Translator's Introduction to Eye of Heaven — Web Exclusive
By Forrest Gander
Written by contemporary Mexican poet, painter, and translator Valerie Mejer during a tumultuous period in her life, "Eye of Heaven" makes reference to tender details of intomacy between, presumably, two adults. In the second stanza, the rhythm of the typewriter and the pulser of the beloved fuse. The names of the dead and the lost are being typed onto paper that will, as part of an Asian ritual, be set on fire and floated on a river—freeing the living "from a weight." As Mejer says, "Writing comes from the heart literally and figuratively; but the pulse doesn't, finally, belong to us." Formally, the poem biopsies the origin of love in the three stanzas. The speaker argues that the heart for writing, for loving, might be borrowed from a god, "the Child of Heaven," because compassion is boundless. The end of the poem is a pledge that reminds me of Rimbaud's declaration in Varese's translation of Illuminations:
When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our four eyes' astonishment, a beach for two faithful children, a musical house for our pure sympathy, I shall find you.
The difficulties of translating this poem are obvious. There are references to subject matter—Chinese gods, Asian memorial rituals—likely to be unfamiliar to a reader: there are words—heart, flame, child—that have sentimental associations (with dueño and corazón prestado, I was haunted by the pop song lyric "Owner of a broken heart"). Furthermore, there is an intensive ambiguity between the human and non-human world, the landscape and the written word.
I consulted with the author before translating "pulse," at one point, for the Spanish word for "heart" (corazón). Not only did the substitution work to carry the idea of the original without treading too close to the familiar pop song lyric, but the c's of corazón and clave were in some sense matched by the p's in "pulse" and "typing." I also especially liked that in the last line English, I was able, by ending on the syntactically precarious preposition, to emphasize the thematic fragility.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator. Born in the Mojave Desert, he was raised in Virginia where he attended The College of William and Mary, majoring in geology, a subject referenced frequently in both his poems and essays. He received an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University and moved to Mexico, where he began to assemble poems and translations for Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women, a bilingual anthology. Gander is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. He has taught at Providence College and Harvard University. Currently, he is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Rhode Island.