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IL MIGLIOR FABBRO

BY CARLOS MIJARES POYER

IL MIGLIOR FABBRO

            Many people do not know who Ezra Pound was.  A major american poet, with poems like Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, he was il miglior fabbro, the best blacksmith that could churn the metal to shape the art and equal universal art at the hand of this master of literature and translation.

            Ezra Pound, died in Italy in prison accused as traitor for broadcasting fascist and non-fascist and anti-fascist radio talks through italian radio, during the Second World War.  Why do poets always have to end this way, I know... but I will not tell you, it is interesting research in the library and on the internet, noone talks about that subject.

            Pound was a multi-linguist, a scholar and a genius of art and poetry.  The mentor of poets like T.S. Eliot, THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT, author of the The Waste Land, poems like The Hollow Men, edited by the prestigious publishing house in London, Faber&Faber.

            Eliot wrote a very know poem entitled: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (I grow old/I grow old/I wear the bottom of my trousers rolled), it is a piece of poetic art in english and american literature, for Eliot lived the rest of his life in England and everyone fights over him and the extraordinary legacy of his heritage.

Let us go, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table (begins the character Prufrock)

But who is “us”?  Then, “you” and “I”. How many people are to go, this is the mystery of the poem for some scholars. And, if you translate to spanish you have to be careful with this twist, a psychological and sociological turn, that must say:

Vayamos, tú y yo

Cuando el anochecer esta esparcido por el cielo

Como un paciente en éter sobre el mesón…

It could also mean to use the verb vámos, but it would not imply the existence of more than two people that are going as Eliot wants to perhaps imply.  There is a “you” and “I”, perhaps the third entity is the patient etherized upon the table to symbolize the precarious death of humanity, the end of all numb things, or the start of life, in its implicit beginning.  In the beginning... the bible says.  I would not dare translate the bible.

A LEGAL ENTITY IS CHASING YOU!

BY CARLOS MIJARES POYER

A Legal Entity is Chasing You!

When translating in court, lawyers, defendants, prosecutors, the Judge, no one, waits for a translator´s mind lapse.  In Spanish the term “persona jurídica” seems to be a bit of a mystery for some beginners in translation.  It means legal entity for many sworn translators in these activities of Crime and Punishment, as Dostoyevsky would write.

Once in an interview for a translator´s job I was asked the pop question, telegraphing that I would connect to answer that “persona jurídica” was translated to English as: “legal person.”  A bit of History.  I coursed a bit of law school but it´s not my design.

Persona, comes from the Greek Tragedies of Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and others, and it was a white mask that was placed in front of the face to “personify” and resonate the speech of actor in Greek Theatre. The mask had the description engraved infinitely in its carving, whether sad or happy, villain or saint (?) where are they?  The particular mask enhanced the sound and made it echo through the theatre hall for the audience, while displaying the mood, sanguine or melancholic humor, of the character at hand, it spiraled in the hermeneutic imagination of the audience. It was all part of the show, as old as entertainment and advertising is in this world.

Now, when a legal entity is chasing you, or perhaps the police is looking for you, arrested and tumbled to court, you will definitely learn the term there; we are all legal entities for the law, that is for all us, and innocent until proven guilty, unless you invented the gun, indeed, the culprit is the creator of gun powder; guns are just lateral marketing accessories we use to kill people, -and we call ourselves a civilization.

An error in legal translation can cost millions of dollars or whatever exchange or send someone to jail, we all know that.  A legal interpreter must handle these terms effectively, like a science and study comparative law, for when a translator is summoned to court to translate a trial, most of the legal events are facing each other as two nationalities, or two cultures, and here in the word culture is the new maelstrom of globalization.  One must have a deep culture to translate, it comes sometimes with the handling of day to day translations, it is the responsibility of the translator to know how to translate cultures when translating to oppose malinterpretations and prejudices that might arise anywhere in the scenario of written or public trial, it is almost a tragedy not to manage the items of culture in legal translation, and others too!

Of course, if you did not notice it, when you translate one language follows the other, it can even become invisible, the invisible man exists.  Translation can become a calm patient essence or a wild goose chase.

THE COWBOYS OF TRANSLATION

BY: CARLOS E. MIJARES POYER                                             DATE: MAY 3, 2012

GENRE: TRANSLATION ARTICLE

The Cowboys of Translation

Caracas, Venezuela, is the most insecure city in the World -in all senses.  You walk through its concrete jungle of over 7 million souls, boggling the streets searching survival, it is perhaps your city too, a common panorama  Taking the public transportation and boom you are immediately in the Urdaneta Avenue. What you don´t know its that your entering the Wild Wild West of Globalization, with its neosocialist government buildings, banks and offices and excecutive meandering to an fro in the corruption of yesteryear.  A phantom Rolls-Royce custom made in purple wine races through the avenue.  When the oil runs out, and the steel, and the pretty women and other energy resources it will become a ghost town, which was once a commercial mining town, and walking you see multicultural races from Spain, Italy, Germany and Colombia and now the cubans, yes, the cubans.  Avenue Urdaneta is the wild wild west and its men are cowboys, yes, they have modern guns, and there, in one of those towers, are the Cowboys of Translation.  They are merely teen-agers like Billy the Kid, following the example of an older cowboy who hires them.

