In the project of translating this poet, I faced the need to make a decision about meter which I myself had imported and against all better opinion, decided to do so to suggest a change of form in the translation toward an antecedent or a neutral precursor. In the fact that the work seeks to supplant language by visual effects and in order to emphasize its creative foment between the discordant graces of English and Spanish language differences, I selected blank verse as a deferral of the crisis of translation and language studies.
There are, perhaps, one may hope, humane reasons to introduce Marti by way of a 100-year lens to the tumult of science and the disparaging of art that renders the poverty of mindful thought and honorable service.
The work of a poet is work of time. I hope you may enjoy them by way of the English versions and I invite you to make use of them in your own research or adaptations.
These verses have their right to live on and in English may make their way across the screens of the MLA Commons and perhaps into the awareness of scholars and readers for they are just as worthy of study as most of what we read in English by the Jose Marti. The shyness seems to me to be exorbitant within our global culture today.
Despite the poet’s renown for personification and mellifluous phrasing as in Simple Verses the lack of an English translation of Free Verses (available in Spanish at http://www.literatura.us/marti/libres.html and http://www.damisela.com/literatura/pais/cuba/autores/marti/libres/pollice.htm) appears to skew the possibility for comprehending works the poet crafted when ingenuity rather than accessibility was his objective.
Because they were wrought out of a quest to compose newly and against prior example in Spanish convention, the accomplishment of Versos Libres is a synthesis afforded by a new tone based on a rigorous inversion of inherited conventions of affect, authority, and values that both mock and subvert colonial affectations. For Marti such affectations were deceptive not only to the many subjected persons beneath imperial submission but to the wielding of a sensibility construed as suppression of prowess and worth, ideals and continuity. Seeking such a universalism he decided it was found in fortitude, originality, and a striking if devastating equilibrium of thought and action.
Were it possible for a poet to covet what they themselves author, these are the verses that he did covet. When he turned from their demanding compound delineations, their dramatic figures and dense visual rhythms, to write his lyrical classic work, Versos Sencillos, he did so as a stoic and benevolent concession to popular song triumphal in its immediacy and in that way a Swan Song previewing the decline of his health, the likelihood of imminent loss of faculty, and ultimately as Ruben Dario’s declared his “untimely death” or more likely assassination in the wars for independence from Spain and the founding of a nation, Cuba then proving itself vulnerable due to corruption of submitting to U.S. annexation as history proved true later and still illustrates a valid preoccupation belonging to the Latin Republics each with their own mandate but who formed Marti’s audience. As such his enemies were the vested powers and authorities of the hemisphere as his readership was aware the popular base of people desirous of independence was a base for lyrical communication acts. Visually and phonically, and beyond poetry’s technical resources, a storehouse for multimedia equates with hypothetical units of data as qualities of ideas, even publicly-purposed discussions. By no means does poetry not open as it opens where opening is concerned but may equally shut and close what it does.
The contemporary analytical mind capable of art is the one that politics can set free, Marti seems to say, but dependence is a far worse dilemma than putative freedom bent to ignoble force.
Cuban independence which he would never witness he had syncretically conceptualized through his profuse efforts to coin a new poetry and by that means even a new republic by prolific authoring and production of news media, political organizing, military strategy, and even poetic innovations that today remain hermetic joys of scholars and specialists.
The purpose of this blog is not so lofty as to claim to offer great or even adequate literary renditions of the original Spanish works. Rather the work underway is the product of an aspiration of translating the content of a poet’s most demanding self-study in modern poetic forms and a beginning step in the reconstruction of this highly meritorious work of modern poetry that continues to elude an audience by lack of available intermediary texts that can serve as potential guides for future, better translators.
There is also some value in the experimentation occasioned through the transfer of these works from Spanish free verse into English blank verse. I do not have reason nor rationale to defend this method and see it only as another exciting journey to commence.
Were I to attempt to offer explanation of my method in extracting the Spanish free verse for importation into English metrical verse, it would be none other than that meter appears to heighten the verbal efficacy of what comes across in Spanish as rather more visual than what would be effected via free verse English translation, in my opinion.
This work is preceded by that of Jack Agueros of New York City who researched, edited, and with great effort sought to publish the complete works of the Cuban. His rigorous search for accuracy in Spanish and Cuban English equivalents led him obsessively to collect any and all useful dictionaries he dug from obscure corners of bookstores left and right. This project would not merely have been impossible without his foundational approach to such things that seeming need of preservation he pursued with abandon. His view of this extended to his own works in semi traditional forms which he endearingly labeled , “Sonnets from the Puerto Rican.”