by Jordi Alonso
In my last semester at Kenyon, I took a course on poetry in translation where we were told that getting published as a translator is nearly impossible, and even more so as a translator of poetry. Usually, “lit in translation” courses mean that you read Isabel Allende or Arthur Rimbaud in English, and then talk a little bit about how translation is a thing that happens to literature so that people who don’t read the language can read whatever it is you’re reading in that course, and that’s it. You pretend like Allende’s Afrodita was written in English, that Rimbaud wrote about his drunken boat in an American, or maybe a British idiom, but in this class, we approached the source material (contemporary Latin-American poetry) in its original, and took up the task of translating it into English, learning how to be better translators and poets in the process. My literary preferences before taking that class, and continuing even now after it, tended, and tend, to the multi-lingual. I love the traditional canon of writers as much as any other English major, and even though all of my creative writing (so far) has only ever been in English, much of my inspiration recently has come from a distinctly multilingual idea: translation. Whether from translations themselves––I’ve been reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and I don't speak any German––or from works that take translation as their starting point but are “unfaithful" to the source material and in being unfaithful create a refreshing English sound, tinged with traces of the original language whether in diction or tone––Edward FitzGerald’s Rubai’yat of Omar Khayyám comes to mind.
After 23 years of loving languages, something that most likely happened since I grew up bilingual, with English and Spanish being my two firsts, I’ve come to pick up a few more (with varying degrees of fluency) along the way. I’m fluent in French––after studying it for twelve years at school, and I’m decent in ancient Greek, which I began studying when I fell in love with Willis Barnstone’s translation of Sappho during my sophomore year of college, when I was going through a bad spot academically, socially, literarily, and romantically. I poured myself into Aeolic Greek, Sappho’s particular dialect, and eventually weaned myself off of the English parallel text.
I’m also comfortable in Middle English, Latin, Italian, and a little less comfortable in Old French, and Provençal. I studied Anglo-Saxon for a semester with a fantastic professor who knows more languages, dead and living, than anyone I know, and I dabbled in Dutch over the summer, but recently dropped it for modern Greek, since I have a grounding in the grammar and vocabulary already.
Lit, and lit in translation, matters to me because without it, I wouldn't have been able to tell that Sappho said she “now would sing beautifully” for her friends when I wondered if what I was writing was just notebooks stacked on notebooks filled with lines of sienna ink. My obsession with Aeolic Greek in particular, led me to write a series of re-imaginings of Sappho’s fragments in which I took a line from her, translated it, and built a poem of my own around it in a process of literary archaeology. After two-and-a-half years of writing these fragments (some of which I wrote while interning at Lighthouse’s 2012 LitFest) that I was intending on using more as therapy than art sometimes, I was lucky enough to catch the attention of a lovely little independent press in Ohio, XOXOX Press, and a very gracious and industrious pair of editors, Jenaye Hill and Jerry Kelly, who published all 108 of them this November.
Writing Honeyvoiced, aside from bringing me into contact with people whom I now couldn't imagine living without, gave me hope that even though “pure” translation may not sell, the philosophies of translation and a love of language, or a love of reading widely, could open avenues into making art that does.
Jordi Alonso has an AB in English from Kenyon College. He is the author of Honeyvoiced, and served as a Lighthouse Lit Fest intern in 2012.
This post is part of our Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts is meaningful to them. Lit Matters stories will be posted leading up to Colorado Gives Day on December 9. Schedule your gift now. And join us on Dec. 9 for writing hours at Lighthouse and the first-ever Lighthouse Read-a-Thon. Thank you!
