And possibly my last. I went to Interpreting Lorca at the CUNY Graduate Center. When I arrived, I was a little optimistic and hopeful. I thought, “Hey this might be fun.” It’s New York, there can’t be boring events. The first thing I noticed was that it seemed like a senior home event. And the proof was that they laughed at jokes that weren’t even funny. Okay, so it wasn’t the most horrible thing. I did enjoy learning about Federico Garcia Lorca’s life. I found him interesting and I love learning about people and their lives and their pasts and what they did. However, when they got to the actual poems, I was bored. Joan Jonas read, and she was really boring. The poems themselves were nice, but the letters were the interesting part. Jack Spicer, who has translated Lorca’s work, wrote letters to Lorca. He said, “Prose invents—poetry discloses.” I’ve interpreted that as prose being very ordinary and idle, while poetry is used to speak out to the public and disclose important information in a way that people might get inspired to take action.
.jpg/220px-Lorca_(1914).jpg)
Federico García Lorca
Shakespeare
There was also an interesting part about translations and how they are never the same. Interestingly, one of the writers we have read, Langston Hughes, was one of the many writers who have tried to translate Lorca’s “verde que te quiero verde.” It is a simple line, and as a Spanish speaker, I would translate it as “Green, how I want you green.” I tried to look up his translation, but it’s nowhere to be found online! It’s a bit weird because even though the event was boring, I’m interested in reading Lorca’s work. The boring readers did not take away from his work, surprisingly. Although translations are fun and all, I might side with something that was said at the event. Do we have to translate? Is it necessary? It may be necessary to express ideas, but I definitely think it takes away from the original work. Why do we have to translate Shakespeare’s work? Well, I know it’s not an official translation since it’s English, but I think it definitely takes away from Shakespeare’s marvelous works. His work is fine as it is, and although I may have a hard time comprehending it at times, I still think it’s better to leave it as it is. I’m sure that when he wrote his pieces, he was not looking for people to try to translate his every line, and every word. He simply wanted people to enjoy the enactments and come up with their own ideas of what they meant. What would Shakespeare and Lorca say about translations if they were alive? I’m not so sure that they’d be flattered. Poetry, like any writing, is meant to be left in its original state. If the writer wanted others’ impute on their writing (what I consider a translation to be), they would have asked.
