Let it Go

What feels most important (to me) to translate is the energy of the original, its breathless emotional rush: that’s where the meaning resides, and so the line breaks are signal and problematic. If in Spanish a line begins, as it does, “lo mereces,” the subject comes after the object and is melded into the verb itself. But in English, the normative translation would need three words and would begin with the subject, then the verb, and then the object: “You deserve it.” How to approximate the casual condensation that keeps the poem moving quickly in Spanish? So part of the translator’s job, as I see it, concerns the strategic (and necessarily different) placement of words on a line. Enjambment, with its propulsive edge, is a critical aspect of the original and the translation.

I had to struggle to keep certain phrases, colloquial in Spanish, from sounding more formal in English. For instance, where Bredow writes “y sigues levantándose / con sonrisas para quienes esperan sonrisas” (literally “you continue getting up with smiles for those waiting for smiles”), I first thought of using the verb “furnish”: “You furnish smiles for those waiting for smiles.” But who would say “I furnished a smile”? The Spanish tone is spoken, not arcane. Making serial changes all week as I worked, I ended up with: “and you still dispensing / smiles for those who expect smiles.” I could have used “and you putting on / smiles,” but I felt that the act of giving away something, rather than merely wearing something, was a critical distinction.

I do love the way the last line—“save us, save us”—begs to be read in two ways. In the Spanish, it’s clear that the second “save us”—“sálvanos”—is an imperative. I could have added an exclamation point to clarify the imperative nature of the second “save us,” but I appreciate that Bredow didn’t use an exclamation point, and I like the reduplicative subtlety which might cause us to linger on those last lines in the English translation.