A Poem and its Self-translation

• Main Author: Sofia Monzon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta 2020-09-01
• Series: TranscUlturAl
• Online Access: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/tc/index.php/TC/article/view/29514

“Poema II/ Poem II”, a bilingual expression that goes beyond a mere literary translation, is part of the series Poetízame las ganas/ Turn My Yearnings into Poetry. Although it started as an original poem in Spanish, my first language, an English translation ended up coming together from the first lines. Very much influenced by the playful translations of Eliot Weibenger into English, I enjoy playing with source and target languages to puzzle the reader, by erasing the traces of the translation process, while, at the same time, keeping a foreign debris within the kind of language I use in both texts. With these two pieces that arise as a reciprocated translation, the poet challenges a bilingual form of creative expression in which there is a clear refusal to utterly domesticate the texts. Love and language are, undoubtedly, both the object and the subject of the whole poem. They are represented through an unceasing analogy that depicts the symbolic connections behind these two intrinsic, most desired—and perhaps hardest to understand—human domains.