Miguel Hernández, Elegía / Rithāʾ

Miguel Hernández, Elegía / Rithāʾ

Translation from Arabic: Translations of Spain’s most renowned poets from the twentieth century

Al-Motamid 26, Tetouan 1953. Source: Spanish National Library.

Miguel Hernández

Miguel Hernández was born in 1910 in Orihuela (Alicante) and died there on 28 March 1942. As a young man, he was a herdsman; but when his poetic sentiments became stronger, he felt a desire to start writing, and so he moved to Madrid in 1935. He immediately started devouring all sorts of beautiful poetry, singing his songs with a warm affection kindled by his own enthusiasm, until he was known in literary circles for his great poetic ability. A poet who is an introvert yet speaks in a loud voice, whose poems all concern death, whose words are firm, frank and fragrant. The best of his collections is Unrestrained Lightning [al-Barq al-Mustarsil, referring to El rayo que no cesa, 1936], from which this translated poem is taken; dedicated to his friend Ramón Sijé, whose death struck him like a fierce thunderbolt ignited by sparks. [1]

Elegy [2]

Oh! If only I could be, with my tears, a gardener;

A gardener of the earth around you, which I have tended and which now conceals you.

Dear friend of my soul! Have you gone so soon?

With my tears, I rouse rains and scatter shells;

How can it be that everything I feel afflicts me, assaults me, without me realising?

To moths on the brink of death

I offer your heart as enticing food.

Among the agonies that gather in my chest,

There is burning; there is bitterness; and even breathing pains me.

It is a forceful blow, a punch that leaves me dumb,

A ferocious storm that rages all about me,

A kick made blindly in the dark.

These wide, desolate expanses

Cannot compare to the depth of my wounds.

I lament my misfortune, my grief, my pain;

My sorrow for your death is even greater than what I feel for my own life.

As I walk, there are beneath me the remains of those who have passed.

I have no time for compassion, I do not care for life;

I have been cleaved from my heart and put onto my own lonely path.

Too soon has fate come to flutter above you,

Too soon have the eyelids of morning settled back into their sleep,

Too soon have you hurried beneath the ground, masked by night.

No. I will never forgive fate, blind as it is;

I will not, under any circumstance, excuse this cruel life;

And I will never pardon this earth, nor this sky.

In the palms of my hands I forge a thunderbolt

Made from stones, from unceasing lightning strikes,

From woes, from starving disasters.

I want to tear the earth apart with my teeth,

I want to grind the earth down into its smallest pieces,

Warm, dry, chewed to a pulp.

I want to dig down into the earth to find you,

To draw together your noble remains and embrace them,

To kiss you – and then to leave you.

Come back, oh, soul, to my field, to my fig tree,

To the swaying swings of flowers,

And hover, there, amongst the beehives.

…

Your heart remains in your body

And I call out to it, from the dewy drops of the almond groves

In a longing, loving voice.

From the souls of the roses,

From the almond trees, I call to you.

There are so many things for us to talk about,

Dear friend of my soul, my friend.

Commentary

This Arabic translation of Miguel Hernández’s Elegía is, the translator notes prominently, a tarjama ḥurra, a ‘free translation,’ something that is reflected most obviously in its form. The tercets of the Spanish, with their regular ABA rhyme, become irregular stanzas in the Arabic, albeit with some evocative instances of line-end and internal rhyme. One of the clearest examples of this comes in stanza four of the Arabic – laysa ʿalā al-shāsiʿāt al-qāniyyāt / mithl jurāḥī al-bālighāt, ‘These wide, desolate expanses / Cannot compare to the depth of my wounds’ – where the long –ā vowels emphasise the breadth of the empty spaces to which the poet compares the depth of his metaphorical injuries.

One of the more striking formal changes comes in the latter half of the poem, where the Arabic translator removes stanzas thirteen and fourteen of the Spanish source text (de angelicales ceras … tu novia y las abejas) and, in doing so, cuts short an enjambment that links stanzas twelve and thirteen in Hernández’s poem (which corresponds to the end of stanza eleven in the Arabic translation). But this also has quite a pronounced effect on the meaning of the Arabic poem. In the Spanish, Hernández talks in definite terms: ‘You will return to my orchard and my fig tree,’ where ‘your soul will flutter like a bird, a beekeeper // of heavenly drops of wax and fruits of labour’ (pajareará tu alma colmenera // de angelicales ceras y labores). The Arabic is similarly direct, but ultimately something of an unfaithful gloss, which cuts off the second half of the sentence: ‘Come back’ (irjiʿī) the poet calls, ‘and hover’ (rafrifī) in the fields ‘amongst the beehives’ (fī khalāyā al-naḥl), using, on both occasions, the imperative of the verb. The Arabic here avoids a cyclicality that is evident in the Spanish: that the soul of Ramón Sijé, Hernández’s friend, will return to the fields that he once tended and, by extension, that his body is now feeding the system of nature in which he once lived.

As will be evident from the discussion so far, and as is quite clear when reading the different versions of the poem itself, there is a fair amount of lateral movement in terms of the words and images that the Arabic translator draws out from the Spanish source. The replacement of amabolas, ‘poppies,’ by al-farāsh, ‘moths,’ in stanza two is a clear example, which seems like a stylistic choice given the associations of both with death and decay. Yet some of these changes, or omissions, are actually to the detriment of the Arabic translation. That the translator replaces the image in Hernández’s poem of the heart as a piece of terciopelo ajado, ‘faded’ or ‘tatty velvet,’ in stanza fifteen with a straightforward declarative clause – ‘your heart remains in your body’ (inna qalbaka li-ashlāʾ) – avoids one of the more beautiful images in the Spanish poem, a striking metaphor that is itself enough to make your own heart sink. At the same time, there are some wonderful instances in which the Arabic translator extrapolates or departs from the Spanish source; stanzas five and six, in particular, very effectively convey the sometimes cryptic style of Hernández’s Spanish, even as they shift the meaning somewhat. The Arabic translator’s munsalikhan ʿan qalbī, ilā darbī (‘I have been cleaved from my heart and put onto my own lonely path’) produces in very few words the striking image of the poet being forcefully separated from his own emotions and put onto an isolated track that is, I would venture, more evocative than the Spanish (voy de mi corazón a mis asuntos, ‘I leave my heart for my business’); stanza six, meanwhile, builds on the simple sentences of Hernandez’s Spanish to create more complex, yet simultaneously more delicate, images, with the lines of the tercet themselves creating a cyclicality with the initial and line-end –ā rhymes.

All this is to say that the punch that the poem packs in Spanish is far from lost in its Arabic translation, even if there are some quite noticeable differences between my English translation and the English translations produced from Hernández’s Spanish. The anger we feel when we lose loved ones, the anger at fate, at the ground in which our loved ones now lie, and even at the loved ones themselves; the desperation to be close, again, to those we have lost, to join them in their grave or to bring them back to our world; our resignation, or acceptance, that this is part of the cycle of nature, and that we can find a little piece of them in the world that surrounds us, in its almond trees and its roses: all of this is beautifully conveyed by the Arabic translation, as it is by Hernández’s Spanish. As a translator, it is really wonderful to see such a moving poem lose none of its emotive impact in translation – and, what is more, to see what it can gain in moving from one language to another.