Translation: Broad linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual learning process

Manuel García Verdecia can be summed up in a single word: “Literary Café”. Every Thursday at 04:00 pm, a group of culture faithful gather in the old building of the Uneac in the city of Holguin to let themselves be surprised by the imagination of this poet, professor and cultural promoter, who loves translation.

Verdecia as the majority calls him begins to narrate the most significant cultural event happened that day. From that moment all the furies of the pleasant and sensitive are unleashed; poets and novelists, painters and historians take possession of a couple of hours. Everything good and necessary is talked about. The great thing is that the meeting has been repeated for 20 years and seems to go on forever.

But that kind person who organizes and directs the “Café Literario”, as they have baptized that dedication to the pleasures of the spirit, has a secret history that few know.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

We do not know how or why, but Verdecia has appropriated an immense wealth that he is constantly and perhaps even ruthlessly increasing every day. He knows no limits to his intentions. Verdecia has tried and succeeded in becoming the master of a significant part of human understanding: translation. Thanks to him we know of the existence of many works originally published in English. To this Verdecia, who like all translators rests in oblivion, of that brief note that sometimes appears in some books: translator. It is to the translator Manuel García Verdecia that I would like to approach today with my questions in order to unveil his universe as a foreign language professional.

Where and when were you born, who were your parents?

“I came into the world in a place that, although it later became famous for a song, was not the most appropriate place for the development of poetry or art, although my innate imagination and curiosity did what was necessary, especially because of the immediacy of nature. I was born in the old sugar mill Marcané, today Loynaz Hechavarría. My parents were very humble people. Manuel, my father, was a warehouse clerk and Ada, my mother, was a housewife. They were very fair and generous people”.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

What did you study?

“After attending elementary school in Marcané, I went to Cueto to finish elementary school and go to high school. I did not finish High School, but then I took an Emerging Teachers’ Training Course in Holguín. Once here, I studied English at the Higher Pedagogical Institute, where I also took numerous postgraduate courses in different subjects to diversify my training. Then I did a master’s degree in history of culture and started a doctorate that I didn’t finish either.

What do you think of the translations you have seen and read?

“Look, there is an old saying: ‘Traduttore, traditore’, which I think is unfair. Of course, there are some translators who are more skilled than others. It is indeed very difficult to find a totally efficient translation, but I don’t think there is one that is so bad that it does not allow us to get the gist of the original text. How much of what we know comes from foreign language texts? What percentage of people can read in one or two foreign languages? I can tell you that I have seen superb translations and some rather flimsy ones, but never completely treacherous.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

What is a translation for you? Do you think it changes a lot the content and the meaning of the book?

“When faced with this question, I always refer to Martí. He said that “To translate is to transthink” and, although translation goes far beyond the mere act of thinking in another language, it is essential to have this principle. It is not simply a matter of substituting a word in a foreign language for a word in one’s own language. In translating we are reflecting a whole world made up of language, style, way of thinking, customs, ways of assuming certain realities and the very fact of written creation. Therefore, for me, translation is the recreation of a world in the terms and ways of another culture in such a way that we can understand the world originally expressed with the greatest fidelity”.

How did you come to translation?

“First of all because of the taste I developed for languages and their different but similar ways of expressing reality. More specifically, I think I came to translation out of solidarity and challenge. When I finished my studies of English and French I could already read authors that interested me directly in their languages, but I found around me readers, many of them writers, who wanted to know certain writers and could not find them published in Spanish. So I decided to make my own versions to share with interested friends.

“Basically they were single poems by well-known writers that people wanted to know. Besides that, I came across translations that I was not entirely satisfied with, sometimes by renowned writers (which tells you that they are two different arts, you can be a great poet and yet not be an effective translator), they did not manage to give the world of meaning that I thought the author was trying to convey. So, as an intellectual challenge, I decided to dare to go beyond them. It happened to me with Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Sandburg, Eliot, Pound, Ginsberg, as well as with poets of other languages whose English versions I found and didn’t like, such as Horderling, Rilke or Brodsky, so I undertook my own.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

What did it mean to you to start translating?

“First of all it was a huge intellectual challenge. In translating, as I said, it’s not just about mastering two languages, your own and someone else’s. It’s about getting to your own language. It’s about giving your language the atmosphere and the sense of a different culture. So I had to study the other culture, learn more about the authors, their lives, their writing styles. Little by little I learned more about the foreign languages I had studied but, above all, I reached a more vast knowledge of my native language.

