The Cantos in Translation: The Spanish Variations

Abstract

In this chapter, the author begins by paying homage to Pound as an avid reader and prolific translator who read and translated from well over a dozen languages, both modern and classical. She praises him as also a staunch defender and practitioner of translation as a humanist tool to bridge the gap separating peoples, languages and worldviews. So it is only fair, and not surprising, that his own poetry should have been translated into over 70 languages. More specifically, though, among the diverse languages within the European context into which The Cantos has been translated, Spanish is honored to have been the first language into which the full text of Pound’s epic was ever translated. Only three years after Pound’s death, but after 23 years of hard work, intensive correspondence and fruitful conversations with the poet, Mexican professor and translator José Vázquez Amaral completed his Spanish edition of Cantares Completos (Editorial Mortiz, 1975). Soon after Cantares Completos was published would appear Antología de Ezra Pound, a partial translation by Nicaraguan poets José Coronel Urtecho and Ernesto Cardenal (Visor, 1979). Two decades later, three volumes of Spanish professor Javier Coy’s projected a four-volume annotated bilingual edition of Cantares Completos, an indispensable scholarly work for Spanish Poundians, were published (Cátedra, 1994, 1996 & 2000), based on Vázquez Amaral’s translation – with the final volume yet to appear. However, as the most recent translation of Pound’s major work into Spanish, Argentinian poet Jan de Jager’s Los Cantos de Ezra Pound (Sexto Piso, 2018) once again offers the full text of The Cantos in Spanish, including now the Italian Cantos and the Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII. De Jager’s is a non-bilingual edition with neither notes nor appendices, yet it seeks inventively to do justice to the complexity of Pound’s masterpiece for a contemporary Spanish audience. After reviewing this varied, lively history of Pound’s work in Spanish, the author examines the vicissitudes of these varied Spanish translations of The Cantos, especially by comparing Coy’s comprehensive, annotated edition with Vázquez Amaral’s translation and De Jager’s creative one, so as to shed light on their two very different approaches to the colossal feat of translating into another language a poem often considered an unassailable fortress, even in English.