Wednesday 5 March 2014

Spanish [insert here much anguish and a pot and half of tea] English

So you want to feel the Spanish language, the poetry of Lorca, the city of Seville? Get yourself a mini Oxford Espanol-Ingles and an edition of Lorca's Poesia Completa, and get busy on Lorca's poem called "Sevilla".
I don't blame the mini Oxford or Lorca, but two minutes later I'd written that Seville is "a tower / full of crooked archers." Seville for "pain," Cordoba for "death," was how I translated Lorca's refrain. "Crazy with horizon" I rather liked but, in the end, I felt as if I'd taken the great Andalucian's immortal poem and doused it in Starbuck grande-sized incompetence.
No worries. Let's try a sinple "Song". Soon a "heart" is said, as I figured it, to be "winning the north," and the poor "north star" had been "beheaded." And in Lorca's "Dos Muchachas" I found "in a small olive grove / sings a German." My mistake. Sings a "sparrow."
There's always another poem. By now I was ready to embrace Lorca's "Song of Desperation" in which, as I had it, padres waited for Advent and boys "painted / their hearts green" somehow.
I'm not sure if the wine helps but I'll keep trying.
Tonight: flamenco.

2 comments:

Brenda Schmidt said...

Coffee is key. Tea gets lost in translation.

Gerald Hill said...

That's true. Tea is "you" in Spanish. Try ordering tea when both you and the young Spanish man or woman are just waking up. Tea? You?