“You can’t imagine how many words and grammatical structures I have come to learn through translation, because each person has a limited universe of ideas and words with which he or she acts in the world, but the translator has to deal with the particular world that each translated writer represents. So the translator becomes as many writers as authors he translates. Moreover, if the translator also exercises creative writing, that is, if he or she creates his or her own literary work, by getting inside the expressive machinery of each author he or she translates, then he or she knows and acquires a wider range of possibilities for conceiving and structuring a text, so that he or she develops a broader expressive expertise”.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

Tell me about your first translation?

“Actually, the first professional translation task I took on was that of Sylvia Plath’s poems. It was extremely interesting to infiltrate the world of a woman, with all the dilemmas that her person posed (a tutelary father who pulled her towards science, a husband already a famous and admired poet, a peculiar talent for writing poetry but limited by the constraints imposed on her by being a woman, a foreigner, a wife and a mother).

“I had to read a lot about her life to discover the subtleties of nuances that she suggests in her texts, as well as to inquire among educated natives (because one can be a native speaker of a language but not be more cultured in it) to clarify the enigma of certain phrases and situations. It was a long, arduous and tense process, but it gave me great satisfaction when so many people were able to read Sylvia in Spanish and find her as faithfully as possible as she had lived and felt.

What differences do you notice between your translations, which ones do you prefer?

“The nature of a text varies according to its content and purpose. I have focused, above all, on literary works, basically poetry, because it is my area of creation and intellectual interest, but I have eventually taken on translations of other types of texts.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

“Works of a historical, scientific or political nature belong to the style we call pragmatic, that is, the function of language is not primarily to create beauty but to convey information effectively. Here the important thing is to master what you are talking about in order to say it as precisely as possible.  However, the literary text has an aesthetic purpose, it seeks to convey various values to you through its highly connotative form.

“This is more difficult for the translator because he himself has to first discover these values and then, in the most imaginative way possible, suggest them in the language into which he converts them. This is the challenge that most motivates me to make such translations, as it involves a broad linguistic, aesthetic and spiritual learning process”.

Do you think a good translation can improve an original text?

“It could be, but you have to keep in mind that the translator does not aim to surpass the writer, only to present it in the most effective way possible. I should not set myself objectives beyond those set by the author himself. Of course, this does not mean that, because of the translator’s skill and experience, he or she can achieve, at certain moments, more luminous areas of the original text than others”.

What should characterize a good translator, besides mastery of the language?

Verdecia, poet, Translation

“I insist that we are dealing with a form of creation, it is not a mechanical act, like the reflection of a mirror that lets you see something only in an inverted image. Therefore, a translator must have a taste for the language, not only knowledge, he or she must be able to taste the words and structures in both languages. He or she must also have the sensitivity to reach the most hidden and subtle nuances of meaning communicated by the original work. Likewise, a broad knowledge of the culture in which the work is created and which it reflects, since the meaning of something is very much in accordance with the context in which it is produced.

“Logically, he is bound to master the expressive resources used in each type of literature and in the languages he handles. I would also add a sort of sixth sense that guides him to carry out his recreations with tact and good taste. The rest is a lot of effort, zero complacency and constant consultation with other authors, both in the original language and in his own language, so that the writing solutions are always the most appropriate.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

Which translation has been the most difficult for you?

“I consider that every translation is a different problem in itself. It is not the same to translate a 16th century English author like Shakespeare as it is to translate a 20th century black writer from the South of the United States of America, like Alice Walker, or another Caribbean writer of this century like Edwidge Danticat. I think each work has intrinsic difficulties.

“Of course, those authors who are more classical and stick to a general educated linguistic norm are more accessible to a version than writers who are more experimental or who set out to do groundbreaking works. This is true even for an ordinary reader in his own language. Let’s say, reading Alejo Carpentier is not the same as reading Onelio Jorge Cardoso, without this meaning that each one is not remarkable in his aesthetic achievements. It is the same in translation.

You have translated poetry, how do you manage to catch the rhythm of the meaning of poetry?

Verdecia, poet, Translation

“First of all, to translate poetry you need to have a poetic vocation, at least for reading it. The fact that, in addition, one tries to write it, well, it helps because one carries within oneself the perceptions and ways of the poet”.

Tell me about your experiences as a translator, have you personally met an author you translated, how was the encounter?

