Translation of Gotan

Cristina Peri-Rossi 2001

Translator’s Introduction

As is often the case, the translation itself I did for the most part immediately–the translation took about 10-15 minutes for a first pass, and another 10 minutes for the finishing touches. What has taken longer are my translation notes. I think that is justified; one ought to wonder why I translated the way I did and I ought to offer him or her or them an explanation and evidence that my translations are better than the intuitive ones. I haven’t defended everything, just enough to show that, if I translated indirectly, there was a reason.

Furthermore, I have offered just a touch of interpretation for those unfamiliar with the culture or references thereof. I am not an expert in the relevant communities, nor am I of those communities, so there’s a good chance that I’ve missed some important references. I will review some but not all of those possibilities; the one that most sticks out to me is that I don’t know which “Raquel” Peri-Rossi is referring to.

Some of the references or ideas at play are quite nuanced; for instance, does she use the tango variant “gotan” as a play on words with gota:droplet or agotan: they exhaust? How would that change what the rest of the poem means to us? I will try not to interpret the poem so atomically. Frankly, at least half of the sentences include words that we could interpret as double entendres in addition to their cultural references. It’s a mosaic. I hope to have translated accurately enough to allow an English reading to offer nearly as enriching an experience as a Spanish reading; however, it is not my point to provide a thorough interpretation. For instance, you might wonder whether the “injured indian” refers to a real-life statue or which one if so–I encourage doing the research if you are so inclined; that is part of the fun.

Having said that, to get a little personal, I like this poem because it helped me get over a few pernicious instances nostalgia. Sometimes we long for times or places passed; in reality, Peri-Rossi says here, we can’t go back and we are tricking ourselves to think that we really remember what we would be going back to, anyway. Things change and, after all, as we see in the last line, when you’re longing to impossibly return to some previous time, place, people, state, etc., you’re probably just lonely. Go find some company! Otherwise, it is best not to dwell lamenting the past but, rather, to look forward. I’ll admit that the poem itself does not seem even so meagerly hopeful–the narrator ends having said she or he is and always has been lonely–but hopeful is the way I took it. I suppose that, if there is any hope in the poem, it is in the conclusiveness with which the narrator determines that there is no going back. If the impossibility of returning is really so definite, then we have learned to focus on the future to the extent that seeking to return in vain is less fruitful than looking to the future.

The text is really small because wordpress kept cutting lines in half; e.g., “hello world” became “hello
world.” Thus, in some cases, in order to communicate that split lines should actually be one line, I have used a ‘/’. If a line reads “hello
world./”, I mean that the line really should read “hello world,” but wordpress couldn’t handle it. In some cases, I have consolidated lines into one that should be two, and did so by removing words from my translation, words which I would have preferred to keep. Alas. In the same vein, wordpress is fairly incapable of superspcripting (it can superscript from 1-3 pretty well but, beyond that, you might as well dedicate your wits to quantum physics if you can figure it out. I’ve done it once and been unable to replicate it, even using the same method.)

I used the following as the base text: http://www.arquitrave.com/arquitraveantes/imagenes_index/libreria/librospdf/cristina_peri_rossi.pdf. Pg. 67

1. This is a very similar use as that which we see in English. This refers to a statue of a Native American, not a person from India.
2,3, 4 these are songs and lyrics by Carlos Gardel. Much of the italicized are song lyrics.  As if my intuition weren’t enough to convince me that arrabal means outskirt here, the example of “outskirt” in the American Heritage dictionary is “the outskirts of Buenos Aires.” To toot my own horn, that’s one more point for me over Spanish-English dictionaries; the major ones I use do not list “outskirt” as a possible meaning of arrabal. It clearly is.  I have switched somewhat fluidly between outskirt and “outskirts,” the latter of which is much more common in English. 
5. Osvaldo Soriano, author, journalist, subversive, exile, famously wrote a children’s book about a cat in Paris. He is known to have loved cats. Soriano died young in 1997 of lung cancer. This poem, I believe, was published in 2001.
6. Raquel: to my embarrassment, I am not familiar enough with the work of Peri Rossi nor Uruguayan culture to discern this reference. My leads are either Raquel Pierotti, an opera singer and which would cohere with the singing theme of the poem, or Raquel Daruech, a journalist who supposedly covered, at least occasionally (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfB1fD3dSZM), the political prisoners beat, which would suit the newspaper-selling and Peri-Rossi’s exile well; but, then, who is selling condoms and why? Perhaps one or the other Raquel was a sex symbol and would have sold condoms in the sense of inspiring people to have sex.
7. The tilde above the u appears in the original and seems to be a typo. I could be wrong and it’s some poetic something but it doesn’t seem so here.
8. Refers to Los pactos de Moncloa, the Moncloan Pacts, part of Spain’s transition to democracy in 1977. Carlos Gardel also has a song called Nostalgias.

