What They Say About Witness: Poets, Translators, Educators, Readers, and the Media Praise New Translation of Mario Benedetti
- Honors
- Back Cover Blurbs
- Media Reviews and Press Coverage
- Endorsements: What Others Say About Witness (Poets, Translators, Educators, and Readers)
Honors
Finalist, Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
Witness was one of six worldwide finalists—and the only volume of poetry—for Oxford University’s international Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
Witness by Mario Benedetti is the first major appearance of this important Uruguayan poet in English. The translator Louise B. Popkin worked closely with Benedetti and is a scholar of Latin American poetry. This formidable expertise, coupled with affection, shows everywhere in these highly sensitive renditions of poems that intertwine the personal and the political: Benedetti’s state of exile and his brushes with Uruguay’s military regime result in a body of work that does not flinch from life’s tendency to shatter dreams of better things. Popkin’s English versions allow the peculiar sadness and nostalgia of the poetry to shine calmly through.
Louise B. Popkin speaking at Oxford University
Photo credit: April Pierce
Additional remarks by Oxford-Weidenfeld Judge Rebecca Beasley, giving context for the shortlist selection
The novel unsurprisingly was the dominant form, but there were some excellent translations of poetry this year, and we read more drama than we have done in recent years, which was very welcome.
Choosing just six translations from 135 entries took some time and considerable thought and discussion. I will let Adam talk about the shortlist in more detail, but suffice to say that from the many, many excellent translations we read, these six stand out for their remarkably adept, creative versions of their sources, sources which presented considerable challenges to the translator. They are different kinds of challenges—humour, the multiple nuances of poetry, shifting tones, complex characterization.
Back Cover Blurbs
Margaret Randall, US poet
Louise B. Popkin, who spends long periods in Uruguay, knew the poet, heard him read, consulted with him, and has studied his work and entorno, gives us the first really satisfying, accurate, and deeply-felt English translations that capture Mario’s poetic voice throughout all its periods and range. She pays attention to local usage and brilliantly recreates the spoken quality of these poems. Popkin’s is a true labor of love, but it is much more than that. I believe Mario, at long last, would be thrilled. I am.
Claribel Alegría, prizewinning Salvadoran/Nicaraguan poet
It gives me great pleasure to see the work of Mario Benedetti, one of the great poets of our language, made available to US readers in Louise Popkin’s wonderful translations. Louise’s carefully crafted adaptations of Mario’s poems convey all the wisdom, nostalgia and irony that inform his verses in language that retains their musicality. Anyone who has translated poetry will appreciate what an accomplishment that represents.
Sylvia Lago, Uruguayan novelist and President, Fundación Mario Benedetti
This collection of Mario Benedetti’s poems, translated into beautiful English by Louise B. Popkin—a close friend of the author’s and an insightful interpreter of this work—deserves our grateful admiration. The reader who savors each poem, each strophe, each line and image, can truly delight in these texts by our great poet, rendered with love, sensitivity and exceptional skill by a first-rate translator.
Excerpts from Published Reviews and Press Coverage
Print and Internet Publications
Midwest Book Review
…Deftly translated by Louise B. Popkin, “Witness” is a core addition to any international collection of poetry…
(Click here to read the full review)
Benedetti: A Lifetime Believing the Unbelievable
Review by Clifton Ross in NACLA Report on the Americas, Fall 2012
With the publication of Witness, one can only hope that another great Uruguayan writer will now gain a larger audience in North America …
Witness is a poetic chronicle of passage through the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, in which the poet’s personal life reflects the larger social, political, and historical changes of the world. Indeed, his work is so integrally connected to the time and locale that it almost seems to be drawn and boiled down from the editorial pages …
In these poems, Benedetti confronts the problem of the man-made inhumane world, which he would later dedicate his life to fighting …
In pieces like … “I’m Off With the Lizard,” the translator shows her great skill as a poet (the key to translating a poem, after all, is to make a new poem in the target language). She translates “Me voy con la lagarjita / vertiginosa / a recorrer las celdas” as “I’m off with the slithery / lizard / to dart through the dungeons.” Such turns in the target language, where music can be made from a somewhat flatter original, are rare gifts bestowed on translators who listen to their own muse …
[S]ome of his most beautiful poetry comes out of the pain of one torn from home and left to wander the world …
As an old man who remained a faithful poet and revolutionary to the end…he maintained that “maybe happiness is nothing more / than believing we believe the unbelievable.” And perhaps that is Benedetti’s lasting gift: His humane vision allows us to believe the unbelievable to be possible.
