Speaker 1 00:02
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2 00:18
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper and our guest today is the poet and translator Steve Brock. We spoke last week about Steve's work as a poet and about his academic studies in Australian literature. We also talked about his experiences with the Spanish language and I'm delighted to continue the conversation with Steve this week about writing and also about translating poetry. Steve, welcome to the program. We mentioned last week that you've translated a number of the poems of Juan Garrido Salgado, who was a guest on our program in October 2023. When did you start working on translating Juan's poetry and how did that come about?
Speaker 3 01:08
I met Juan through mutual friends while studying at Flinders University, I was studying Spanish and with some classmates in my Spanish class. We founded a bilingual journal called Fusiones which was publishing short stories and poetry and it was through that experience I was introduced to Juan at an event, we organised a reading event and I met Juan and so this would have been in 1990, 1991, Juan had only just arrived in Australia with his young family and at that point didn't speak a lot of English and I was really taken by his poetry and we published some of his poetry in the magazine and then Juan approached me about translating some of his poetry into English which at the time was I felt was a great privilege to do and our approach to translation involved catching up and regularly and talking about the poems.
So out of that formed a very close friendship to this day and Juan this older than me had more experience reading experience and was influential in introducing me to many other poets and really broadening my knowledge of literature particularly of South American poets and novelists as well and at the same time Juan was keen to learn about the Australian poetry scene so we had quite a good dialogue I was able to introduce Juan to other Australian poets and out of that sprung a really important friendship and it was through Juan that I met my wife Angie who's from Chile and we met at an event that Juan was organising, Angie was singing and I was reading poetry and we met at the rehearsal so a really important connection there
Speaker 2 03:19
What a wonderful story. And being able to read the original poems in Spanish that Juan has written and also your translations, at the risk of embarrassing you, I think your translations are superb. And I want to ask you, when you first started translating Juan's poetry, what were some of the challenges and how did you resolve them?
Speaker 3 03:40
When translating Juan's poetry, I was fortunate in that we had a dialogue and we were meeting regularly. So where I came across challenges in his work, I was able to sit down with him and talk through those and get a deeper understanding of what he was communicating in Spanish, then that would help me translate that into English.
Speaker 3 04:05
And through those conversations, it was helpful for me personally as well as a poet to understand his use of metaphor and other poetic devices. And my appreciation of what it meant to be a poet and writing poetry deepened out of those dialogues. And as you would locate, it's always a challenge. With translation, it's because there's never the exact words. And so it's really important to understand the context and find a way of expressing that in the target language and doing it in a way that fits with the tone, the sense of expression, and also without losing the poetry. So there's always an element in translating of transcreation. And at times, I think a lot can be gained from taking a bit of a looser approach and not trying to go for a too literal meaning, as you also want to convey the rhythm, the sounds as well, feeling, the emotion.
Speaker 2 05:10
Absolutely. I think all translation is a multi -dimensional process of negotiation taking into account all of the elements that you've mentioned and also the socio-cultural context in which the original writer is producing their work, interpreting their intentions as well as their words and then negotiating with the language which can be at a whole level but also then there are some details and then constantly bringing back the detail to the whole and negotiating within the work of art, the poem or the piece of prose itself, so constant negotiation.
Speaker 3 05:52
Yes, that's right.
Speaker 2
Which is why translators make such good diplomats.
Speaker 3 05:56
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And being able to speak more than one language I think is very good in terms of your ability to communicate across cultures more generally and to understand there's more than one point of view and also to understand where things can easily be lost in translation. Things are lost but also things are gained as well in translation.
Speaker 2 06:23
Exactly. And your translations are more than accurate. You do recreate the rhythm, the intent and the impact of the original poem very beautifully. Would you talk us through how you go about translating a poem, your early drafts and then how you polish them?
Speaker 3 06:40
In terms of my approach to translating a poem, I would do an initial fairly quick draft, just go based off the initial reading and get something down on a page and then from there it would be identifying bits of the poem that might be more challenging and really honing in on that and getting a deep understanding of what the poets are trying to communicate. You can't always have access to the poet, so in that case, when you can't ask someone about it, it's more challenging. At the end of the day, the translation is also a trans creation, so there's something of you going into that as well and whatever you come up with someone else will approach the task differently and may come up with a variation and that's fine.
