© Cedoc Profile
An abbreviated resume gives an account of a life dedicated to revealing and highlighting the strength of the original in its finished annotated translations. Within the canon of American poetry, Rolando Costa Picazo has translated 95 poems by Emily Dickinson. She is not the first poet that Rolando translates, she had already translated into Dianne at Prima, Rita Dove and Sandra Cisneros. Ignoring gender distinctions as to who translates for whom (a relevant topic and discussed within the literary translation campus) the most important and remarkable facet of this work is that of translating to teach. During the summer of 2011, Rolando devoted himself to the task of gathering, selecting, translating and annotating these 95 poems for his course at the University of Buenos Aires.. This careful and dedicated volume (“To my faculty and students in the 2011 American Literature course at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aireswith affection and gratitude”) is part of the Library of Authors that Rolando Costa Picazo translated for more than thirty years for his students in theoretical classes on Mondays and Wednesdays.
To the teacher with care
Coming out of a conference in homage to Hemingwayalong Corrientes Avenue, many years ago, Rolando told me “If you look at things through the gun of orthodoxy, you kill them.” He was referring to the way we read different authors according to fashions and times. There are rifles in the literature of Hemingway, like bladed weapons in the literature of Borges, and the task of the translator, his tireless rhythmic, ethical and aesthetic search is to translate so that we try to understand the world in which we live. The task that remains pending for so many teachers and students that he trained, readers in times of war, is the task of replacing the mass that supports the tip of the iceberg, and we cannot see. As Hemingway taught in his theory of the iceberg, we must replenish and remember to build from the ellipses, from the mistakes, from everything that is not said, a better time. Dis-arm it, from a utopia, the utopia that every translation tries: to shorten the distance between one and the other. Before finishing with the translation of the Ulisesin 2015 the Editorial Miño y Dávila published No man’s land. English Poetry of the Great War. This work compiles a group of poets who wrote in the First World War, poets who, even losing their lives, left testimony of that struggle in the genre that is closest to the human heart: the lyrical genre. It says Costa Picazo there. “Unlike fortifications, trenches could not be destroyed by artillery fire, and the “no man’s land” that separated them could not be crossed by infantry without huge casualties. The trenches were a clear example of deterioration and putrefaction. There the living and the dead were piled up, the latter absorbed by the mud and all amidst the rats and the stench.” Perhaps, translation, that space between two fronts, can be transformed from these incursions by R. Costa Picazo, into a series of questions and reflections on the present, since having settled there, in the trench of translation is give back to the world and its readers the desolate hope of understanding. To translate these poets is to return to that inhospitable emptiness -War- something of humanity that corresponds to every reader of the civilized world. With this work, Costa Picazo raises a flag of Peace, because as T. Todorov says, for the peoples to understand each other we have to translate ourselves, because translating ourselves is much more than understanding us, it is for a moment being the Other.
Rolando Costa Picazo was a literary critic and translator, Associate Professor of North American Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, author of W. H. Auden, The Early Years (Buenos Aires: Latin American Publishing Center, 1994); Borges: A form of happiness (Buenos Aires: Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation, 2001); Mexico City Bluesby Jack Kerouac (Valencia: Publications of the University of Valencia, 2008); Hart Crane and The Bridge (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2008); WH Auden: The United States and After (Buenos Aires: Active Bridge Editions, 2009); Emily Dickinson: Oblique Light. University of Valencia; Frank O Hara: Meditations in an Emergency (Buenos Aires, Cuttlefish Bones, 2011); Ezra Pound. first poemsUniversity of Valencia, 2014; No man’s land. English poetry of the Great War. Buenos Aires, 2015; Word of Borges. Buenos Aires, 2016; and the Critical Edition of the Complete Works by Jorge Luis Borges –Editorial Emecé, Buenos Aires– in three volumes. He is also the author of the critical editions of Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello and Romeo and JulietShakespeare and a twist and The Aspern Papers, by Henry James; and of the critical edition and annotated translation of the Complete stories by Edgar Allan Poe (Buenos Aires: Classic Colihue, 2010). He has translated around 100 works from English to Spanish, in prose by authors such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Nadine Gordimer, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Saul Bellow.; in poetry, besides Auden, Crane, Kerouac, and John Ashbery. Into English he has translated, among other works, the Cantata de Bomarzo, by Alberto Ginastera and Manuel Mujica Láinez. She received the Platinum Konex Award for Literature twice, in 1994 and 2004, and the Theater of the World Award, from the University of Buenos Aires, for her annotated versions of Shakespeare’s tragedies. He was a full member of the Argentine Academy of Letters and a Corresponding Member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
Dulce and Decorum East
by Wilfred Owen, translation Rolando Costa Picazo
Folded in two, like old beggars under cargo
crooked legs, coughing like hell, we cursed in the middle of the mud
Until in the light of haunting flares we turned
and to our distant post we crawled.
The men were asleep. Many had lost their boots,
and limped, bloody feet. They all limped. all blind
drunk with fatigue, deaf even when ululating
of the exhausted, already straggling gas grenades falling behind us.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!- A groping ecstasy,
clumsily putting on our helmets just in time;
but someone still screamed and stumbled
and he stumbled forward like a man in a fire or walking on lime..
Blurred, through misted glass and thick green light,
Like at the bottom of a green sea, I saw him drown.
…
In all my dreams, before my helpless gaze,
he comes at me, gurgling, choking, choking.
If in some oppressive suffocating dream you too could walk
behind the car we dumped him in
And you saw his blank eyes squirm in his face,
on his hanging face, like a demon fed up with sin;
if you could hear, at every rattle, the blood
gushing and foaming from rotting lungs,
obscene as cancer, bitter as half-digested bolus
Of vile and incurable pustules on innocent tongues,
my friend, you would not tell them with such enthusiasm
to the eager children of desperate glory
la antigua mentira: Dulce et decorum est
Pro belongs to the sea.