Notes from the Sphere: Translating Two Sonnets from Mercè Rodoreda’s World of Ulysses

Rebecca Simpson’s translations of Mercè Rodoreda’s two sonnets appeared in AGNI 99.

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Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) began writing poetry at the suggestion of the esteemed Catalan poet Josep Carner. The novelist and storywriter had left Barcelona in 1939 when it fell to Franco’s nationalist forces, two months before the end of the Spanish Civil War; her exile in France during World War Two was grueling. Despite her desire to return to writing, she suffered a temporal paralysis of her arm whenever she picked up a pen. Poetry would release Rodoreda from this writer’s block. She composed five sequences over approximately ten years. In 2002, a collection was published of 105 poems,^# later reissued as Agonia de llum(Godall Edicions, Barcelona, 2022).

World of Ulysses (Món d’Ulisses) is an outstanding cycle, albeit unfinished, of thirty-two dramatic monologues; the poems are intense, varied, and exquisitely crafted. Ulysses is heard in six sonnets; in eight others he is addressed by an individual or choral group—for example, Penelope or the Sirens. People living or dead affected by Ulysses also speak (e.g. “Dead Soldiers,” “The Hanged Servant Women”). The two “songs” of Nausicaa’s companions are lyrical and playful, climbing the dawn sky or sighting watery doubles; while Ithaca’s miller women contribute a sense of myth and foreboding. Alongside well-known characters, voice is given to various women and anonymous or minor players, in this, Mercè Rodoreda’s take on Homer’s epic poem.

A foundational work of European culture, various writers turned to the Odyssey for inspiration in the war-torn, early half of the twentieth century; Rodoreda was one of the few women to do so. Her probable source text was Carles Riba’s 1919 Catalan translation.^#

Rodoreda said that Ulysses, over and above his devotion to Penelope or any other woman or nymph, was in love with adventure—and he was her favourite literary figure. Yet, as in her novels and stories, her characters are imperfect human beings, and Rodoreda’s gaze is implacable.

In the first eight lines of “[Ulysses on Nausicaa’s Island],”^# Ulysses addresses the sea. In the tercets, his thoughts are aimed at Nausicaa.

This sonnet offers clear examples of how a direct, literal translation cannot be relied on to capture the spirit or force of a thing, an ever-present challenge for translators. Though apparently further from the original, an equivalent—sometimes referred to as a dynamic, as opposed to a formal, equivalent—may convey the sense better. Here is part of the Catalan text expressing Ulysses’ sexual fantasy about Nausicaa:

Flagel·laria amb vergues de llum alta
els coloms del teu pit, . . .

A literal translation gives:

I would flagellate with rods [or pizzles/phalluses] of high light
the doves [or pigeons] of your breast, . . .

My translation has:

With stiff bright switches I would whip
the doves of your breast, . . .

Here, the secondary, sexual connotation of the Catalan word vergues (singular verga) is conveyed by the adjective stiff and combined with bright; light glinting, perhaps, on the supple switch. The specific image of high or tall light is lost, but central to my decision was the desire for an equivalent at the aural level, too: the s and w sounds, and the accented assonance of stiff, switch, and whip work onomatopoeically. The musicality, in both the Catalan and my version, makes the violence, by contrast, all the more shocking.

The final tercet of the poem reads:

Trencaria recós ta jovenesa
vençut pel vori de la dent encesa
si, profund com el mar, no em sentís vell.

Word by word, this translates:

I would break regretful your youth
vanquished by the ivory of the tooth burning
if, deep as the sea, I did not feel old.

The word order of the literal English version cannot mirror exactly how the original syntax conveys meaning, while its awkwardness reduces the poem’s force. In the Catalan, the rhyming of the first two lines of the tercet, and their almost dancing rhythm impel the poem towards the solemn final line. With my chosen word order, enjambement, combined with the internal assonance of teeth, deep and sea, produces a wavelike forward momentum that delivers us at the point of Ulysses’ revelation.

The final line is the same in both English versions. As in the Catalan, it maintains a descending vocal tone, accompanying Ulysses’ conceptual return to the sea, with which the sonnet opened (“O blessèd vengeful sea,” l.1), to provide a final landing place, as it were, on the word old, as Ulysses recognises his new reality.

Full of regret, overcome by the ivory fire
of my teeth, I would crush your youth
if, deep as the sea, I did not feel old.

x

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In the second translated sonnet, “Ulysses on the Island of Circe,” Ulysses defines his companions’ downfall as the result of:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe gnawing
incessant hunger, all balled up
in the wild labyrinth of the gut . . .

The subsequent regaining of human form almost superimposes one image of men on their feet, over another of pigs on their hind legs. We will return later to these lines.

To offer an example of collaboration between translator and editor, William Pierce queried my choice of “being human.” Why not just “being”? Or, otherwise, “being humans”? This convinced us both, replicating, too, the plural of the original.

I will focus, for a moment, on a detail of my translating practice that, when AGNI invited me to submit an essay, I knew I would like to consider; I wasn’t sure why, except that I felt it bore in some way on the question of Artificial Intelligence.

In his thought-provoking Introduction to AGNI 99, where the translations appeared, Sven Birkerts writes: “Any response that is truly evaluative has to be rooted in a self-aware subjectivity. // An AI program can’t achieve the discriminations that are at some level rooted in the physical body.” Birkerts says of the reach of digital technology, in contrast to everyday distractions: “I’m talking about something more consequential, both personal and collective: the distraction from self.”

This year, Pope Leo XIV, in his first Encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas, wrote: “The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination . . .”^# And later: “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships . . . They may imitate language, behaviour and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”^#

Though translating may be envisaged, or indeed at times experienced as a gradual, halting process, I find that with my first quick draft and immediate second version, I work with a sense of heightened vitality, physical and mental. Several drafts later, another day, the same may be true, untangling a final intractable knot, for example, that allows a poem to take final shape in its new language.

It is usually in these moments that the best creative equivalents emerge; an unconscious drawing on my lived experience, studies, reading, previous work, languages and cultures, and other aspects of the self, too. Recalling improvisation in other creative processes, and doing some quick research, I realised this vibrancy and complete engagement is an example of “flow” as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In this state a challenge stretches you, your skills match the task, and creative freedom prevails. Flow is a profoundly human experience.

To return to Mercè Rodoreda, Ulysses encourages his companions, after their unwilling foray into life as the swine of a sorceress:

May all the insults suffered serve you
when you are upright on coarse feet,
arms ending in fork-like hands!

At the peak of honor or sunk in servitude
begin again with patient courage
the difficult adventure of being humans.

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Read more Notes from the Sphere, and the series introduction, here.