Urayoán Noel and the Geopoetics of self-translation I : Situating the poet.

Nuyorican Poets Cafe NYC 1998. Mikamote - Own work. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This column offers a literary, linguistic and political exploration of the work and life of contemporary bilingual Puerto Rican and American poet Urayoán Noel who draws on a Spanish-language poetic tradition developed in the 1970s of oral poetry, improvisation and performance, and reinscribes it digitally in the urban space of the 21st century. In her column, Célestine Barraquand questions the geographical, linguistic and medial grounding of poetry to advocate a transversal literature, which is rooted in physicality but is also sensitive to movement and boundless.

The Latinx tradition of bilingual poetry: the origins of code-switching

In order to truly understand Urayoán Noel’s poetico-political endeavour, we have to go back to the roots of the Latinx bilingual poetic tradition in America, whose forerunners were initially the Chicanos (Mexican-Americans) in the 1960s. The poems encompassed both Spanish and English parts – set apart typographically since the Spanish parts needed paratext to be contextualised.

 Then, in the 1970s, the practice evolved and spread in the Nuyorican community (the Puerto Ricans located in or around New York City and their descendants), more specifically at the Nuyorican Poets Café (NPC) in the Lower East Side of Manhattan . Prominent figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were among the guests, recognizing a vibrant energy reminiscent of the Beat Generation poets of San Francisco in the Nuyorican poets’ performance poetry. In 1975 , Miguel Algarin and Miguel Pinero, the founders of the NPC, published ‘Nuyorican Poetry: An anthology of Puerto Rican words and feelings', and exposed the way their creative endeavour went beyond the mere juxtaposition of English and Spanish that first characterized Chicano bilingual poetry:

‘The work at first is slow and there is no existing language to express the feelings and work to be done. Language and action are simultaneous realities. Actions create the need for verbal expression. If the action is new, so must the words that express it come through as new.’

This marks a turning point in Latinx bilingual poetry, that of the adoption of a new creative method: code-switching. Code switching corresponds to an interplay of languages, where linguistic elements such as words, expressions, and phrases from one language blend with another. It evolves a third space where English and Spanish coexist, mingle, and diverge in unexpected ways, departing from conventional language norms. Unlike Chicano poetry, there are no glossaries or straightforward translations; instead, the inclusion of Spanish seamlessly weaves into the text. English and Spanish coexist within this linguistic dance, mirroring the constant movement of Puerto Ricans to and from the island.

Puerto Rican Gentlemen talk on Avenue C between 4th Street and 5th Street in Loisaida in the East Village of New York City. By David Shankbone - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Noel’s re-evaluation of self-translation: the political power of transcreative translation in a Latinx context

Let’s consider this excerpt from Noel’s poem Signs of the Hemisphere / Letreros del hemisferio:

no Che in this noche avoid Evita no motorcycle in these diaries don’t bother

guessing this loco’s motive this loca’s stride the globe’s refraction in drive-thru

windows workers of the world take off your paper hats

*

esta noche no Che evita a Evita no hay motocicleta en estos diarios no

detendrás mi moción de loco mi nación (dis) loca la refracción del globo en

ventanas de servicarro obreros del mundo quítense sus gorros de papel 

This poem corresponds to a form of self-translation. Readers are encouraged to uncover the hidden words within words, like “no Che” in “noche” or “loco” within “locomotive”. Phonemes are nested within each other, much like Russian dolls. This translingual wordplay deliberately challenges the conventional notion of translation, which typically involves the transferring semantic invariants from one language to another. In contrast, the Spanglish line in the initial version, like “this loca’s stride”, this queen’s stride, is transformed into a markedly different phrase in Spanish: “mi nación (dis) loca,” implying ‘my nation dislocates or distorts’ (or ‘my nation [de]crazies; or my nation, this crazy woman, this queen’).

In this imaginative interpretation, traditional principles of sticking to the original’s exactness or faithfulness are set aside in favour of innovation, a dynamic auditory energy, and an expansion of significance that bridges the gap between multiple concurrent renditions. This creative element does not mean that Noel’s translations are merely belles infidèles, the beautiful, unfaithful ones that seventeenth-century French critic Gilles Ménage praised. He thought that they embodied the tension between making a translation seem not only natural, but beautiful in the target language, versus keeping it as close as possible to the original text. They are much more than that. They are what Brazilian poet and critic Haroldo De Campos calls ‘transcreative translation' (tradução transcriativa).

Such a reconceptualisation of self-translation and of the very idea of faithfulness can ,in turn, have a political resonance. If we indeed call the idea of translation into question, as an art subsidiary to that of writing, then we can understand its potential powers better. Contrary to the academic consensus, ‘transcreative translation’ does not reduce the concept of mimesis to its strictly imitative moment (to the way, in Signs of the Hemisphere / Letreros del hemisferio, for instance, Noel imitates sounds from one language to another, using paronomasia). There is indeed a dialectical flip side to this broader understanding of mimesis in translation: by mimetically rendering what is, the imitative moment also gives a glimpse, ex negativo, of what could be (in Noel’s poem, this corresponds to the manifold meanings associated with the imitated sounds when they are transcribed into the other language). Transcreative translation thus re-evaluates mimesis as an internal dialogue, as a questioning of imitation. Noel’s poems highlight the moment of their making, their fabricated nature, constantly questioning themselves and their relationship to the referents, wary of their own mimetic quality. Rather than promoting the imperceptibility of the translator’s hand, Urayoán Noel puts an emphasis on the discernible presence of the translator as a creator.

This poetico-political ethos at the very heart of the practice of self-translation thus challenges the idea of subservience contained in the faithfulness ideal of translation, both against the idea of submission of the Spanish language to the colonizing language of English, but also for a form of untranslatability in the broadest sense; a form of voluntary opacity that prohibits the reduction of Hispanic forms and contents to categorical systems of thought, a reduction that would recover otherness by instrumentalizing it, by making it intelligible and transparent.