THE PERSONAL AND THE PAINTERLY: ON TRANSLATING THREE POEMS BY ODI GONZALES

To translate the poems in Odi Gonzales’s Birds on the Kiswar Tree [La Escuela de Cusco/The School of Cusco, 2005] is to immerse myself in a time and place entirely foreign to me. Birds on the Kiswar Tree, the fifth of Gonzales’s seven collections, is a book of ekphrastic poems based on church art—syncretistic and subversive church art—painted by indigenous and mestizo artists who lived in and around Cusco during Peru’s colonial period. Of the three poems in this selection, “The Marriage of Don Martín de Loyola and Doña Beatriz Ñusta,” is the most militant and rebellious, the other two, “The Workshop of Nazareth” and “Saint Joseph, the Virgin, and the Child,” are gentler, more personal poems in which Gonzales combines images of his own mother and father with scenes of the holy family. In keeping with the ekphrastic approach, Gonzales titles the poems after the actual paintings and presents the titles as wall labels in an art museum.

A word about the historical and artistic context of the paintings that inspired the poems might be helpful. After conquering Peru, Spain sent, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, accomplished artists, some of them painter-priests, to Peru to teach the indigenous Quechua people how to paint in order to “evangelize the people through art.” Although the European artists provided expert art instruction to the Quechua artists, they also strictly commanded these indigenous painters, on pain of excommunication, to depict only religious subjects. The Quechuas’ Christian faith was deep and sincere, they also subtly rebelled against Spanish repression and the destruction of their indigenous heritage, often by painting native flora and fauna into biblical scenes. These artists produced a body of work that came to be known as the School of Cusco, which is also the Spanish title of Gonzales’s collection: La Escuela de Cusco. In these multivocal poems, Gonzales allows the School of Cusco artists to take their rebellions a step beyond the imagery in the paintings: the poet, the painters, and the figures in the paintings speak in the poems. It was my job as translator to faithfully render the painters’ loyalty to their art and culture, their plights, their piety, their griefs and fears.

The exotic context of the poems posed several challenges to me as a translator. To translate the poems, I felt I had to see the paintings. Fortunately, I was able to find a number of them online, and viewing the works helped bridge some of the gaps between vocabulary and vision. For example, I was able to see the painting The Marriage of Don Martín de Loyola and Doña Beatriz Ñusta by searching its title online. (The title can be entered in a search engine in English or Spanish, and a search of images will readily bring up the work.) Being able to see the painting was a huge help to me as a translator. I could see how the anonymous indigenous painter did indeed, as Gonzales describes, separate the Incas from the high-born Spaniards even as the ñusta, the Inca princess, was being married off to a grandee. The pathos of this “farce of an impossible union” comes through in the poem as it does in the painting.

Although I had visited Cusco and other sites in Peru’s Sacred Valley and learned something about the Inca empire and the history of the Spanish conquest, the translation project required me to look up information about the lives of the painters, their Spanish rulers, battles between Quechuas and the Spanish, biblical subjects, the Quechua way of life, and birds of the Andes. What I learned was so helpful that I decided to share it in glossaries at the end of each poem. Additionally, I quickly realized that this was not a translation project in which I could take liberties. Gonzales’s well-researched poems are very precise in their references to the works and lives of the painters and personages in the paintings. Other than the translator’s usual prerogative to choose one synonym over another and to try to take rhythm into consideration in word selections, I stayed as faithful as I could to the original. This meant observing, as much as possible, Gonzales’s line breaks and preserving his open-field form. Striving for that line-for-line translation was one of my greatest challenges. Finally, there was the tricky matter of determining the relevant definition of certain words that I could not, for the life of me, find in any of the more than a dozen dictionaries and other sources I consulted. One humorous example of this concerned the carpenter’s tools listed in “Saint Joseph, the Virgin, and the Child.” Ultimately, Gonzales had to ask someone to help us come up with the best American English for sierra de vueltas (hand saw) and el pequeño cepillo “torito” (the tiny wood shaver called “little bull”).

Collaborating with the poet himself—Odi Gonzales is trilingual in Quechua, Spanish, and English—was an exciting and essential part of the process. While the poet was in Peru, we worked by e-mail: I would send him three or so translations at a time, and he would reply with explanations of Quechua cultural terms and practices, corrections of my misreadings, and definitions of some dictionary-defying words. In our face-to-face meetings in New York, the poet and I debated the best English renderings of some phrases, but eventually the intended images and phrases came through in the same way a landscape emerges when the mist departs.

Glossary to the Poems