(Click here to read the full review)
Excerpted from “Contra despojos y desvíos—Sobre el sofisticadísimo arte de la traducción” by Raquel Garzón, editor, Eñe Magazine (weekly supplement to the popular Argentine daily newspaper, Clarín), translated by Louise B. Popkin
Popkin is the translator of Witness: the Selected Poems of Mario Benedetti, a new anthology published in the US by white Pine Press with a prologue by the feminist poet Margaret Randall, for whom this collection represents “the first satisfying, accurate and deeply felt English translations of the Uruguayan author’s [poetry]… Her translator’s prologue (shouldn’t every work in translation include one?) sheds light on the tiny details of craftsmanship that require attention: when to be literal and when to look for similar expressions in the readers’ language, how to preserve a colloquial register…
Is poetry really untranslatable as some would argue? Is something inevitably lost [in translation? Bilingual editions can be amulets that keep things accurate and on course. Fortunately…this one does.
To read the full article (in Spanish) on the Clarín website, please visit http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/despojos-desvios_0_778122439.html.
In a private note to Louise (used with permission), Garzón wrote, “Me alegra sobremanera que le vaya tan bien al libro. Tus traducciones son realmente magníficas!” Translation: I’m really delighted that the book has been doing so well. Your translations are truly magnificent!
Review in World Literature Today
Benedetti was one of Uruguay’s most beloved poets and activists. This anthology of his work, lovingly translated by one of Benedetti’s closest associates, spans his career and demonstrates both his profound understanding of his fellow Uruguayans and unwavering devotion to the advancement of human rights.
Excerpts from Sylvia Goldman’s review in Contratiempo (English translation follows):
Cuando Popkin traduce “trasluce”; hace visible una luz que nos es inaccesible, entreabre una puerta y nos muestra la hendidura por donde entrar. Su traducción es también un doble acto de excavación; por un lado saca a la luz a
una poesía apenas traducida al inglés, por otro lado saca a la luz lo que el español tiene de herida abierta. Su tarea es cultural e “iluminadora” en su sentido más profundo; no solamente nos da la lengua del poeta, sino que deja que su propia lengua materna sea interrogada por él. […]
Se trata de una traducción concienzuda y metódica. […]. Cada palabra aquí traducida forma parte de una batalla ganada, un triunfo sobre la facilidad del cognado. Así, “No te salves” se traduce como “don’t play it safe”, evitando su correlato en inglés para salvar tanto el mensaje como el tono coloquial de esta poesía.[…] Popkin “does not play it safe,” va al encuentro no sólo del sentido, sino también del ritmo, del registro y del tono del original.
English
Popkin’s translations are “translucent”. She shines an otherwise invisible light [on these texts], cracks open a door and points the way in, […] doubly excavates them, […] giving us access to this seldom translated poetry and laying bare […] open wounds. Her work is both cultural and “illuminating” in the deepest sense: not only does she render the poet’s language; she allows it to interrogate her own […]
This is painstaking, methodical translation […]—each word rendered into English is a triumph, a battle fought and won against facile overuse of cognates. For example, by rendering “No te salves” [not as “Don’t save yourself”] but as “Don’t play it safe,” she “saves” both the message and the colloquial diction of the original. […] Popkin does not play it safe. She goes not just after meaning, but after rhythm, register and tone […].
Click here to read the full original review, in Spanish.
