Natasha Wimmer in “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” by Natasha Wimmer

For our Poetry Making series, we ask poets and translators to dissect the poems they publish in our pages. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roque Dalton’s poem “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 253. Here, we ask Wimmer to reflect on his work.

Can you tell us a little about Roque Dalton and your attraction to him? Where was this poem first published?

Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935 and is generally considered one of the greatest Latin American poets of the twentieth century. He was deeply involved in politics—he lived in exile from El Salvador for most of his life, including several crucial years spent in Cuba. In his thirties, he became more committed to armed struggle and joined a guerrilla group to fight in El Salvador. Four days before his fortieth birthday, he was shot by his comrades in an incident that was never fully explained.

I first encountered Dalton through my translation of Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño admitted to meeting Dalton shortly before he was shot, and Wild Detective clearly influenced by Dalton’s autobiographical novel Poor little poet, I was… (not yet translated). In the course of translating him, I fell victim to his extraordinary charm—as did everyone who met him.

This poem was originally published as part of a collection A slightly hateful book (A Slightly Disgusting Bookforthcoming), which I have translated together with another work entitled Shops and other places (Shops and Other Placeswill come). Both are part of a larger project by Seven Stories Press to bring Dalton into English. Until recently, English-language readers had only anthologies, Small Hours of the Nightand Dalton’s final collection, Class Struggle Stories and Poems.

How did the first draft make you feel? Does it come easily or hard? Are there difficult and easy translations?

Yes, there are easy and difficult translations! However, “easy” translations sometimes resist correction and revision, because they seem self-evident. And a translation that initially seems “difficult” may be more successful in the end because it spurs the translator to think more deeply. The first draft of this poem is relatively easy (watch out! danger!). It’s one of Dalton’s most narrative poems, so it feels closer to what I’m used to, which is a prose translation. Dalton is almost always cheerful, and here he turns that cheerfulness into a sparkling autobiographical miniature. Often, its playfulness has a subtle feel, and the translation process is slower because it requires critical reading that develops over several drafts and months.

When did you know the translation was complete? Are you right about that? Is it done?

This translation is basically complete after some light revisions. I did save the initial draft, and when I looked back at it, I noticed more differences than I expected. The first two lines, for example, come from:

You see, my nose is broken
what I got when el tico Lizano hit me with a brick

to:

You know, my nose is broken
when el tico Lizano hit me with a brick

from Spanish:

What happened was I had a broken bone in my nose
What does Attic Lizano do to me with bricks?

A conversational tone is important here—Dalton speaks directly to the reader. “what happened” gave me some trouble. I also experimented with “The thing is,” but although it initially seemed like a closer translation, it didn’t have the same confessional slant as “What happened was that,” and this hinders the rhythm of the sentence in English. I tried a simple sentence like “Look, my nose is broken,” but I thought it was too abrupt. The addition of the word “You” may be controversial, but it is implied, and I think it conveys the right level of intimacy.

By breaking the line in a slightly different place than Dalton did and removing the relative pronoun clause (“that I got”), I rebalanced the verse and approximated the bouncy rhythm of Dalton’s Spanish.

What were the challenges of this particular translation?

Improved the sound. Dalton is at his most delightful here—funny, vulnerable, sly, self-deprecating. The poetry is also very dense, packed with information conveyed in neat little packages. And it has great momentum. I want this to feel easy and inevitable, but also very important.

Do you sorry, is there a revision?

I tended to tighten up Dalton’s sentences, which I think is generally the right strategy—as is often the case, in switching from Spanish to English—but when looking at an earlier draft, I noticed that I missed at least one small detail toward the end: “splitting my zygomatic arch into three parts” became “splitting my zygomatic arch.” I guess I dropped the “in three parts” to preserve the point of the sentence (“in three pieces( is in the middle of a line in Spanish; becomes anticlimactic in English), but the specificity is hilarious. These cuts are also questionable according to my loose principles of never removing or adding any concrete information.

And I’m still not sure about “you see.”

Natasha Wimmer’s translations from Spanish include Álvaro Enrigue’s translation You Dream of the Kingdom and Roberto Bolaño 2666.