            They are foreign language students, some learning French, mainly English and Italian or German, it is their pick, there are several universities offering services.  They desire to be language teachers, absent minded about the sickness of low payment salaries and exploitation, and the hindrance and noise caused among linguistics of the serious profession, of translation.  Have you ever seen a translation sweatshop?  We have them here.  Perhaps they can appear somewhere else like a bureaucratic phenomenom.  There are no serious translation organizations, they play with the number of words and pages, affecting the profession of translator and languages.  Translator calling each other and searching each other through google asking to see the other´s rates.  If someone calls a legitimate translator, they will contract you for the translation, and then, and only then they call the cowboys of translation on Urdaneta Avenue, who do not speak English correctly, and translate false versions of content and form, are there ready to steal the project from you.  Most of these sweatshops are directed by corrupt lawyers, that through payments obtain translation certificates and are sworn translators and they pay the cowboys, those children -a measely salary.  When you need a translation contact a serious translation office, the third world is full of these cowboys in all trades, it is the mediocrity of a society that aspires to fall and decline even more.

            The concept of the Cowboys of Translation has no allusion to the American Wild West of hollywood movies, but here gun fights among translators happen virtually through the phone, and clients aware of the low hanging mangoes take the opportunity to pay less, to people who are transcending to be professional translators, writers and linguists in the world awning in the presence -all in the presence of God.

            The cowboys use the lasos which is word in the english language, look it up, which is the rope to catch cattle to catch clients it all coordinates the universe of offer and demand.

BY CARLOS MIJARES POYER                                          DATE MAY 12, 2012

GENRE LITERARY TRANSLATION

THE TURNS AND TWISTS OF A LITERARY TRANSLATION

            If you have not read anything by american novelist Henry James, anyone who knows would definitely recommend The Turn of the Screw, indeed fluent and paradisiacal. One becomes enamored to this novel that has reached the romantic screen of Hollywood and t.v.

            The novel does not seem, but it is a ghost story and a love story. A story of serendipity deep in the English mansions, just read.

            I have never tried to translate this novel it would be a daring sin for me, I do not compare, I could translate well, but its title addresses the twists and turns of the literature it is composed of.  One must first as a literary translator, have humility in front of the prose one is about to transform to another language, another world.

            Sometimes when translating literature from English to Spanish, the second language lacks the pragmatism and nominalism of the first, and I will include here a translation of a stanza of a poem I wrote in English and was translated by someone else, to demonstrate the twist and turn of the prose.  The stanza says:

Like an old turtle´s trot

In heavy steps that drop

A low hum from the heart.

Como el lento paso de la vieja tortuga

Angustiosa pesadumbre que entona

Un profundo murmullo del corazón. (My translation).

If you like the translation, comment on it, and add constructively to it; that´s what blogs are for.

            Going back to our novel, the Jamesian style, participates in that it propitiates the fluency for translation, because James uses paratactic sentences the reader and his imagination must add to.  I am no addict to structuralism but it helps.  As a matter of fact the whole story one must add great imagination to the love theme and the obscure and terrifying ghost presence in the content of the novel.  This is hard to reach if you try to translate this novel to Spanish, it has been done, but because I am always learning and literature is infinite, this article dear reader encourages you to pick up the novel and rehearse a translation to your language.

            A twist in language or the turn of the screw to tightened the art or loosen it when possible, to reach new levels of talent in writing and translation, is there, it´s when you try to work on it that the style reaches your mind and heart.  Students should be encouraged to work on this.

            The stanza up top could have been more literally translated and say:

Como el lento paso de la vieja tortuga

En pesados pasos que intuyen (o que dejan abismalmente descender)

Un profundo gemir del corazón. (another version of my own creation.)

            By the way, for you russian novel lovers, take a peek, I mean good vantage point from your reading chair or desk, and observe how Sarah Burnett translates the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov, indeed a turbulent novel full of mysticism, parricide and of course, literary talent.  Read, something always remains, that´s what translator are there for -in serious organizations.

            Literary translation, in my opinion, and only in my judgement, should be carried out by a writer or poet with talent and control of the languages at hand.  It takes time and it should be well paid, only if the translator has the ability to transport his original writing talent to the translation, and that not always happens.  The style of the translator´s writing style may show, it is almost impossible that it does not happen, but it is the style of the prose that must come through, and in poetry, the mistake comes like a boomerang when translating metaphors, or similes and other accented rhyme, like when you try to translate metered rhyme in English Literature to another language.

