Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz - es un vano artificio del cuidado

Sonnet 145 of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, "To Her Portrait":

Este que ves, engaño colorido,
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido

éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,

es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento delicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado:

es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco y, bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.

A reader doesn't need much Spanish to see a lot in this poem. It's all one sentence. Seven of fourteen lines start with "es", while three more start with "éste" and "excusar". And then "es" appears again and again in the last line.

Look at the rhyme words. Four lines end in "-ores", but the rest are "-ido", "-ado", and "-ada", similar sounds, slant rhymes.*

Does a good translation need to keep all of this? See yesterday's post for Edith Grossman's version. Here is Margaret Sayers Peden:

This that you gaze on, colorful deceit,
that so immodestly displays art's favors,
with its fallacious arguments of colors
is to the senses cunning counterfeit,

this on which kindness practiced to delete
from cruel years accumulated horrors,
constraining time to mitigate its rigors
and thus oblivion and age defeat,

is but artifice, a sop to vanity,
is but a flower by the breezes bowed,
is but a ploy to counter destiny,

is but a foolish labor ill-employed,
is but a fancy, and, as all may see,
is but cadaver, ashes, shadow, void.

A lot of this is pretty close to the text. Peden keeps the "is/ this" structure, although not in the last line. Grossman tries a parallel structure ("a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness"). Peden keeps the rhyming cognates (horrors/ rigors/ colors). There's no "sop" to vanity in the original, nor are the horrors "accumulated". Still. Edith Grossman's horrors are "stark", which isn't Sor Juana either. What else can a poor translator do?


Peden does one thing more. Her essay "Building a Translation, the Reconstruction Business: Poem 145 of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz"** compares nine(!) translations of Sor Juana's sonnet, including one by Samuel Beckett. She provides the handy diagram on the right to help us see what each translator is really doing. Most of them, regardless of decisions about rhyme and language, stay right on top of this schematic. The ones that don't are terrible.

This is all I really want. Every translation of a poem in multiple versions with an accompanying essay, and diagrams. Is this so much too ask?

Bonus fun: compare the last line of Sor Juana's sonnet to that of the Luis de Góngora sonnets I posted two days ago. The Sor Juana poem is from sixty or seventy years later, I think.

* Does Spanish prosody have slant rhymes, or am I importing a foreign English concept?

** From John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, eds., The Craft of Translation, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz - this thing you see, a bright-colored deceit

Sonnet 145

In which she attempts to refute the praises of a portrait of the poet, signed by truth, which she calls passion

This thing you see, a bright-colored deceit,
displaying all the many charms of art,
with false syllogisms of tint and hue
is a cunning deception of the eye;

this thing in which sheer flattery has tried
to evade the stark horrors of the years
and, vanquishing the cruelties of time,
to triumph over age and oblivion,

is vanity, contrivance, artifice,
a delicate blossom stranded in the wind,
a failed defense against our common fate;

a fruitless enterprise, a great mistake,
a decepit frenzy, and rightly viewed,
a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness.

translated by Edith Grossman

Poems of the Spanish Golden Age - earth, vapor, shadow, dust, nothing at all

Here's a hopeless task. Two, really. The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance (2005) is Edith Grossman's anthology of old Spanish poems, from the Coplas of Jorge Manrique in the 15th century to the sonnets of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz at the end of the 17th.* In between: Petrarchan innovator Garcilaso de la Vega, mystics Fray Luis de Léon and San Juan de la Cruz, ornamentalist Luis de Góngora, the prolific Lope de Vega, and the great satirist Francsico de Quevedo (pictured, left).

They're all lyric poets, so fundamentally untranslatable. That's the first hopeless part. The second is my attempt to evaluate the translations. I read, say, Grossman’s version of one of Luis de Góngora’s baroque bonbons, and think: that’s pretty good. Then I look at the Spanish and see that this word is omitted by Grossman, and that word appears out of nowhere, and although the rhythm is close, the music is completely gone. So I turn to the same sonnet in another collection, where I see that Grossman’s infelicities are corrected only at the cost of brand new problems, often worse.

This happened every time I checked one version against another, or any version against the Spanish. A Professional, a scholar or a translator, may know how to play this game, but I was stumped every time. I’ll try again tomorrow, with some scholarly assistance.

Grossman's new translation of Jorge Manrique is valuable. Longfellow's translation is a masterpiece, but anyone who finds him archaic or fussy should take a look at Grossman. The handful of poems of St. John of the Cross are some of the finest, strangest religious poems ever written, and should be read in their entirety (John Frederick Nims trumps Grossman here). Fray Luis de León and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are almost as good. Luis de Góngora is a more difficult case, perhaps genuinely hopeless, although still worth the very real effort (my selected poems of Góngora includes his “Defense of Poetic Obscurity” - that should give you an idea of the problem). Grossman convinced me that Garcilaso de la Vega and Francisco de Quevedo's poems are also worth further attention.

This is really an admirable book. Each poet gets a pithy biography, and a portrait - there's a rather severe Luis de Góngora on the right. There's facing-page Spanish, as there should be in every translation of poetry. My only actual complaint is that the book is much too short - only 80 or so pages of poems, really. I want a sequel, preferably longer. And then a volume of 19th and 20th century poets - Becquer, Dario, Jimenez.

Here's Góngora, Sonnet CLXVI, per Grossman, on the transience of beauty, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, etc.:

As long as burnished gold gleams in the sun

in vain, attempting to vie with your hair;

and your brow, white as snow, views with mere scorn

the lily so fair growing in the plain
and each lip waiting to be gathered draws

more avid eyes than first carnation blooms;

and as long as your neck so full of charm

outshines brilliant crystal with proud disdain
revel in neck and hair, in lip and brow

before what was in this your golden age

gold, lily, carnation, and crystal bright
turn to silver, to violets crushed and sere,

and you and they together must become

earth, vapor, shadow, dust, nothing at all.


* I know, neither of these poets is actually from the Spanish Golden Age.

A profile of Edith Grossman, at Bookforum.