Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems

Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems, the bilingual edition of Jeannette Clariond’s selected poems translated and introduced by Forrest Gander, represents an astonishing act of collaboration. In his introductory note, Gander explains that he discussed his translations with Clariond who is fluent in English and whose own translations into Spanish include the works of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Primo Levi, and others. Gander’s explanation is sure to keep editorial scholars excited:

On a few occasions, following our discussions, she adjusted a poem to match the translation. Consequently, the Spanish poems in this selection aren’t always precisely the same as when they were originally published.

This collaborative approach to translation—which led to reimagining the source poems—says something very deep and true about language and experience. That Clariond rewrites, even in part, some of the poems represents an effort at a more precise articulation of the past experience. At the same time, it says something about two poet-translators working together at that liminal space between different languages and their individual sensibilities.

Gander has chosen poems from seven different collections and focused on those that have not been previously translated. The poems engage with exile, language, and politics through the figure of the woman. The woman’s body, viewed through a mythical trope, sometimes “resembles a continent” as in the poem “Woman of Sand,” where the body dissolves into the water, only for the waves to bring it back changed. The woman “doesn’t hesitate at the wave’s curl.” She “explodes into a spray / that erases every image or memory.” The speaker, who would have loved to hold the woman back, says:

For though I felt her pulse beating, I knew her body
would collapse and evanesce on the beach. 

The woman’s metamorphosis is inevitable: made of sand, her body will forever be reshaped and moved around by the restless sea. This has significant metaphoric implications for an exile, whose life is constantly changed by language, politics, and time, and whose memory becomes a site of self-questioning and becoming. 

Sometimes, the woman—specifically in the life-giving role of mother—is a “country” made of “remorse, rage, guilt,” as in the poem “Off in the Mist,” where the speaker dreams of her “floating in shallow water, / swathed in seaweed.” The word “remorse,” which appears several times in the collection, seems to infuse the emotional life of these translations. On other occasions, the body of the woman simply burns, as in the grandmother’s body in the poem “1004 Mina Street,” where “[…]. She burned, / without and within” and where the speaker says:

I watched my father wrap her in a sheet, the mattress on fire;
the curtains, the carpet, her dress
carbonized. He gathered everything up.  

The transformation of the body is violent, destructive, and all that remains is the smell:

The smell of my grandmother’s flesh lingered in the hallway
While my aunts went on sipping bitter clots of coffee. 

If the woman’s body is not disintegrated by the sea or absorbed in the landscape, then she simply turns to ashes. The organizing theme of this collection is passion—the passion to assert a sense of identity in language, to articulate a woman’s experience in the world, to fulfill one’s sensual desires, to probe the space between life and death. Many poems appear as single lines or phrases, ranging from observations and musings to sentences that read like aphorisms. The mind of the poet is constantly at work, registering, noting, questioning, and defining her perception of reality while the mind of the translator joins in to bring that work into the English.

Poets reading this bilingual collection will surely be reminded of Horace’s thought in his Ars Poetica that “a word once sent abroad can never return.” Scholars, on the other hand, will be thrilled to look at the Spanish poems to see how the source poems were changed by translation.  This rewriting of the original prompted by the process of articulation in another language, which is akin to interpreting the past through the present, would make a wonderful scholarly study. The general reader, however, will simply delight in these translations, knowing that they also touched the original as they came into life.