TO ETERNITY ON TIME /English Translation Lidice Megla

  

 

Translator’s Words

 

A safe fairytale poetry is untrue to poetry itself. In the collection To Eternity On Time, Abel German explores the nature of time and its relationship to human existence with boldness and psychological insight, thus showing us that Abel’s poetry is far from safe and uncommitted.

 

The messages can be challenging to decipher due to the use of abstract language and imagery. I respected the integrity of the entire collection, which unfolds as one solid, long poem. In hopes of improving the effectiveness of the English rendition, I focused on using the same symbols, imagery, and punctuation as in the original itself. I do not know if any part of it fits the bill: Abel plucks theories, producing thought-provoking poems that appear in long poetic prose in a way that tilts the prism and looks at the world from his very own perspective.

The writing style is complex, referential, and carries an erudite tone, enveloping the whole text as if it were part of a more extensive work; in other words, it makes you think of the future, which is another way of saying it makes you think of the present. Literary influences and philosophical idiosyncrasies abound, and his style owes much of its energy and exuberance to his erudition. The subjective point is conveyed through images of pessimism and a sense of the futility and significance of life. But, alongside that pessimism, there is also humor.

If there was a difficulty, it lay in reproducing that very style, which is also full of oddities, such as the title, which we aimed at respecting in its integrity, including its nuance.

It’s ever so enticing to impose our views and styles when translating, to impose a meaning—after all, our craft is words, hence it makes us eager to understand what the writer means in order to pass it on to the world—but it’s of utmost importance to ventriloquize the voice behind which lurks the sense of the poet, as it is vital to respect ambiguity and opacity. Finally, equally essential is getting the tone right.

To Eternity On Time swings in a back-to-forward motion with a steady rhythm, moving from all angles across the web of time and its events: a flight over the poetic world of a human being.

I’ll leave you with no promise but a “touch of staggering” and the assurance that some images will stick in mind, like whisperings from Eternity.

 Lidice Megla.

Nanaimo, Vancouver Island. September 3, 2023.

  

 

FOREWORD

 

A SCREAM IN THE DARK

 

Upon delving into Abel Germán's latest collection of poems, 'A la eternity en punto/To Eternity On Time,' I found myself immersed in a world of enigmatic emotions. The words seemed to beckon me towards 'The Scream,' a painting by the mysterious Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. There's no overt connection or direct parallels between Abel and Munch, nor does the painter's most renowned work mirror the poet's book. Yet, an undeniable allure binds them, a puzzle that invites deeper exploration.

In The Scream, you catch, from the first glance, the desolation and dread expressed by the face of a human figure with his mouth open and his hands on his head. That's all the artist needed to show us his existential cliff. Or almost everything, because when we review details, after that first glance, we realize that the scream, the detonator of the expression of the face, may not come from inside the figure but from some other indeterminate place. Then, the open mouth could be an effect and not a cause. And that's precisely where I could have found the thread of essence between the painting and this book.

In "To Eternity On Time," Abel often talks about Abel with himself as if he were talking to someone else and about someone else. From afar comes the voice of the other, the real one who invents himself... In the introduction to the collection of poems, he has let us understand that he is talking with his brother Andrés, another admirable poet. However, it is difficult for me to determine whether the hopeless cry projected by this collection of poems is, like Munch's cry, motivation or consequence of a bitter inner turmoil. Is it a cry that the poet expresses or an echo of distant cries that reach him? Perhaps it is impossible to pin it down, even for Abel himself. Needless to say. Because despite the painful corpus of the disaster he is describing to us (or precisely because of the brilliance of the description), what is decisive is that it is a poetic exercise of singular value.

Whether in dialogue with his inner self, with his brother, or with the one who invents himself, or with all of them together and at the same time, Abel unravels in memorable verses the anguish he experiences in the face of the irreversibility of time, which only drags those who pass by in search of eternity. An eternity that is not beyond or anywhere else, as we like to believe, since eternity is nothing. The eternal is summed up in what always is, as we have been warned since Plato, given that time is the moving image of eternity. Temporal mobility is opposed to the immobility of the eternal: It barely leaves room for things / to continue on their way. The light continues to arrive / at the corners where doubts accumulate like / cockroaches. Yes, like those eternal bugs...

'A Cry in the Dark,' despite its dramatic magnitude, exposes the poet's dismay at the point of no return we are destined from birth. Yet, it does not prevent us from glimpsing it amidst painful irresolution. His verses are rife with questions, often leading to more questions: Why did I never organize my failure? Why was my answer only this? / Why do I insist on it? –And I look at a crazy moon. / This is the red line (if it is such), these are the questions (if there are any), / and this is the future (if such a thing is possible). / When you get old, it's like that; that's what happens, I can attest. There's a red line, / a place marked by that line/ and an old man standing there, balancing himself as best he can, / turning back and exclaiming/ the first 'why' in the world, that first proper name of panic, / and he falls PAF! Like a slap on the wrist of eternity... This is chilling to-the-bone poetry! But its clarity is soothing. It is a hypnotic digression that throws us straight at the bullseye, casting doubts that do not require clarification because we are transparent about them, no matter how comfortably we ignore them.  

Hence, my contrasting sensations when reading the book were very similar to those that assailed me in front of Edvard Munch's painting: delight and restless dislocation, joy and awe, and a desire at times to look away and turn the page, even knowing that I was not going to do it, that I would not be able to, because I was prevented by that joyful trembling of the bowels that comes from approaching a work of art.

There's no escape. Not to the fullest, so enjoy this jewel and return to it repeatedly in the unappealing drift toward eternity. Meanwhile, A disastrous angel pushes a shopping cart overflowing with incorrupt clocks – listen to his music. It makes the ears bleed. / These clocks move the twisted hands as if they were dragging, laboriously, / God.

 

José Hugo Fernández, Miami, April 2023. 

Amazon.com: TO ETERNITY ON TIME A LA ETERNIDAD EN PUNTO (Spanish Edition): 9798329780727: German, Abel, Interian Guerra, Odalys, Megla, Lidice, Fernández, José Hugo: Libros

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Lidice Megla (she/ her) is a hyphened poet and translator with several published poetry collections and an international poetry contest winner. She is a 2024 nominee for Women of Influence Nanaimo (WIN) in the Arts and Culture category. A nature lover, a dedicated translator with a wide collection of renditions across genres. She is a full member of the Literary Translators Association of Canada, The League of Canadian Poets, and the Federation of Writers of British Columbia.  She lives, works, and learns in Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, on the territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nations. Her readers can reach out, and her books can be found at https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07XVT6DK8.