Writing and Translating- What is the Difference?

An Interview with Mark Weiss

by Elisa Cabrera

If someone asked what is easier to do-- write an original poem or translate a poem from another language, what would you guess? This is a question I asked Mark Weiss, the ideal person to ask, when he was a guest lecturer at Centenary College. Weiss is a published poet, editor and translator of Anthologies of Spanish poetry. His answer was, “Writing is easy, it doesn’t matter what people think of my work. Translating is extremely difficult because I want to preserve the writer’s meaning, and have the text make sense and sound appealing.”

His overall goal as an editor and translator of anthologies is to “try to make a realistic representation of all aspects of a selected culture with the use of a variety of poets.”  For example, Weiss edited a Cuban anthology titled, The Whole Island, in which he researched 100 poets’ works and ended up with 55 poets represented in the published book. He described the beginning of the process as, “I looked around the world for 2 years for these poems; these poems represent what is really going on in Cuba.”  In one review of the anthology, the reviewer, Eliot Weinberger, states, "The Whole Island is a masterwork of cartography: a map of what is, for English-language readers, an almost entirely unexplored territory, full of poets—at home or in the diaspora—whom we ought to know.”

I learned in the course of the interview with Mark Weiss that translation is so much more than literally translating. According to Weiss, a translator must, “express what the poet is saying.” This is ultimately the goal of a translator but this is also what makes translating so difficult.  When translating, some culture is lost but after much research, Weiss says, “I include extra aspects in the poem in order to express lost information and allow the poem to make sense.”  After this process, Weiss says, “I need to preserve the poet’s work and make it sound good. The process is like doing a crossword puzzle, dialect only makes it harder.” Weiss and his co-editor Harry Polkinhorn, in the anthology, Across the Line, were successful with this process, based on a review by Homer Aridjis, “this lovingly-translated anthology conveys the feel of gritty towns and cities, burning deserts, lonely mountains, a huge sky still crowded with stars, the wind blowing in off the Pacific or the Sea of Cortez, the nearness of gray whales and pelicans, the uncertainties of isolation, the jittery rhythms of urban life, the United Sates forever looming on the other side of the border.”

So, which is easier, to write an original poem or translate a poem from another language?

Mark Weiss

Mark Weiss was on the translation panel at the Poetics Colloquium, Centenary College.