“Normally you work with authors who are already deceased, mainly in a poor country like ours, because that makes it easier not to have to pay royalties. I have been lucky enough to work with two living authors, the American Alice Walker and the Canadian Amanda Hale. Happily they are extremely kind people and both, besides being writers, are activists for the social betterment of the world. This gives me a closeness and access that other authors might not provide.

“I met Alice during the 2004 Book Fair. I had been asked to translate her novel Meridiana, which had been rejected by several translators because of the difficulties involved in translating into Spanish the ungrammatical English spoken by black southerners. It was precisely because of this challenge that I accepted. I was fortunate that someone gave me the author’s e-mail address and this made the work much easier for me, since I could know first hand what she intended to express with each idiomatic phrase or each personal situation she presented. I believe that, based on the comments I have received, the translation was quite adequate.

“I met Amanda through a friend who introduced me to her by email. She was looking for a translator for a book of short stories about Cuba (she is an intense lover of Cubans and visits the archipelago regularly), but had not found a convincing one from the references she was given. Apparently she got good references about me and asked me to do the job. I accepted her proposal and we worked in a constant dialogue via email, in addition to several visits to this city that she has made, to clarify situations. This allowed her work to appear and was very well received.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

“I have translated other books for both authors, and they have become very close and kind friends. At the moment I am the official translator of Alice Walker’s blog, I also did the Spanish translation of her poetry published in English by the prestigious publishing house Simon & Schuster and, as if that were not enough, my version of a novel of hers, El templo de mi espíritu, got me the Premio Nacional de Traducción José Rodríguez Feo, 2012″.

Can you list the translations you have done with the publishers and the year of publication?

“The list (incomplete) of my translations is this: Las musas inquietantes, selection, translation, and prologue. Editorial Holguín, 2002. Intimate strangers, anthology of Cuban-Canadian poetry, Hidden Brook Press, Toronto, 2004. No Love Lost III, ten Cuban love poems, Hidden Brook Press, Toronto, 2004.

Meridiana, novel by Alice Walker, translation. Editorial Arte y Literatura, Havana, 2004. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, selection and translation. Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2007. The Prophet, by Khalil Gibram, selection and translation. Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2007. Alchemy of the Islands (an anthology of New Zealand and Cuban poetry), selection and translation, Neoimist Press, New Zealand, 2008. A Generation Defining Itself: Volume 8, USA, 2009.

El templo de mi espíritu, Alice Walker, Arte y Literatura, Havana, 2010. The Lady in the Mirror, V. Woolf, Art and Literature, Havana, 2011. Caribbean Stories, Art and Literature, Havana, 2012. Locas, locas mujeres (Selection of poetry by Anne Sexton), Ed. Holguín, 2013. El mar como un cielo, Selection of poetry by Saint John Perse, Ediciones La Luz, Holguín, 2014.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

Now is the time to open your heart, Alice Walker, Arte y Literatura, Havana, 2015. Another country. Anthology of Hindi poetry written in English after independence, Ediciones Holguín, 2015. The secret of joy, Alice Walker, Editorial Oriente, 2016. Sondeando la sangre, Amanda Hale, Editorial Holguín, 2016 Al faro, Virginia Woolf. Editorial Holguín, 2016. Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart, poems by Alice Walker, bilingual edition, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2018. The Fiddler and Other Tales, short stories, Herman Melville, Ediciones Holguín, 2018. The Sin Eater, short stories, Amanda Hale, Ediciones Holguín, 2019.

Do you have a secret aspiration in mind to translate a certain book or author?

“There are so many wonderful books still unpresented in our language! I would like to know more languages to delve into the recent Hungarian, Japanese, Czech, German literatures… But I have a particular dream, to make a translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for which I would like to work with a good sonneteer because I am not easily given to meter and rhyme and I would like it to be a very comprehensive translation in terms of meaning and way of writing. If I succeed, I will be able to think of other projects while I still have breath left”.

Do you think that a particular language gives a particular type of thought or are thought and culture universal? I want you to reflect on that, on the frontiers and perhaps even the traps that make up languages.

Verdecia, poet, Translation

“Each language has certain possibilities to express matters that others don’t have, but I think that doesn’t imply that depending on the language there is a type of way of thinking. It is already known that language is the envelope of thought and that envelope adapts to what it wraps. You don’t wrap a pair of sandals in the same way as a bottle of liquor or a dozen lemons, but you wrap them all the same. I consider that each language is self-sufficient and generates the forms to be able to express the immense, inexhaustible and changing possibility of thoughts that existence leads us to produce”.