Translation notes and extraneous interpretation

Flics: the single best translation here is jail / dungeons, as Peri-Rossi often references conditions of the dictatorship, including, for instance, “clandestine centers,” which were basically secret dungeons or detention centers operated by the government. But Rossi has also expressed her sexuality, which I would describe as trans, through her poetry, and likely flics is a double-entendre thereof as well. That is because flics can also refer to canas, as in the grey highlights that come with age and which are often a synechdoche in Spanish for age, aging, or old folks. Lovers are often described as reminding us of when we were kids, restoring us the feeling of youth or even, in the Christian tradition, removing us from the confines of limited time by a unity that transcends from life into death and, thus, into eternity (time without limit). Thus, if the French woman saved Rossi from the flics, and flics are a synecdoche for aging, the French woman may have been a lover that saved Rossi the feeling of aging in one or more of the aforementioned ways. Since Rossi often imbues her poetry with her romantic life, I don’t see why this one should be any different.

The second “No adivino el parpadeo de…”: If I keep the same syntax as the first time I translate it within the poem, then her directness will be compromised. It will be chopped up by commas and pauses. However, if I go back and change the first translation to match the second translation, then the first one will not be properly choppy, which it is when she says it. The problem: my second translation is not as directly-translated and entails that I will have translated the same sentence, which she repeats exactly, in two different ways in different parts of the poem. However, if I translate it the same way both times, then I compromise either the choppiness of her first utterance or the directness of her second utterance. Further, the Englishness of one or the other translation could be lost by translating directly. The first translation of that sentence is a little–just a little–strange. It’s not how we would talk. However, it matches the verse as she’s written it. If I were to move that same translation down and match the style of her second utterance of it, the lack of formatting would highlight its strangeness. Hopefully I have explained why translating the same sentence two different ways at two different points in the poem is the right move.

Oxidated: while “rust” is also a translation of “enmohecer,” and perhaps the most direct one, in English, we think of autumnal colors when we think of rust. Rusted bronze, however, is usually green. Thus, to evoke the proper imagery, I tried to avoid evoking autumnal colors. I’m not sure it worked.

Revolves: this is a double-entendre that I think just won’t translate. Girar also means to give orders. E.g., the general gave orders. Thus, she’s referring not just to the absurd twist and turns of life and more literally the revolution of the cosmos, but also to the infinite cylce of ordering by the generals of offensives against this and that. The mutation of the enemy within–i.e., within the country. Just like our wars on terror, whereof the generals unendingly find some new strategy or thing to attack abroad, the generals in Latin America long did the same, just internally instead of abroad. Think McCarthyism; first the enemy was montoneros, then all communists, then leftists, then the outspoken, then the gays, then counterculture artists, then people who blinked twice on Wednesdays, etc.
Girar also translates to “centers around/on.” There was no way to translate this multientendre completely.

Torture my dreams: this is not something we really say, nor is it necessarily more poetic than “haunt my dreams,” so I considered translating to “haunt my dreams,” but that felt cliché. Further, “torture” once again evokes the atrocities of the dictatorship.

Como siempre: not “the usual;” even though that might sound more colloquial and natural, “lo de siempre” translates better to “the usual.” Therefore, “como siempre”:”as always” is just fine.

Otras miradas: another multi-entendre that might not be translateable into a single word or phrase. I believe she means both “other looks” (from people’s eyes) and “other views,” as in perspectives or sets of beliefs.

Oscura para devolverme: “oscura” could be describing herself as well as the sea. She probably made this its own separate line precisely to emphasize the coreference

Volver: “going back” is probably a better translation than “return” in most places.  I don’t see a single translation of “volver” that would fit everywhere she says it, so I have translated it different ways to show the comparisons and contrasts she is making between different kinds of returning. 

Why do I toot my own horn when it comes to translation? People will often assert that interlingual dictionaries or google translate provide sufficient translations. In many cases they do not. Also, people may object to my translations by referring to the same sources. I toot my own horn to show that that’s a bad move; I and many speakers of second languages know better than do dictionaries or online translators–I suspect this has to do with our abilities to judge context, which the dictionary is removed from. In other words, our ability to interpret.
That’s not to diss dictionaries; I love them and their defintions. They’re particularly great for operating within a given language; it’s just that they are much worse at translating than we often give them credit for.

Also important: there’s some chance this poem came out in 1994, published in Otra vez eros (instead of “Condición de mujer,” the date of publication of which I cannot find) (https://obrasdecristinaperirossi.blogspot.com/2017/10/otra-vez-eros-1994.html)
But my best guess is it published in 2001 in Estado de exilio (http://letras-uruguay.espaciolatino.com/peri/gotan.htm)
www.revistatabularasa.org/numero-33/05-esguerra.pdf this says it came out in 2003. I think this citation is incorrect.