No one's got a monopoly on the meaning and when you come to a poem or any text, you're bringing your own reading experience, your own life experience and that context invests the poem that you're reading with meaning and that gets down to the essence of how language works, how words work, language isn't an objective thing and words can be described theoretically as empty signifiers that are then invested with meaning and that has other implications more broadly for discourse, political discourse, how some meanings are created that dominate other meanings and a lot of people, a lot of theorists have written about how that plays out in the colonial context and today in terms of power relations between different countries.
Speaker 2 08:33
Absolutely. And we talk about language choices when we talk about language quite often and those choices are imbued with all of those different elements that you've talked about. So it's not just a matter of, for example, looking up a word in a dictionary, but what sits around that word? Who uses that word? How is that word used?
Speaker 3 08:56
That's right. And that's where, in terms of how the approach to translation has changed over time. When I first began translating poetry, 30 years ago, it was just based on dictionaries. And then with the evolution of the web, the internet, technologies, now today there's online tools available. But even five years ago, those online tools were a lot more limited. And it's amazing, also a little frightening how quickly the technologies evolved, whereas today the tools, online tools for translation are a lot more sophisticated and can delve into that context. However, having said that, there's always context that's missed and that's culturally based. Because it could be related to humor, could be related to something at Palms, referencing a political situation that can just get missed in a literal translation.
Speaker 2 09:58
And I think for that reason the most useful online resources from my perspective anyway are the examples of language use in context, how a particular word can appear in many different ways. So those certainly do help at times to resolve doubts there might be about the most appropriate language choices to make.
Speaker 3 10:21
Yeah, yeah, that's correct. Yeah, there's definitely some tools are a lot better than others and those ones that present language in different contexts, that's very helpful.
Speaker 2 10:32
Steve you spoke a bit before about how working with Huan has influenced your own work. Would you elaborate on that? How translating Huan's poetry has influenced your own poetry writing?
Speaker 3 10:45
So I was fortunate in terms of my relationship with Juan and the dialogue we had as quite young at the time in my early 20s. And Juan would often come up to Flinders Uni and it would go through the Spanish section of the library together and he'd show me different books, I'd borrow books, would share the books. So that reading and introduction to other writers were really important. It's also important for me as well to have, to work with Juan and work with someone who was already an established part, he'd published some significant Kleiderstein works in Chile.
And that I think helped to give me confidence in my own work. And some of the first poems that I published in magazines were in fact translations of Juan's poems. So that was a bit of a confidence boost. I felt, well, if I can publish the translation, then I can publish my own poetry as well. So on many angles it was important and it's still an important relationship and dialogue that we have today.
Speaker 2 11:56
As we mentioned previously, Yun Huan collaborated with the poet Víctor Cifuentes Palacios and the poet and academic Sergio Olas on a remarkable, trilingual poetry anthology, Poetry of the Earth, which brings together translations into Spanish, English, and in Mapodongun, the language of the Mapuche people of Chile. It's an extraordinary work. We did talk about that with Juan when we spoke with him on the programme last year. What did that project mean to you personally, and what was it like to be part of a team producing such a significant contribution to bringing the voices of Indigenous people of the global South to the wider community?
Speaker 3 12:41
It was a very important project for me to work on, and at that time, as I mentioned last week, I'd finished my PhD, which freed me up in many ways to take on other projects, to read more broadly. And this particular project aligned quite well with what I'd been studying in terms of post -colonial theory and literature. So I felt I'd had quite a lot of theoretical training and preparation through the PhD. And here was a project that was really something quite practical in practice, where I could apply that knowledge, but apply it in a creative context. And it was also something at the edge of creativity, at the edge of knowledge in that. Here was an anthology of young Mapuche parts, many of whom are university educated, writing from a Mapuche tradition, a writing in Spanish, but deploying a lot of Mapuche concepts, spiritual concepts, and Mapu Dungun language.
