#florentinoyeldiablo

[valdezito23]

The devil is on the house 07/jun/18 #lvaldez #foto #photo #abrapalabratv #florentinoyeldiablo #ucabguayana

[beverlyperezrego]

On A.A. Torrealba and Joyelle McSweeney

Atlantean Poets - Editor’s Note Translation is a Faustian bargain. You give up the ungivable to satisfy your heart’s desires: banished be the lack of money, unrequited love; or maybe a spell with the dreaded block in those nights when the writing does not yield, you’re one blink away from plagiarism: damned be the unyielding words and foreign languages. How opportune that blocks were used to separate thieves from their hands in olden times. Faust knew this because he was a translator who suffered over his version of the New Testament. His obsession was to find the *right* way to say In the beginning was the Word. To him this translation was clearly incorrect, and one can see his logic: if the Word is the beginning, what is the translator? A violator? A liar? A thief? For if the Word is so essential to being, how can the translator even think of altering, uprooting, challenging the Original? You could go to hell for far less. But the original is unfaithful to the translation, said Borges, that old devil. And McSweeney proceeds to shred through Torrealba’s Venezuelan llanos with her rendering of The Pact and The Duel, thus also altering the landscape of the dark suburban living rooms, the Appalachian trails, the sleepy Andean churches, Southern crossroads, bowling alleys, Medieval German villages, beauty parlors, Irish mountain passes, academic cubicles, Assyrian orgies, Red Lobsters in the deep blue sea and any other place where such mythical showdowns have been known to occur. In the tradition of the Atlantean Poet, McSweeney is unfaithful. She switches genres and sinks the text into its own drama. She invades the space and not its depiction. She steals the frame and tears the canvas. She takes over the essence and goes for the Origin of the tale, her Origin, the real Word. She goes for the jugular because what we proposed to her -by giving her a mid-Twentieth Century Venezuelan poet-national treasure who said that *a great poet is the voice of the collective*; who held political power and reigned at the center of our art circles at the time, taking unto himself the task of retelling the vernacular version of the Faustian saga in so many pages of Venezuelan folk poetry, in Spanish- all this was indeed a showdown, a bilingual monster duel. McSweeney gives Atlantean Poets this impudent purple mess of a girl who belongs more in the underworld than the Evil one and claims it for herself with so much sass, her spike heels puncturing the searing slush. You have the second sight now, Porphyria, you have a second shot. You mean like a translator, Narrator? Meanwhile, the King is fixated on keeping his domain under control while lying on the burning Lake, thunder-struck and astonisht ; she, in turn, is fixing to stay forevah. This battle of wits is clearly unfair and fixed: how can a King hold his own in the face of such barefaced girlhood? If he were a mirror he would shatter. It´s unfair. It´s malefic. It´s the fairest malefice of them all. One remembers the mile-long glittering braids of ­­­Gretchen spreading like snakes on the ground as she crumbles near the end of Murnau’s Faust, and how her hapless lover curses the youth he received in his bargain. It all ends in such a mess that one just swallows the cautionary tale thing like a spoonful of bat liver oil. It makes every traduttore-traditore choke and think of the way some writers seem to curse their own writing - thou shall be untranslatable! And like the Goethean silent screen couple, translators curse their own children by cautiously expecting the worst, which is silence. They live with it. They even grow to relish it, thankless task and all. In the end, the silence is broken and the task is done either though a pact with invisible forces or by a showdown between original and translation, mediated by the traditions and circumstances that define the mission. But who will win? Who will survive the duel? Who will prevail? Between Florentino and the Devil, Porphyria and the King, who is the best poet? Is there a winner? Who knows? In the Beginning was the Deed. Whatever the outcome, in this Twenty-First Century face off, our money is on Joyelle. I wrote this for Joyelle McSweeney's sidereal rendition of Florentino y el Diablo, by A.A. Torrealba, at Atlantean Poets