Last autumn, after a month spent in Ecuador trying (amongst other things) to teach myself Spanish by reading books, I saw a poster for a series of talleres de traducción literaria being held at the Instituto Cervantes in Manchester. This seemed like the perfect way to continue with my slightly unconventional course of self-instruction, so in I went to sign up. And thus began my adventures in the wonderful world of translation.
The Autumn 2013 workshops featured a banquet of words and works, ranging across countries and centuries, from the early classics (the Quijote and El Cid both made an appearance) to modern satirists writing in contemporary periodicals. Along the way we discovered (and through translation re-discovered) literary greats such as Julio Cortázar, whose Axolotl I found endlessly fascinating; Fuentes -- having now read Aura in its entirety, I still cannot claim to understand it fully, and I don't think it's because of any loss in translation -- and of course plenty of my most favourite Borges. I may post some of these previous translation attempts here, eventually...
This term, having thoroughly enjoyed the previous series, I was delighted to see that the workshops would be running again. This time, though, our homework was a bit more of a challenge: start our own translation blogs and put some of our words out there online! Hence this blog was born.
The title, for anyone who isn't as much of a music nerd as me, derives from the text composed by W.H. Auden for Britten's Hymn to St Cecilia. Cecilia is the patron saint of music, whose name-day (22 November) also happened to be Britten's birthday; the poem, then, is about music -- but as with everything, it's not just about music...
In my book, Hymn to St Cecilia is one of the greatest a cappella choral pieces ever written, so it was perhaps an obvious choice to pick the lines from the chorus "Translated daughter, come down and startle composing mortals / With immortal fire" as the inspiration for naming my blog. After all, doesn't the translator herself also seek the inspiration of immortal fire from time to time, when trying to put into other words the compositions of others? But the other passage that had an unexpected resonance, at least on the surface of it, with the idea of this blog was from the third section:
"O dear white children, casual as birds
Playing among the ruined languages
So small beside their large confusing words
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did..."
Although, as we've realised in our workshops, it is often the small words, not the large ones, that are most difficult to translate, and although we are working in languages that are very much alive (we try not to ruin them, too much), the metaphors here seemed appropriate to a blog about translation. I just hope the things I do aren't too dreadful! (Sorry, JLB...)
Anyway, finding the title was the easy part. Now to see whether I can create some actual content!
