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queer poetics is essential to Spicer’s tribute to Lorca. Belatedly we return to that dedication,‘A Translation for Jack Spicer’; the poem and its moment are mirrors ‘for’ the poet himself to look into, their contents locked in a feedback loop with the poet, one queer and hermetic, perhaps fetishistic and onanistic.
con el sexo atravesado por una aguja.
At the same time, however, when Spicer offers a ‘straight’ version of Lorca he selects an avatar of that poet who conversely seems to be somehow pastiching Spicer. Spicer translates Lorca’s Oda a Walt Whitman, from Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (192930) — the only number from that book that Spicer approaches —, as Ode for Walt Whitman, and keeps his translation pretty close to the original, his text generally only benefitting from the subtle dance of indirectly translated prepositions and Spicer’s tendency towards the more scurrilous alternative in choices relating to the translation of Lorca’s doubleentendres. Spicer’s amendments of Lorca treat the source text freely, but not to such an extent that it might be termed a ‘free-translation’: Clayton Eshleman writes that although ‘at points Spicer considerably distorts this complex and very tricky Lorca poem, after all is said and done, his is by far the best version to date.’9 Here are parallel passages in Lorca’s and Spicer’s versions:
Ni un solo momento, hermosura viril
Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman,
Enemigo del sátiro, enemigo de la vida y amante de los cuerpos bajo la burda tela.
que en montes de carbón, anuncios y ferrocarriles, soñabas ser un río y dormir como un río con aquel camarada que pondría en tu pecho un pequeño dolor de ignorante leopardo.10 * Not for one moment, beautiful old Walt Whitman, Have I stopped seeing your beard full of butterflies Or your shoulders of corduroy worn thin by the moon Or your muscles of a virgin Apollo Or your voice like a column of ashes. Ancient and beautiful as the fog.
he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas, ni tus hombros de pana gastados por la luna,
You gave a cry like a bird With his prick pierced through by a needle Enemy of satyrs
ni tus muslos de Apolo virginal ni tu voz como una columna de ceniza; anciano hermoso como la niebla, que gemías igual que un pájaro 9 The Lorca Working, boundary 2, Vol. 6, No. 1, Jack Spicer (Autumn, 1977), p. 38.
número 02
Enemy of the grape And lover of bodies under rough cloth. Not for one moment, tight-cocked beauty, 10
Selected Poems, p. 230.