A Marriage of Distinctions
Jeff Stumpo. El Océano y la Serpiente/ The Ocean and the Serpent. Tabula Rasa Press, 2004. Paper, 18 pp., $10.
Review by Tobias Peterson
Two years ago, I attended a reading by Oscar Casares, who was asked about the use of Spanish in his short story collection Brownsville. Casares mentioned that he purposefully refused to italicize the Spanish portions of his story, as the shift in type style signified a kind of difference that he did not recognize in his approach to the language. The italics, Casares explained, were markers of otherness, denoting a kind of estrangement from the standard typeface that the English text enjoyed. Rather than set Spanish apart in an either/or dichotomy, Casares advocated a "both at once" approach that held English and Spanish in the same textual regard.
The kind of separation that Casares was writing against in his stories can also be found in poetry. Frequently, bilingual poetry suffers from the same kind of separation. Non-English languages are Othered with italics per usual, but bilingual poetry segregates the languages even more radically—into separate parts of the book. On the left page, typically, the source language of the poem; its translated English counterpart positioned on the right. The implication, given the movement of reading English from left to right, is that the right page is the destination, the conclusion of a process of meaning that begins with the other language but ends with the resolution of the English translation.
And in between these separate pages? Space. A vast gulf of emptiness within which we locate the hand of the translator. If we know the source language at all, the act of reading ultimately becomes an observation of the work that moves the poem from one linguistic space to the next. We note the translator's word choice, attention to structure, her solicitude with rhythms, and her omissions. In such a reading, though, the poem retains the either/or dichotomy and remains—spatially and typographically—partitioned into separate linguistic spheres.
Jeff Stumpo's El Océano y la Serpiente/ The Ocean and the Serpent, however, attempts a kind of "both at once" approach, troubling the gulf that typically separates the source poem from its translation. Though the title of the work announces the same kind of separatist translation, the poems themselves purposefully confound the left-right, source-translation structure of other books of bilingual poetry. Stumpo does not seek to integrate italicized Spanish into the English surroundings of his poems. Instead, the poems exist in dialogue with one another. The right-sided English poems are not simply translations, speaking for the Spanish poems. Instead, they are speaking to the poems on the left—and the Spanish poems speak back, creating a sense of mutually constitutive conversation.
The European conquest of the New World provides an apt foundation upon which Stumpo can base this project. El Océano y la Serpiente/ The Ocean and the Serpent is interested particularly in articulating the conflict of the conquest in linguistic terms. Beyond their guns, germs, and steel, the language of the European colonizers represents yet another kind of imposition on the native population. In Stumpo's book, however, the natives' response to this imposition is, importantly, also given voice.
The notion of this conflict is carried both in the structure of Stumpo's left-right pairings, as well as in his content. The pairing of "Quetzal," with "White" perhaps best encapsulates the book's project. "Quetzal" is a short poem that reads "haz / el truco Diablo," while its counterpart on the facing page, "White," reads "light / the lamp Christopher." Even a cursory knowledge of Spanish reveals that Stumpo is not engaged in translation here, but rather a dialogue of perspectives. My translation of "Quetzal" is "do / the trick devil," which, when held up to the act of lighting the lamp, creates a tension that binds the two poems to each other. The native perspective of the "trick" of light and the conflation of "devil" with Christopher (Columbus) is articulated by Stumpo's decision to render the poems in separate (and in terms of the conquest, oppositional) voices as well as separate languages.
Rather than yoke Spanish poems to English translations, then, El Océano y la Serpiente / The Ocean and the Serpent foregrounds a fraught dialogue between the English conquistadors and Spanish-speaking natives. One poem, "sic transit gloria mundi novi" reads "I am the conqueror. / Thus the distance. / Between us grows." The title itself complicates the phrase "sic transit gloria mundi" (thus passes away the glory of the world) with the addition "novi": thus passes away the glory of the New World. With this addition, the colonial project is both linked to, and emblematic of, the inherent degradation of the material realm. As a social commentary, the lines could just as easily refer to the linguistic space that separates the two groups, as the poem's Spanish pairing, "espejo," responds to these lines with "Como el espacio entre. / Estrellas como palabras. / En una página." ("Like the space between. / Stars like words. / On a page."). By articulating such a distance in his work, though, Stumpo's structure paradoxically draws the poems closer together. The pairings create a confluence in which two voices and two meanings emerge, ultimately engaging in a shared exchange.
Tobias Peterson is a master's candidate in creative writing (poetry) at Texas State University. He holds bachelor's degrees in English and Spanish Literature from the University of Texas and a master's in English Literature from George Mason University. In his ever-diminishing spare time, he's the sports editor for Popmatters.com.
