To translate a poem from Spanish to English, the translator has to not only know the language but also consider the feeling the poem evokes, the rhythm, and the style. “It’s really a puzzle because there are all these different elements of the original poem that you are not reproducing but re-creating,” says Olivia Lott. Lott is a translator and a doctoral candidate and Olin Fellow at Washington University. She was recently named a PEN award finalist for her translation of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis. The poetry collection, which Eulalia Books released in October 2020, is the first by a Colombian woman to be translated into English.
Lott fell in love with Spanish in high school. She was fascinated by the language, and it came pretty easy to her. When there was an opportunity for students to visit Peru, she jumped at the chance. “I got to really experience what learning a second language opens up for you in the sense of all the people you get to meet that you wouldn’t have met otherwise, the books you get to read that you wouldn’t have been able to read otherwise—just this whole other world,” she says.
Being in Peru motivated Lott to become a Spanish major at Kenyon College, a school known for its rich literary tradition. Lott took many classes on Latin American literature. Then she signed up for a literary translation course, and much in the same way that Peru had been an eye-opening experience, this class was “a total life-changing class.”
Every week the class translated a new poem. “It was sort of the greatest hits poems from Latin American literature,” Lott says. “It’s really what set me on this path to keep translating.
“Gabriel García Márquez called translation the closest form of reading, and I think ultimately that’s what it was for me. It was this opportunity to see something so deep and engage with it on a different level, on a level that I hadn’t really engaged with literature before,” Lott explains.
For her final undergraduate project, Lott translated a Colombian poet. Colombia, which is the third-largest Spanish speaking country, resonated with Lott when she learned how under-translated the poetry was. She says it has a "more conservative poetic tradition."
"I saw this as an opportunity for me as an aspiring translator to have an impact in the conversation of what kind of poetry from Latin America gets translated into English," she says.
After she graduated, in 2015, Lott received a Fulbright scholarship to Colombia, where she worked as an English teaching assistant. On her weekends and holidays, she traveled across the country to meet poets. “I wanted to try to soak in as much as I could about today’s poetry from Colombia.”
It was during her trip to Medellín that Lott met Estrada. During this first (and only) meeting, Estrada gave Lott several books of her poetry. “I began translating poems immediately on the plane,” she says. Lott continued to translate Estrada’s poems for a couple of years, even publishing a few in different journals.
When Lott saw that Estrada had published Katabasis, which is the 2017 winner of the Bogotá Poetry Prize, she read it and loved it. The title is the Greek word for "descent," and the poems focus on the descent into the unknown, whether by epic heroes or through the pursuit of classical knowledge. She wrote to Estrada to see if she could translate it. “She was very excited. By this time, I’ve been translating poems for her for about three years, so we had built a relationship.”
Estrada doesn’t speak English, so she has to have complete trust in Lott and her work. “This has been one of the amazing things about working with her—she really seems to understand the translation process as creative writing. She’s always encouraged me to take risks with a translation to really prioritize the writing of a new poem in English. She’s really empowered me in this way.”
One example of that creative process is shown in the intertextuality of the work. In Katabasis, Estrada mentions Paul Celan, Marosa di Giorgio, Sylvia Plath, Lasse Söderberg, but the poetry collection's most "sustained correspondence," Lott says, is with Plath. An epigraph from Plath's "A Life" begins Katabasis, and Estrada's first poem, "Medusas," is written alongside Plath's "Medusa."
"When translating this poem, I pieced together lines where Estrada's version called out to Plath's," Lott says. "And this guided my approach to the rest of the collection. I searched for moments in the Spanish where Plath's poetics might come through in the English. This meant, for example, creating clipped nouns in [the English version,] which Plath often uses but which aren't as syntactically possible in Spanish. Sílaba de aire, dolor de sal, and vueltas de llave became air syllable, salt ache, and key turns in my rendering."
When Lott received the news that the translation of Katabasis had been selected as a PEN finalist, she immediately called Estrada. They both hope the recognition will open more doors for more Colombian poets to be translated into English.
The winners of the PEN awards will be announced in a virtual ceremony on April 8.
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