“Are you familiar with the work of Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez?” wrote Jeremy Puma last night. I wrote back that I had never heard of the fellow. Jeremy continued: “Your electronic postcards from Motovun remind me a great deal of Platero and I, his collection of pastoral prose poems about a donkey and a small Spanish town.” I promised to look him up. “If you haven’t read this book,” he concluded, “I can’t recommend it highly enough—you’ll most certainly enjoy it.” I thanked him. Without much ado, I fired up Google. To my shame, Jiménez got a Nobel Prize for poetry as far back as 1956. “Alas,” I wrote to Jeremy again, “the world is on the big side…” And then I fired up Amazon in an attempt to shrink the world a tiny bit. With Jeremy’s help, of course. As luck would have it, he is from Seattle, Washington.

Addendum I (December 19, 2003)

A copy of Platero y yo/Platero and I arrived from Amazon in this morning’s post. Selected, translated, and adapted by Myra Cohn Livingston and Joseph Dominguez, the hardcover book was published in 1994 by Clarion Books in New York. The original Spanish and the English translation appear side to side. The slim volume surprised me for several reasons. To begin with, it is illustrated by Antonio Frasconi very like a book for children. His woodcuts are a dash sentimental for my taste. Then, each and every translation is significantly longer then the original. By the way, none of the pieces is longer than one page, and many are on the short side, and the difference in length is therefore striking. In my mind, English just cannot be so much less straightforward than Spanish. My Spanish is not that good, but the translation still strikes me as a bit sweet, as though whipped-cream and syrup have been added throughout. According to the blurb on the jacket, Myra Cohn Livingston is “a widely known and highly regarded poet, with more than seventy-four books to her credit.” More than seventy-four books? Interestingly, she lives in Beverly Hills, California. Finally, this particular selection contains only nineteen out of one-hundred and thirty-eight original pieces. Strangely, they are called “chapters” in the blurb. After all, our poet is a Nobel Laureate rather than any old scribbler! It did not take me long to start looking somewhat frantically for poor Jiménez in a book bearing his name.

Addendum II (December 20, 2003)

“Ah,” responded Jeremy Puma when I circulated this addendum to my friends, “I should have warned you about the plethora of poor translations.” “Mea culpa,” he continued, “I always forget the necessity of including the translator when recommending a translated work.” And then he turned to the translation of his choice:

If you can find it, I recommend the translation into English by Spanish philosopher (and a mentor of mine) Antonio de Nicolas. It contains the entire work, sans sappy illustration, and Dr. de Nicolas’s mastery of language is absolutely incredible. He’s also translated The Bhagavad Gita and large sections of the Rig Veda, and written a number of his own works of poetry. Unfortunately, his translation may be out of print, so you may have to dig around for a copy, but it will be well worth it, I can assure you.

I wrote back to him at once:

This explains it. However, it is not exactly easy “to dig around for a copy” here in Motovun. Although it is far from Moguer, Jiménez’s Andalusian village that reminded you of my town, it is not close enough to worldly libraries or bookshops. If you come by a copy, I would appreciate receiving it from you in the fullness of time.

Anyhow, I will do my best to find the translation Jeremy has recommended. Now that I have committed myself to Jiménez, as it were, it is essential to find him. And to find his Moguer. The best I can do in the meanwhile is dig into his Spanish. After all, it is not that different from Veneto, the dialect you can hear in Motovun.

Addendum III (December 21, 2003)

As I suspected, there is nothing wrong with English. Or Jiménez. Where he is terse, Cohn Livingston and Dominguez are rambling. Where he is letting the reader complete a thought or a scene, they pile adjectives for fear that the reader will not get it at all. The title “El canario se muere,” which can be rendered simply as “The Canary Dies,” they translate as “The Death of the Canary.” Instead of “tú sabes bien lo que hay de la calle de Emmedio a la pasada de las Tablas…” in “La perra parida,” translated inanely as “The Mother Dog” rather than something clear-cut like “The Bitch with Pups,” we read “you know very well what a long, long way it is from Emmedio Street to the crossing at Las Tablas…” Here, “you know well how much there is…” would do just fine, and “long, long” is nowhere to be found in the original. Instead of one-hundred and twenty-three words of “Pasan los patos,” there are one-hundred and sixty-four words in “Passing of the Ducks,” which is a decent translation of the title, at least. And the forty-one-word surplus is just that, surplus. Where Jiménez says that the ducks “van tierra adentro, huyendo de la tempestad marina,” which can be rendered as “fleeing the stormy sea, they are going inland,” Cohn Livingston and Dominguez go rapturous: “flying, flying inland, fleeing from a tempestuous storm out at sea.” Where did they find the “flying, flying” bit? Every page is full of such moronic conundrums, but the most ridiculous one is in the translation of “ahooora,” a prolonged cry that can be rendered as “nooow,” which is translated as “noooooow.” Where Jiménez was happy with three letters, Cohn and Dominguez went for no less than six. And so on, and so forth. As the Afterword explains, this is “a literary and poetic translation, as opposed to a strictly literal translation.” Perhaps the translators worried no-one in Beverly Hills would be able to swallow the Nobel Laureate without whipped-cream and syrup?