SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS:
The Value of Mistranslated Poems, apologies to Neruda
by Brandon Cesmat

"Wherever they plant his corpse
they harvest his voice."
    --Steve Kowit

I showed some of my Neruda translations to my friend Jorge Elizalde, whose first language was Spanish, and asked him if they were accurate.  "Yeah, you got it, but you don't got it," he said. The words were right but the music was wrong. I then asked a poet who had published a book of Neruda translations for some direction. He looked at a poem and asked me what I liked about it. I pointed to a couple of lines that I liked. He said, "Well, why don't you do an adaptation, build on the ideas in those lines and cut away the rest?"

So I cut a verse and several lines even though they contained several images I liked. Later, when I missed those images, I brought them back and wove them into the poem by combining them with other lines. The poem "Pale Blue Town, after Neruda" was the result.

The whisper of dusk entangles you
as you sit turned from sun’s helixes
flying upward without you, leaving you mute
in this dead hour when beachfires
inherit the light of the destroyed day.

See the light fallen into the folds of your black dress.
The roots of your soul grow at night.
They reach to your pale skin so
tomorrow this blue town that gave you life
                can feed off you.

Every life stands to follow the circle of
black turning to gold turning to black to gold.
How charismatic! What grand production!
Flowers wilt and you fill with sorrow.

Meanwhile, I still had a couple of pages of my bad translations, so I brought "Pale Blue Town," Neruda's original poems, my literal translations to class. It was important for the students to hear the original in Spanish, but more important, I wanted to show them the way the poem changed and how Neruda taught me. Often beginning writers believe they're protecting their first drafts by not revising. I wanted them to see how valuable my bad translations were, that I could take something beautiful, make mistakes with it, but see some of the poetry return if I played with the words.

Assignment
I gave them a couple of bad translations, told them to combine images from different poems freely and cite Neruda as their source. Despite the boundaries I set up with the translations, during the wordplay, new and good combinations emerged. In the adaptations, I still hear Neruda, but each of us found something of ourselves as well.

Objective
Obviously, the trick here is starting with true poetry. By making a mess of Neruda's poems I set three things in motion: one, no one worried about making a mistake; two, Neruda's vocabulary struck the right balance between abstractions and concretes; three, when they combined the words in their own way, the adaptations contained poetry not found in Neruda; therefore, it must have come through them. Surprise.