Jesse Kercheval will read from her new book The Invisible Bridge/El Puente Invisible, a translation of Uruguayan poetry, tonight at Prairie Lights.

By Isaac Hamlet
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“Lost in translation” is one of those catchy little phrases that’s managed to make a home in our collective minds. It describes linguistic or cultural nuance that strains and finally snaps.

It is worth now and again pausing to remember what is gained in translation.

At 7 p.m. today, Jesse Kercheval will bring Uruguay to Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St. Her book, The Invisible Bridge/El Puente Invisible, imports a selection of Circe Maia’s poems from Spanish into English.

“From the first moment I picked up her book of complete poems, I was instantly drawn into this world, these moments of epiphany,” Kercheval said of the works she translated.

Maia, 83, was born in Uruguay, where she published her first book at 11 years old. Later, she taught philosophy, a field she drew upon when piecing together poems.

“In some ways the poetry is deceptively easy to translate,” Kecheval said. “In Uruguayan poetry there’s a name for every article of clothing, every food, and there’s this elaborate slang. [Maia] really tried to avoid that; she makes her poems very classically accessible Spanish.”

Still, accessible in one language can be restricted in another.

“The major difficulty in translating from Spanish, I think, is that Spanish is a rhyme-rich language; English isn’t,” said Ed Ochester, the poetry editor for the Pittsburg Press. “So maintaining the same ‘tone’ or sound from one language to the other isn’t easy.”

Certainly one could simply translate the Spanish “vacio” to the English “empty,” but to do so would change the texture of the poem, Kercheval said.

“English has words that come from Latin, but those tend to be words that are fancier,” she said. “In Spanish, ‘vacio’ means empty. In English we have ‘vacant,’ but a house is vacant; you wouldn’t really use it to describe a chair. Just the lilting rhythmic sound of it is really different in Spanish, but the effect [Maia’s] trying to go for is to use a really simple language.”

Choosing complicated English words rooted in Latin may be more pleasing to the ear, but would cloud the poems and spoil Maia’s attempt to make her poems easily understood.

“In general, Americans are afraid of poetry much more than people in many other cultures,” Orchester said. “Good poetry isn’t necessarily more difficult than good fiction or non-fiction. My own view is that poetry should be only as difficult as it needs to be— anything more is pretension, as it is in any other kind of writing.”

Complicated and subjective as the process might be, when it’s done right it makes a difference. A culture—a world—that might previously have gone unvisited by the reader is opened up to them.

“Poetry is often where any language finds its fullest expression, where it obtains aesthetic magnitude,” said Aron Aji, the University of Iowa’s director of M.F.A. in Literary Translation. “Carrying a poem from one language to another is like transplanting a mature tree, a difficult operation. If you are successful, then you have a good translation. But if you can also carry some of the original climate, the water, the salt in the air, then you have a great translation.”

WORDS

Jesse Kercheval reading

When: 7 p.m. today

Where: Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque

Admission: Free