So it was just a fabulous project to get involved with. It was a project that Juan brought back from a trip to Chile through his relationship with the editor, Jaime Luis Huynun Vija, who is an internationally recognized poet in his own right. So he sourced the poems and the poets. And then initially, Juan and I worked on the translations together. And then we brought on Sergio Olas into the project, who's also a poet from Chile. And at that time was lecturing the Spanish department at Laid University. And so Sergio brought another lens to the project. He also wrote a critical introduction to the book. And it was just a delightful process to be a part of. A lot of the work we did was done around a kitchen table.
So we'd rotate between our houses and really just talk about the poem, the translation, the challenges, what we thought different meanings were. And each of us could bring some different context background to those conversations, which really helped in terms of the end result of getting rounded translations that worked in English and were faithful to the original, but also weren't bound in terms of, you know, literal sense also had that the imaginative quality, the creative element that could make these poems standalone as poems in English.
Speaker 2 15:33
Sounds like the most wonderful experience. On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation programme, Emerging Writers. Our guest today is the poet and translator, Steve Brock. Steve, could I ask you to read for us a poem from Poetry of the Earth in Spanish and the English translation?
Speaker 3 16:00
Certainly, I'll read a poem from the collection by the poet Paolo Uriimeja. I'll read the poem in English first. It's called Wario Song. And I should just add that the poems were originally written in Spanish. We worked on them, translated them into English. And Victor Palacios translated them from Spanish into Wario Song.
It is always the other in the cracked reflection of a photograph. The Castilian or Chilean word expresses nothing. It disappears into a well in which my body shivers. I can only be with her in my infancy. In a swing, I could clutch with my hands by the plum tree, blossoming with its inward root. Hence, reality is a man's scar. Remembering the journeys to the sea with the bandage on the child and the music of our bones toward death. Wario Song. I, a hunter, an urban collector of chequete and leather. I painted the rubber born of the chingada, of Pedro Heriazo, with a musical harmony between the teeth. I speak Tartamuro for the deaths of my ancestors, with the sign of departure.
Parco de Palabros se me ha perdido el carnet de identidad. Miro a los gangsters que nos busquen en el suelo por cortar el gas de los eucaliptos, encender fuego con las veiles de Mamita Virgen. Hablo ahora torcido mi boca por el aire, dando vueltas hasta que se quema el humo, y el agua sigue cayendo. Estiro en el río el árbol con un trozo de licán, que la muerte no vuelva con aquel bajo de la ciudad que augura de noche. Siempre es el otro en el reflejo trisaro de una fotografía. La palabra castillo chileno nada puede expresar. Se vacía en el pozo en que el amor de dura me tirita. Solo puedo ser con ella en la infancia, en que un columpio podría apretar mis manos junto al ciruelo, florecido con la raíz hacia adentro.
Es entonces la realidad una cicatriz del hombre que recuerde los viajes hacia el mar con una venda en la semilla y la música de nuestros huesos hacia la muerte.
Speaker 2 19:39
Gracias. Thank you. Steve, how has your collaborative work on translating poetry influenced your understanding of the two languages, Spanish and English?
Speaker 3 19:53
I think working in another language, in my case working in Spanish, makes me look at English in a different light, so through the translation process. One learns about the language one's translating into, but then it also causes you to reflect on the English language and see that in a new light. And often bilingual writers, bilingual authors can reinvent language through this process, just through using different types of expression for a native speaker. It's not something that would be intuitive, but coming from another language where you're hearing things phrase in a certain way or images used, you can bring that back to your native tongue.
And in a way it recreates English and also words I find when when reading in Spanish, because you look at the word a little bit differently and think it's interesting how that word's made up of these components. And then sometimes you have a realization that the English word similarly is made up of those components, but it's something that you're not consciously aware of, you just take it for granted.
Speaker 2 21:14
And Steve, you now have more than 30 years experience in writing and translating poetry. So how has your approach to translation changed over time?
Speaker 3 21:25
As we were talking about earlier moving from 30 years ago when you just really had dictionaries to now today, there's the internet, there's a bunch of tools available, electronic tools, or the tools are there, so it's part of the arsenal, I think, of the translator. However, I still, when working on a poem, we'll still get back really to pen and paper and starting as I've always done, but where in the past, I may have turned to a dictionary, there's now other options as well. And on the subject of technology, I've worked closely with the Chinese-Australian poet, Oh Yang Yu, and he invited me some years ago into a chat group on WeChat where they smash poetry and most of the poets are just working in Chinese, but through the app, there's a translation tool which enables me to participate in these sessions where people post up poems and then critique the poems.
