Making of a Poem: Natasha Wimmer on “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly”

Roque Dalton in exile in Havana, Cuba, 1967. Casa de las Américas, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roque Dalton’s poem “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 253. Here, we asked Wimmer to reflect on her work.

 

Can you tell us a little about Roque Dalton and your interest in him? Where was this poem originally published?

Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935 and is generally considered one of the greatest Latin American poets of the twentieth century. He was very politically engaged—he lived in exile from El Salvador for most of his life, including some crucial years spent in Cuba. In his thirties, he became increasingly committed to the armed struggle and joined a guerrilla group to fight in El Salvador. Four days before his fortieth birthday, he was shot by his comrades in an incident that has never been fully explained.

I first encountered Dalton through my translations of Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño claimed to have met Dalton shortly before he was shot, and The Savage Detectives was clearly influenced by Dalton’s autobiographical novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo … (as yet untranslated). Over the course of translating him, I’ve fallen victim to his considerable charms—as seems to have been the case with everyone who met him.

This poem was originally published as part of the collection Un libro levemente odioso (A Slightly Nasty Book, forthcoming), which I’ve been translating along with another work called Taberna y otros lugares (Tavern and Other Places, forthcoming). Both are part of a larger project by Seven Stories Press to bring Dalton into English. Until now, English-language readers have had only an anthology, Small Hours of the Night, and Dalton’s final collection, Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle.

 

How did the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult? Are there hard and easy translations?

Yes, there are easy and hard translations! However, “easy” translations sometimes resist improvement and revision, because they seem so self-evident. And a translation that at first seems “hard” may be more successful in the end because it spurs the translator to think more deeply. The first draft of this poem was relatively easy (alert! danger!). It’s one of Dalton’s most narrative poems, and so it feels closer to what I usually do, which is prose translation. Dalton is almost always playful, and here he turns that playfulness into sparkling miniature autobiography. More often, his playfulness has a cryptic edge, and the translation process is slower because it requires a critical reading that evolves over many drafts and months.

 

When did you know this translation was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished, after all?

 This translation was essentially done after a few rounds of light revision. I did keep an early draft, and when I look back at it I see a few more differences than I expected. The first two lines, for example, went from:

You see, I have a broken nose
which I got when el tico Lizano hit me with a brick

to:

You see I have this broken nose I got
when el tico Lizano hit me with a brick

from the Spanish:

Lo que pasa es que tengo esta fractura en la nariz
que me causó el tico Lizano con un ladrillo

The conversational tone is important here—Dalton is directly addressing the reader. “Lo que pasa” gave me some trouble. I also experimented with “The thing is,” but although at first it seems like a closer translation, it doesn’t have quite the same confessional slant as “Lo que pasa es que,” and it impedes the rhythm of the line in English. I tried a simple “See I have this broken nose,” but decided it was too abrupt. The addition of the “You” is perhaps controversial, but it is implied, and I decided it conveyed the right level of intimacy.

By breaking the line in a slightly different place than Dalton does and dispensing with the relative pronoun clause (“which I got”), I rebalanced the couplet and came closer to the bouncy rhythm of Dalton’s Spanish.

 

What was the challenge of this particular translation? 

Getting the voice right. Dalton is at his most delightful here—funny, vulnerable, sly, self-deprecating. It’s also a very tight poem, packed with information delivered in neat little parcels. And it has great momentum. I wanted it to feel easy and inevitable, but also irrepressibly vital.

 

Do you regret any revisions?

I tend to tighten Dalton’s lines, which I think is generally the right strategy—as it often is, in going from Spanish to English—but in looking at the earlier draft, I see that I lose at least one small detail near the end: “splitting my zygomatic arch in three pieces” becomes “splitting my zygomatic arch.” I presume I dispensed with “in three pieces” to preserve the punch of the line (“en tres pedazos” falls in the middle of the line in Spanish; it trails anticlimactically in English), but the specificity of it is funny. The cut is also questionable according to a loosely held principle of mine, which is never to eliminate or add any concrete information.

And I’m still not sure about that “You see.”

 

Natasha Wimmer’s translations from the Spanish include Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.