Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
Translator's Note
Guillermo Boido (Buenos Aires, 1941) published four slim but warmly received
books of poetry in the 1970s and, after what threatened to be a permanent silence,
recently brought out a collection of new and selected work entitled La oscuridad del
alba. Poemas 1970-2000. His new poems maintain the tersely phrased musing of
his previous work, which established him as an essential voice of the ’70s. Boido’s
generation of poets forms an interlude between the social commentary favored by
the poets of the ’60s and the “neo-barroco” that dominated the poetry of the ’90s.
Relying heavily on traditional Spanish poetics and decorum, these poets have often
been criticized for their metapoetic bent and “fuzzy ideology.” Though Boido
expressly denies that poetry should be political, one can’t help noticing the many
references to siege, singing, naming, terror, forgetting, silence, solitude and other
tropes that call to mind the dictatorship and “Dirty War” that raged during the time
he was first writing. These allusions may contribute to a metapoetic or even a
metaphysical argument in the poems, but they often suggest scenes of terror,
particularly in light of their social context. Therefore, the translation of this verse
must maintain this interpretative hesitancy.
Boido’s poetry is challenging to translate because of its precisely balanced
verse and this hesitancy it often provokes. For example, he has a fondness for
using the word “olvido,” which is difficult to convey in English, for in different
contexts it can mean “forgetting” or “oblivion,” and often proves rather abstract or
awkward in English. Moreover, as this term can relate to the private memories of
childhood or love as well as to the testimonials of the public sphere, it becomes one
of the elements of this vacillating angle and so demands special care in its
translation. In “Habits,” for example, “forgetting” worked better than “oblivion,” but
it was necessary to add a noun to save the line from utter abstraction: “love is a
bird that / builds its nest on a forgotten past […]” thereby making for a more
attractive conceit.
In this same poem, the melodic mirroring of “canta” and “calla” (it sings/ it
hushes) is also problematic for the translator, since the English words cannot
recreate a corresponding assonance. Furthermore, Boido’s poems are often built on
a rhetoric of balanced equations—perhaps deriving from the poet’s education in
mathematics—and thus require a similar juxtaposed logic. Here the parallelism is
achieved with directional actions—rise and fall—which emphasize both the bird
imagery and the polarity of song and silence. However, the exact repetition of
“olvido” has been sacrificed:
2 2
love is a bird
that builds its nest on a forgotten past
and
rises into song
The wavering between the metapoetic and the euphemistic that is produced in
much of Boido’s work is present in several of the poems in this selection. In the
poem “Craft,” the notion of silence is implied by the phrase “transparente de
palabras” (linguistically see-through) which I rendered as “wordbare” to play off the
idea of speech as fabric and thus bring the metapoetic aspect of the poem into
relief. In another poem, however, we find this hesitancy pushing the poem to work
in two simultaneous directions, rather like an optical illusion between the terror of
the clandestine jails and a metaphysical meditation on loneliness:
FIVE POEMS
Craft
Habits
Nothing can
silence the atrocious, formless
dementia of love and reflection.
Nothing can
name the atrocious, formless
dementia of love and reflection.
Denotation
Underdevelopment
First Love
Meeting
Creed
_____________________________________________________