So I'm able to participate with poets in China without knowing Chinese, but solely based on technology translation tools and Chinese poetry was something I originally got interested in via Pablo Nerdulda, reading about Pablo Nerdulda when I was younger, who spoke a lot about Chinese parts and then via Oh Yang Yu, I've been able to interact with contemporary Chinese parts. Using technology that 30 years ago just wasn't available.
Speaker 2 23:13
That sounds incredible. Steve, you've taken part over the years in live poetry readings and your 2020 published collection is titled Live at Mr. Jakes. What does that experience of reading to a live audience give you as a poet?
Speaker 3 23:30
I've always enjoyed doing live readings and often quite comfortable reading in a pub or reading to people who ordinarily wouldn't have a lot of exposure to poetry and because my poetry is accessible, I find people can relate to it. So I've always enjoyed that aspect. In terms of my collection live at Mr. Jakes, it was published and some of the poems were written during COVID. So the poem live at Mr. Jakes, it's actually really set in someone's living room, not actually a living room, more a granny flat, come studio where a close friend makes a lot of music. So in writing that poem, it's a bit of a celebration of people who are working in their living rooms in their homes, in their home studios creating music or writing poetry and finding meaning and joy in that.
So there's something behind the title, what's about live poetry, it's also about what's happening in people's everyday lives and a bit of a tribute to creators and particularly during COVID where a lot of that was happening, people can find to their homes and producing art, music, poetry and collaborating, often not being able to collaborate in person, but using technology. So part of the giving out the title live at Mr. Jakes was this commentary on what we were all living through during COVID.
Speaker 2 25:10
And you do integrate some of the challenges and dilemmas and the big questions that we've had to deal with and questions about who we are and how we live in this world with everyday observations in your works. Could I ask you to read another of your poems?
Speaker 3 25:26
Certainly. Since we were talking about translation I'll read a poem from live at Mr. Jake's which is called Alpha Horde and while it's mostly in English it's a bilingual poem so through by work I've got a number of bilingual poems or poems that are inspired from translation and this also draws as I mentioned earlier on my family life and the reality of living a bilingual life and how it relates to different places and it's also a poem about the limits of translation and also what we try and achieve through translation: Alpha Horde.
We eat Alpha Horde's and Membrigio from Argentina bought in Melbourne. There's no translation for Alpha Horde. You'll find Dulce de Leche inside. There's no real translation for that either although Caramel comes close. The Alpha Horde is round with biscuit on the outside individually wrapped. They taste as good as the word Alpha Horde. Pronounce the J like an H as though your mouth is full of sweetness.
Speaker 2 26:47
Thank you so much, Steve. It's an enticing poem and I've loved our conversation about translation and translating poetry. Our guest on Emerging Writers today was the poet and translator Steve Brock. Steve is the author of the poetry collections The Night is a Dying Dog, published by Friendly Street Wakefield Press in 2007, Double Glaze, published by Five Islands Press in 2013, Live at Mr. Jake's, Wakefield Press 2020, and the chat book Jardin du Luxembourg, Garonne Publishing 2016. And Steve will be curating the next No Wave poetry event at the Wheat Sheaf Hotel in Theberton. It's at 7 for a 7 .30 start on the 3rd of April.
And the focus is on Spanish and French poetry in translation. As well as Steve, this event will be featuring other past guests on our program, Gemma Parker, who we heard from last month, and Juan Garrido Salgado, who we heard from in October last year. And we'll also feature Sergio Olas, who worked collaboratively with Juan and Steve on the Mapuche poetry translation that we referred to in this episode. So that's the No Wave poetry reading on the 3rd of April, 7 o 'clock for a 7 .30 start at the Wheat Sheaf Hotel in Theberton, and entry is $5.
This program can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio Digital, online at varadio.org, and also on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes.
Speaker 1 28:52
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Speaker 2 29:02
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