Feeling for correlative patterns in the jangle of our consonant-frontal idiom is something like transcribing the pitch values of a Max Roach drum solo for honkeytonk piano. When I was a girl, I had chronic pneumonia, which always came with very high fevers. As a reader, I listen into his rhythms and watch the shapes they trace in my mind.
As a translator, I lean into the rhythms much more blindly, and it is only when absolutely necessary and even then, only while editing that I will try to see an image clearly or grasp the implications of a metaphor. This may be a useful stance in general for the translator, but I mean it in a very particularly way in the case of Mario. Like a sick person touched by a healer or a violin detuning toward to the natural intervals of sound, or maybe more like a radio locking in on a signal, I feel my heartbeat synchronize to the more coherent frequency.
But unlike a cello or a broadcast receiver, Mario was tuning to an-ever shifting, incoherent target. As a translator, there are many moments when all dictionaries seem to be in on the cruel joke of making human history disappear from the record.
I feel my heart inside my chest. Here are its answers. In , Santiago Papasquiaro was killed by a car while walking through Mexico City. Cole Heinowitz is a poet, translator, and associate professor of literature at Bard College. Home Subscribe Issues Support Us. December 19, Sign Up for Our Newsletter. Stay in touch with The Common!
