Postcard: Lost in Translation

I'd meant to muse on translating and translation, but I find my mind further adrift than I'd prefer right now. I've studied a fair handful of languages in my time, mostly for graduate school requirements and related personal interest: Latin, Anglo-Saxon, German, Classical Greek, and Spanish, with smatterings of Medieval French, Medieval Welsh, Old Norse, and Old High German. That list is so much more impressive than any ability I currently possess with any of these languages. Aside from English, frankly, I'm rather tongue-tied.

Translation as a mode of thought and a means of entering into a culture, into the literature, and into contact with the people: those continue to interest me, even as I've let my linguistic skills falter and lag.

For a while in graduate school, I intended to focus on medieval texts of Western Europe (with competing yearnings to shift to Classical Latin, to Vergil, and all those Romans), but the realization that I'd never quite get all the jokes, not from that distance in time and culture, deterred me. It's hard enough to find all the jokes in William Wordsworth or Beowulf (a medieval text, yes), though I used to think I'd managed both of those tasks.

I need to muse further on this topic, the larger topic of translation, but I want to pause a moment with a favorite poem in Spanish for which I'm still seeking the best translation. Yes, I should revive and expand my high school Spanish to read Lorca's gypsy ballad in its original form; yes, I agree, but that project will have to wait. By the way, my eighth-grade Spanish was good enough for me to listen to and decipher much of what the fine folks of Tecate, Mexico, were saying about my grandmother, my brothers, and myself, but even then I was too shy, too unequipped, to speak to and with them. 13 or 14 years old, and tongue-tied. I liked listening, though, and smiling.

I've pieced my way through Lorca's original, and I've read various translations, but I still haven't read the translation that captures whatever mysterious effect I feel when I reflect on the poem and the few phrases I've memorized, on what people have shared with me about this poem: "Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verde ramas." There's a magic to this gypsy ballad of Lorca's, and I sometimes wish I had enough Spanish, enough denotative and connotative knowledge, to truly feel the evocative power at work. I feel much, but not enough.

Here is the opening to Lorca's poem in the original Spanish. If you know of a worthy translation or the missing key, let me know.

Romance sonambulo

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verde ramas.

And besides Lorca, there's Neruda and all those favorite poems from Isla Negra, The Captain's Verses, and beyond.