Which poets have the biggest impact on you?

Paul Celan, Georg Trakl, and José Angel Valente.

You wrote your doctoral dissertation about the Spanish poet, José Angel Valente. What do you like in Valente’s poetry?

Indeed, my thesis title is “Entre el alef y la mandorla: Poética, erótica y mística en la obra de José Angel Valente” where I studied Valente’s poetry and essays. He was also an excellent translator of Celan and Trakl.

I love words. My poetic education keeps developing while translating. Translating inspires my writing.

Valente’s writings always surprised me with his meditations on language and his interest in other arts, particularly painting and music, as a way of exploring more directly the nature of poetic creation. He was my bridge to Buddhist philosophy, Spanish and Jewish mysticism, erotic poetry and even silence. I am very interested in music, and in order to understand Valente’s poems, in particular Tres lecciones de tinieblas. I studied, under the guidance of one of my doctoral dissertation advisors, the music of the French baroque composer François Couperin, a key for a better understanding of Valente’s book. The poems took me also to the magnificent music of Tomás Luis de Victoria and Thomas Tallis.

Valente is a difficult poet who demands much of the reader. I like his linguistic force, his risks, his precision. Poetry is sacred, and didn’t Mallarmé say that whatever is sacred, whatever is to remain sacred, must be clothed in Mystery?

Did you translate a selection of his poems into English?

Yes, I did. In the Spring 2004, the Cuban poet Jesús J. Barquet, professor of New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, invited me to collaborate in a dossier dedicated to the Spanish poet. Barquet was aware that Valente has been sparsely translated into English and wanted to assemble a selection to be published in Puerto del Sol, a journal of the English Department of New Mexico State University. Suddenly I found myself facing an enormous task, an extraordinary challenge for an amateur translator like me. The translations were possible thanks to the collaboration of other American translators, including yourself. The dossier — “José Angel Valente (1929-2000): A Selection of His Poetry” — was published in 2005.

Could you talk about other translations that you’ve embarked upon? Is translating an essential aspect of your writing?

I love languages. I love words. My poetic education keeps developing while translating. Translating inspires my writing. Working with you and with Angela McEwan in the translation of my own was the best school for becoming a translator myself. I had some minor experience as a translator before coming to United States. When I was an editor in Havana, for example, I translated a history book from the French, and some articles from English into Spanish. In New York and San Francisco, I did some translations for an advertising company.

Libro de los XXXIX escalones
BY Carlota Caulfield
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
BY Angela McEwan
Carpeta de Poesía Luz Bilingüe nº 2
(Luz Bilingual Publishing, Inc.)

My first literary translation was Framment /Fragmentos/Fragments by Luigi Minghetti, published in 1997, in Italy. Agreeing to do the translation was a bold act, but it initiated me into the art of translation. Many of my poetry translations are from English into Spanish, for example, poems by Jack Foley and Cecile Pineda. But I like to take risks, and after acquiring some theoretical expertise, in particular after attending many workshops at the ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) meetings, I wanted to translate more into English as a way of expanding my sense of the language.

I collaborated with Stacy McKenna in the translation from Spanish of Antonio Beneyto’s Còdols in New York. With other translators, I worked on poems by Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American women poets for the anthology The Other Poetry of Barcelona, a bilingual edition. I participated in the translation of “Kodak Ensueño,” the avant-garde poems of the Cuban poet Regino E. Boti, included in the book Kindred Spirits, published in the United Kingdom in 2005.

Recently, I finished translating Beneyto’s Un bárbaro en Barcelona/A Barbarian in Barcelona to be published next year in a bilingual edition.

My last major project was the translation of Irish poetry into Spanish. The bilingual Contemporary Irish Women Poets anthology project began in Stanford, at the 2000 literary festival “Finnegans Awake: A Festival of Irish Writers,” while speaking with the English poet and critic John Goodby. I coedited the book with him. Translating the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Elán Ní Chuilleanáin, Sara Berkeley, Rita Anne Higgins, Paula Meehan, Eavan Boland, Mesbh McGuckian and Catherine Walsh into Spanish was not at all an easy task. It took me almost two years to finish the translations. Some of the poets were very generous with their time and they helped me to solve important translation problems. I need to give also credit to Angela McEwan for helping me to revise the final versions. And to you also for suggesting very valuable solutions in some cases. The anthology was published by Ediciones Torremozas of Madrid in 2007.

While translating, I also began writing poems in response to some I have just translated. They are part of an unpublished manuscript titled Diario Dublinés.