The poetry of the illustrious Mexican writer Jose Emilio Pacheco (1939-2014) has crossed the ocean to settle among Arab readers in the form of a bilingual anthology, making it the fifth Cervantes Prize translated into this language within the framework of a program to promote emerging performers.
After zooming to Gonzalo Rojas, José Hierro, María Zambrano and Ida Vitale to the Arab world for the past six years, the Cervantes Institute Poets in Arabic (POCENAR) initiative launched this weekend in Lebanon In shorta work that walks the reader through the main stages of Pacheco.
“This selection, this anthology, what it seeks is to give a complete panorama of the poetic work of José Emilio Pacheco, that is to say that it covers the greatest extension in time from the most youthful poems, which are from the end of the 60s”explained to Eph the expert Alvaro Ruiz Kneewho collaborated in the creation of the book.
The young man, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Library of Mexicobelieves that the chosen compositions “reflect” the main themes of the author, beginning with that first stage marked by social events such as the Vietnam War and the Student Movement of 1968.
In short also walks the reader through later poetry that explores the “literature itself” or the topic of time, putting the finishing touch on its last pages with more recent stanzas about “The approach to other cultures, to other languages”Ruiz added.
That is why the final poem is in Babelthat kind of incomprehension between languages, but that poetry does allow and I think that translation is the best proof of it”, highlighted this doctorate in Hispano-American Literature with a focus on Jose Emilio Pacheco.
Hiba al Hassanie, one of the three translators of the anthology, knows very well what the Mexican poet was referring to when he said “In Babel I stammer my barbaric language / It sounds to the Assyrians like a bark / Blablabla of bubbles in the swamp” .
The young Lebanese woman, selected for the program from a large number of applicants from the nation of cedars, Egypt and Jordan, confesses to Eph that “differences in the structure of sentences in Arabic and Spanish” posed “many difficulties” when translating the poems.
“In the beginning, it was necessary to understand very well what José Emilio Pacheco meant with each word (…) in order to understand the meaning very well in Spanish and transmit it, and choose the most appropriate word to introduce this poetry to the Arab public”Hassanie pointed out.
However, the efforts paid off and today she proudly displays the pages of In short where the eleven compositions that he has translated into Arabic appear in print, as well as two that he worked on during a workshop together with the other translators selected for the program, sponsored by the Abertis Foundation.
The director of the Cervantes Institute of Beirut, Yolanda Soler-Onisindicated to Eph that this is the first time that this “training, translation and editing program” has been held in Lebanon since its first edition in Morocco in 2016, when it was dedicated to the work of the Chilean Gonzalo Rojas, coinciding with the centenary of his birth. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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