Perren Carrillo
on translating Gabriela Mistral
I began by doing a literal translation of the poem based on my own understanding of Spanish, the translations of “The Abandoned Woman” by Randall Conch and “Deserted” by Ursula Le Guin, and a Spanish-to-English dictionary. However, I wanted my translation to be just as intense, animated, impassioned, and senseless as the original, which a literal translation could never attain. In order to create a sense of reckless abandon in feeling and emotion, I took multiple liberties in order to evoke certain images or concepts.
For example, in lines 5 and 6 of my translation, “neglects” replaces “forgets.” Here, the speaker, like the river, has made a conscious choice to ignore herself to the point of harm because every part of her has become her lover. Furthermore, I chose “neglect” because each part of her and every word she speaks embodies her lover in such a way that the speaker cannot truly forget no matter how hard she tries. In fact, there is a paradoxical futility in even trying to forget; any active effort to repress something further recalls it.
There were times also when words and concepts in Spanish did not translate literally into English, such as postrimería in line 18 of the original. This word is only found in Spanish and is used to describe the four afterlife occurrences according to Catholicism: death, judgment, hell, and glory. Le Guin translated the word as “afterwards” and Conch translated it as “waiting-for-death.” Personally, Le Guin better renders the afterlife in her translation whereas Conch veers away from that in rendering this ad hoc neologism for what the living feel towards the afterlife. I chose “hell” to relate to the connotations of death and the already condemning tone of the poem. This abandonment represents the death of their love, a death that condemned the speaker to hell — to the flames and fire and pain and viscera. I also feel that this was an appropriate choice because it relates back to the first two lines of the third stanza: “Now you must give me the words / that my mother never could.” After all, a mother would never give a child the word “hell.”
about the author
Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was a Chilean poet, diplomat, educator, and humanist. In 1945, she became the first Latin American author and fifth woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature. She had many passionate affairs with both men and women, with perhaps the recently published correspondence between her and Doris Dana being the premier example of both her great capacity for love (if not passion) and her defiance of gender roles and stereotypes that the Chilean government had imposed on her. Central to her poems are nature, betrayal, love, and remorse, as seen in the translated poem, “La Abandonada,” which comes from a collection called Locas mujeres (Crazy Women or Madwomen, depending on the English translation). This poem in particular deals with abandonment after love. Although the original abandonment of the speaker by her lover is the catalyst for the poem, it becomes apparent that at the forefront of the poem is the speaker’s madness, her abandonment of every sense — a madness more complex and more nuanced than it appears to be. She descends into a visceral insanity that engulfs the poem in the all encompassing redness of flames, of rage, of passion, but in a way that is completely her: complicatedly human.
about the translator
I translated this poem as my final project in Taije Silverman’s class “The Translation of Poetry and the Poetry of Translation.” I study Spanish , French, and comparative literature in the College, so I am constantly translating between languages, authors, times, etc.
photo by a DoubleSpeak staffer