Review at Talented Reader: A Literary Journal
By George Ovitt
…Benedetti’s Spanish is lively and idiomatic and attuned to the speech patterns of ordinary people–it is difficult to translate, but thanks to Louise B. Popkin and the good people at Buffalo’s White Pine Press, we now have a generous, lucid, and accurate version of some of Benedetti’s poems–he was enormously prolific, publishing eighty books, including poetry, plays, song-lyrics, and many novels (which I hope Ms. Popkin will consider translating as well). I love poets who are engaged with the world, whose political passion informs their writing. We have few such poets in North America, and their work is generally marginalized in our search for the merely entertaining and our discomfort with art that doesn’t affirm our way of living and thinking. But Mario Benedetti’s work demonstrates the richness of poetry that derives its life from this world, with us, the poetry of workers and of ordinary people who need bread and poems…
(Click here to read the full review, including several poems)
Excerpts from Anna Rosenwong’s review in Quarterly Conversation, #32, June, 2013
[F]urnish[es] readers with potent tools for a thoughtful engagement not merely with individual poems, but with the shape of Benedetti’s poetic oeuvre and legacy…[V]ery occasional explanatory notes…are deftly used to clarify specific local references that would otherwise be lost on the foreign reader, as well as to highlight allusions to major writers…
To trace the arc of Benedetti’s poetic contribution in Popkin’s translation and alongside her notes is to get a glimpse into the high wire acrobatics of literary translation in general and the poignant trade-offs of translating so influential an author in particular. In her initial note, Popkin discusses the challenges of bringing important work to a largely nonspecialist but educated audience, consciously struggling to balance the foreign and familiar without condescending or making the work something it is not…
[T]o her great credit, Popkin’s reflections point to and take ownership for such choices, at the same time as they do not insist on them as definitive, but rather underline the productive possibilities of divergent approaches…
Click here to read the full review
On Wisconsin Magazine
The haunting cover of Witness: The Selected Poems of Mario Benedetti (White Pine Press) draws the reader into the words of a man who was a powerful voice for social justice and a literary light in his native Uruguay. This volume, translated by Louise B. Popkin MA’63, PhD’73, is the only collection of Benedetti’s work prepared for the English-speaking world that had the late poet’s active support and direct input. Popkin teaches Spanish at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education.
Arlington woman a ‘Witness’ to Latino poet
by Monica Jimenez, Arlington Advocate
Popkin sifted through Benedetti’s 28 collections (some 2,600 poems), picking out his best-loved texts and her own favorites, striving to represent his diverse themes and styles, and searching for “English-able” pieces — ones that could be translated successfully.
Creating a translation both true to the original and meaningful in English meant not only choosing which nuances to sacrifice so others could be preserved, but also capturing sound, musicality and rhythm, said Popkin, who often went through a dozen drafts of one poem and spent upwards of seven hours on a single verse.
Click here to read full article.
Review at Newstaco.com
Benedetti: The Well Loved Poet the U.S. Should Come to Know
By Yago S. Cura
…Benedetti’s poems are the ones young boys in Montevideo plagiarize the most to their girlfriends. His poems are the ones on the lips of taxi drivers, sanitation workers, and salarymen. That is why, Witness: The Selected Poems of Mario Benedetti, translated by Louise B. Popkin, is such a gem. Witness not only brings Benedetti’s best work to light for a discerning American public, it does so through a translator that knew and had a working relationship with the author while he was alive. A personal relationship with an author does not a translator make, but Popkin travels frequently to Uruguay and knows the Uruguayan dialect and several of the registers Uruguayans utilize on a daily basis. Thus, in terms of proximity to source language, Popkin’s translations are on some next-level, high-fidelity ground.
Reading Benedetti’s poems is like listening in on a phone call to Montevideo, or ear hustling a pavilion of Uruguayan ingenues. Benedetti’s poems are colloquial and direct in ways all poets aspire to emulate, but rarely can…
Witness: The Selected Poems of Mario Benedetti (White Pine Press, 2012) is the definitive, comprehensive tome for enthusiasts of Latin American poetry, but the translations are so seamless that poetry fans writ large are bound to take notice and hopefully a revival of Benedetti’s work might ensue.
