilibrio, Pero siempre unido hacia abajo desde las altas Laderas del monte, una vena De la oferta evangélica, una presion un principio y don de Cristo. E. del Río

(4) Soy suave tamiz En un reloj de arena - en la pared Fijado, pero minado de una moción, una deriva, Y se apiña y se peina a la caída; Yo estable como un agua en un pozo, a una pose, a un paño, Pero liado con, siempre, todo el camino abajo de los altos Desmontes o flancos de voel, una vena Del evangelio proferta, una presura, un principio, Cristo-su don. Edisón Simón

Simply on the linguistic level, there are many things that can be singled out in this famous stanza: one of them is the remarkable use of grammatical conversion. There are at least four or five outstanding cases of conversion here: "sift" in the first line is an example of verb — > noun conversion; "steady" in the fifth line is adjective — > verb conversion; in the same line we have the verb "poise" being changed by virtue of verb — > noun conversion into a countable noun, and proffer in the last line, which Seamus Heaney considers shows Hopkins' incredible precision ... with its suggestion of urgency and obligation to accept and so much more alive than `offer', is another example of verb — > noun conversion. Besides, proffer is preceded by a noun — > adjective conversion in the use of gospel, which qualifies the following word. In fact, many of the words used as verbs or participles here: mined, "crowds", combs, roped, would be considered primarily nouns, but because of the typical - s and - ed verb endings they don't strike us as conversions. Another thing that stands out in this stanza is the use of of the Welsh dialect word voel for hill As I mentioned above, noun — > verb conversion exists in Spanish in a limited sense but not adjective — > verb, or noun — > adjective conversion. Now, in two of the four translations, sift is translated by a verb, cerner, meaning to sift, but, used as a noun,this word could only be construed as the act of sifting, not the result of something sifted. Another translator uses the noun arena, meaning sand, while the fourth, uses the word tamiz, meaning the sieve, the object used for sifting. The conversion of the adjective steady into a kind of reflexive verb = steady myself, has no parallel in any of the four translations; in the first, the predicative adjective Firme is used, inverted with the verb soy; in the second, the translator uses the adjective quieto, preceded by the pronoun yo and with the verb omitted: the fourth translator does something similar, using the adjective estable, and then he goes on to convert agua into a countable noun, "un agua". Only the third translator uses a verb, Me quedo = I am or I remain. Poise, the verb converted into a noun, is translated in different ways by the four translators; by the adjectives tensa y reposada;, in translations one and two,by the noun equilibrio = balance or equilibrium, in translation number three and in the case of translation number four, by the noun borrowing from English, pose, meaning a pose;. The same translator uses the word paño to translate pane, when paño strictly speaking means a piece of cloth, or a mist or vapour that gathers on glass.

Translator number four is the only one who doesn't translate the word voel by montaña or monte; he unblushingly borrows the original word without italicizing it or putting it in quotation marks or glossing it. If the word is strange in the original but understandable because of Hopkins' acquaintance with Wales and Welsh, its use is completely incomprehensible in translation.

Finally, the double use of conversion in the last line — gospel proffer — is translated in different ways: Number one gives us Que ofrece del Evangelio ...; number two doesn't translate proffer but translates gospel by la Buena Palabra; number three has la oferta evangelica. Again, it is number four who stands out with the construction: evangelio proferta. Now, proferta isn't a bad choice, as it means that which is offered, but the use of a noun as an adjective, "evangelio" to qualify proferta, is something unheard of in Spanish. In the same line, the same translator uses other debatable constructions and word choices: instead of presión, used by two of the other translators to translate pressure, he uses presura, which means oppression or distress, and the last phrase, Christ's gift, which all the others translate by don de Cristo, is translated by him as Cristo-su don. Again, we have the use of the hyphen followed by su to translate the Saxon Genitive.

There are a few more things that can be pointed out in the translations of this stanza. None of the translators has made a pretence of respecting the rhyme scheme of the original, which would in any case have been an impossibility, nor of using any coherent form of rhyming. More or less the same can be said of the use of alliteration, especially same-line alliteration. It is translator number four who comes nearest to achieving this with his pozo, pose, pano in line four and his proferta, presura, principio in the last line. But, as we have seen, this is unfairly achieved since many of these words don't correctly translate the original text.

With regards the translation of meaning, which is so important, it is translator number one who comes out best, in this stanza and in the rest of the poem. We have only to look at one or two examples: The first four lines of the original are: I am soft sift/ In an hourglass — at the wall /Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,/ And it crowds and it combs to the fall;. Translator number one perceives corrrectly the image of the sand sticking to the walls of the hourglass but rushing down the necklet, making furrows in the slopes of the sand as it does so. She does this principally by the expressions a la pared /Ligado and se encrespa, this latter meaning to cause furrows or ripples. Two of the other translators instead of pared use muro, which is an outer wall or containing wall. In fact, translator number two gives an image of a glass clock hanging on a wall: un reloj de cristal, sujeto al muro. Translators two, three and four translate combs by se peina, which really means combs its hair, a totally inappropriate image for ripples formed in sand.

With this brief examination, I hope to have pointed out some aspects of the state of Hopkins' translations, (as well as some of the difficulties involved in translating him), into Spanish at this present moment, poised as we are on the brink of the new Millenium

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