            Who is il miglior fabbro? (the best crafstman).  Poet means “maker” (maker or images), and these words sprawled like stars over the vastness of the page may have a meter.  Ezra Pound, the american poet, was a vast greek, provencal, latin, and german translator, his translations of Dante´s Inferno, specially the section of the “purgatory” reveal what english poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would write years later in verse.  His example is a grand example of comparative arts (the relationships between the arts basically). Coleridge wrote in verse:

In the hexameter rises the fountain´s silvery column

In the pentameter aye falling in melody back

This is the example of the scansion that must face a translator to meet or try to resemble the passion and the essence of the verse into another language.  These are cadences of elegies (heroic epics) as was a historical tradition in all literature to write, even Tolkien with his modern 20^th Century saga of The Hobbit is a form an elegy, that has reached Hollywood.  A six meter rhyme line followed by a five meter line whether it rhymes or not, is the scansion, the fall of the breath and the heartbeats and the motion of the eyes over the verses, that could be translated to spanish as:

En el hexámetro asciende la columna plateada de la fuente

En e pentámetro ay, cayendo en melodía una vez más…

The knowledge of meter in older poetry in any language and the new edition of free verse and its cadences are of symbolic significance in the art of translation of literatura and poetry, and even prose, for in my judgement; when I read the Norton Edition of Dead Souls by russian writer Nikolai Gogol, I find an inner rythm, a sort of sound that emits order and song. And these artistic attitudes are to be met professionally by the translator.

BY: CARLOS E. MIJARES POYER                                                  Date:  May 3, 2012.

GENRE: TRANSLATION ARTICLE

The Psychological Dilemma of Spanglish in the Translation Process

Spanglish is a verbal free-will psychological combination of the English-Spanish languages in colloquial and formal verbal practice, that occurs in the mind of characters and people.  Whether it be a conversation on the subway, to lectures in universities, it can evolve spontaneously as a social and cultural phenomenon, due to economic and psico-politico-social reasons.  Languages are scientific codes and ciphers that can be verified.

Is the verbal phenomenon friend or foe?  As writer, it is viewed bilaterally: the evolution of this “dialectic-dialect”, as debate can deliver, creates phrases and picturesque vocabularies, in the global scenario of linguistics; as it has occurred with computer terminology and translation, as in the words reset in english or resetear, in spanish, (to reboot your computer), and other pragmatic-utilitarian examples. Or, like translators who translate or pronounce thank you in spanish as sénkiu. 

The phenomenon moves like an information cloud between the two cultures from cosmopolitan Los Angeles, U.S.A. with its hispanic crowd, to Miami or latinamerican cities where technology, and globalization, with its arrays of change, reaches ground in a multicultural american, european, afro, asian, psychological terrains.  Caracas, in Venezuela, or Buenos Aires in Argentina, have the essence and recipes for verbal chameleonic transformation in the languages.  Just like Brazilian bossa nova music enriched the mainstream of American Jazz.  With the advent of the wonderful gleam of globalization, neomarketing, social media, technical writing, and literatures, to translations and inventions, in variegated versions, written and oral translation, creates a gigantic cornucopia of sounds, onomatopaeic to nominal forms.  This can be a dilemma, a syndrome, or indeed, a blessing.

When translating, non-fully bilingual translators fall into the maelstrom or spiral of spanglish, that some linguists have denominated as detrimental to both languages, meaning, that some hispanics, or spanish speakers, in english speaking countries, and natives whose spanish is their second language, do not reach proficiency in any of the two languages.  They speak bad Spanish and bad English, if you might say, at the same time.  Even child nourishment and genetic aspects of social behaviour, are intermingled in this dilemma.  If a child is badly nourished when young, before birth, he can develop speech anomalias, intelligence handicaps that affect future in schools and jobs, affecting economies, societies in the realm of communication, art, etc.

A translator might say in spanish: “What is your name?, translate it on the street or, to commit the sin of doing it in formal translation, and say: “¿Cúal es tú name? (spanglish).  Well, it may seem funny, some people do not care, professionally it makes a difference. Preeminently in legal translating, you can not give yourself the intimate luxury of using spanglish, unless it may be a multicultural novel, or innovation:  I heard of a boy whose name was “Michael Jackson Martínez”.

When a translator makes a mistake, people lose money, time and intellectual richness, you lose communication, the opportunity to translate, deliver a sentence or expression, in the proper form and content, to guarantee the fluent and trafficked practice of life.  And, there, right there, in the use of the word traffic, is an example of spanglish when writing in thinking about the word traficado in spanish psychologically.  What do you think, dear reader?

¿Qué es el concepto de transcreación dentro de las carreras?

La transcreación como dice la etimología de la palabra, es crear a través de un grupo específico de especialidades del conocimiento como la inteligencia emocial, el neuromarketing, las relaciones públicas, el campo de traducción de textos e idiomas y culturas en las traducciones, el periodismo expositivo, de opinión y creativo, las escritura creativa y expositiva y la gerencias de las redes sociales y la publicidad.

Yo le recomiendo especialmente a los profesionales dentro de estas áreas que investiguen haciendo búsquedas por www.google.com este concepto que les abrirá nuevos horizonte y oportunidades para desarrollarse dentro sus ramas laborales y profesionales.

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