(Click here to read the full review at newstaco.com)
Harvard Gazette
Six fresh books worth perusing
By Sarah Sweeney
Largely unknown in the English-speaking world, Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti is regarded as one of Latin America’s most important voices.…[T]ranslator Louise Popkin met Benedetti in Buenos Aires in the ’70s, where the poet was exiled for opposing the Uruguayan dictatorship. “I started translating him at his request,” recalled Popkin. “He was very accessible and enormously respectful of my role as translator, though occasionally he’d get irritated over the number of questions I asked. But those conversations typically ended in laughter: I’d remind him that as a living author, he deserved to be consulted. I really miss being able to ask him for help.” Benedetti died in 2009, and “Witness” features Popkin’s translations, as well as the original versions in Spanish.
(Click here to read the full article. Witness is the third of the six books written up.)
Named to World Literature Today‘s List of 75 Notable Translations of the Year
NETA News (newsletter of the New England Translators Association)
“The Poet Mario Benedetti. A Conversation with Louise Popkin”
By Ken Kronenberg
Extended interview with Louise B. Popkin on Benedetti’s life and work, and on the experience of collaborating with him
In the Fall, 2012 NETA News (PDF download).
“Challenges and Choices in Literary Translation”
Marian Comenetz reports on Louise B. Popkin’s presentation to NETA in January, In the Winter, 2013 NETA News (PDF Download)
Radio and Television
“Translated By…” with Yago S. Cura on World Wide Radio
Interview highlights:
Mario’s poetic voice is the voice of spoken Uruguayan. And you have to live for years, as I have, in Uruguay, to have that in your ear and to know how to try to approximate that in English. One major difficulty of translating Mario is that he’s a quintessentially Latin-American Uruguayan, Southern Cone writer, who has an uncanny ability to connect with his public. And I wanted the translation to convey the power of that connection. But my readers are speakers of American English, so how do you do that without North-Americanizing him too much? That was the greatest challenge I faced.
One of the issues was having to maintain the orality of his work […]. And one thing that implies is that most of the time, cognates –i.e., those words we have in English […] that go back to the same word in Latin as a Spanish word Mario used— those cognates almost never work. The easy way out, and the way most translators take, is simply to use cognates […] That raises the register,[…which is] distancing, by definition…
The other really major challenge has to do with his tendency to pun, and the plurality of meanings that often—and I think not always consciously—shows up in his texts, where a word he uses will sort of reverberate in different directions, and there’s no single English word that covers the entire semantic range he’s covered. So I have to choose which piece of it to prioritize. When he was alive…we’d have hilarious discussions [about passages that could be read in a number of] … different ways. [He’d complain that none of his] thirty other translators into thirty other languages ever asked as many questions as I did. To which I would reply, “Well, you’re a living author, aren’t you? Am I not supposed to treat you as one?” […] And of course, the problem now is, he can’t help me decide any more.
“Here and Now,” segment by Jim Kates, hosted by Robin Young on WBUR-Boston (NPR affiliate)
“Eleven Great Books Translated Into English,”
Jim Kates, literary translator, former President of the American Literary Translators Association and Director of the nonprofit Zephyr Press, reads a stanza from one of the poems and briefly discusses Witness at approximately 5 minutes and 45 seconds into the segment:
“She’s catching the kind of rolling sound of the Spanish, here.”
“Edición Central,” Uruguayan national television show on TNU (TV Nacional Uruguay) Network
María José Borges interviews Louise B. Popkin, in Spanish, about translating Mario Benedetti and about being a Finalist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Eight-minute interview. Click here for Louise’s segment by itself. And click here if you prefer to see the entire program (Louise’s interview starts at 45 minutes, 38 seconds).
“De Diez a Doce,” Radio Uruguay
María Inés Obaldía interviews Louise B. Popkin, in Spanish, about the challenges of translating, on Uruguay’s national radio station. Segment begins with Mario Benedetti reading one ofhis own poems.