Between Strangeness and Natural Equivalences: Translating Lorine Niedecker’s Experimental Poetry

Resumen

This paper shows how my translations of objetivist American poet Lorine Niedecker for the bilingual volume Y el lugar era agua: Antología poética, published in 2018, have constantly sought for natural Spanish equivalences in sound and rhythm while trying, through different translating and rhetorical techniques, to keep the tone of strangeness that a more literal approach to the translation (after Walter Benjamin's reflections on the translation of experimental poetry) would render. To this end, specific translation uses (punctuation sings such as the long dash and other visual display elements, paraphrasing and amplification, homophony, alliteration, and techniques for the reproduction of a sustained tone in the target text) will be explained with respect to the translation choices for some of the most successful poems of the author. Far from definitive, the conclusions for such an approach to the translation of experimental poetry, intrinsic in the poems analyzed, give at least evidence of the constant oscillation between the two extremes of making a poem sound natural in the translation, at the same time that its linguistic strangeness is exposed. More importantly, they connect with the predominant views and practices about how to translate twentieth-century Anglo-American experimental poetry for twenty first-century Spanish readers.