Wednesday, November 28, 2012

The Lovers: A New Translation of Octavio Paz' "Los Novios"


I first discovered Octavio Paz’s poem “Los Novios” through the music of Eric Whitacre,[1] where it was translated as "A Boy and a Girl."  It quickly became one of my favorite poems, as well as one of my favorite choral works.  I looked up the original text, and while Muriel Rukeyser’s translation is beautiful, I was not quite satisfied that it captured the simplicity of original text.  In particular, the parallelism between the first and the second stanzas seemed to be masked.  I did this more literal translation for fun and (honestly) as a break from studying.

As a side note, the title Los Novios, is very difficult to translate into English without losing something.  The word “novio” means a boyfriend or a romantic partner and comes from the Latin novus, or new.  The feminine form “novia” means the same thing, and in Spanish, if there are multiples in a group consisting of females and males, the plural word takes the masculine plural.  While “los novios” could be translated as “the boyfriends,” context here is clear that it is the sum of a boyfriend and a girlfriend and not some sort of homoerotic message.  Because “The Boyfriend and the Girlfriend” is an awkward title, I took the liberty of translating the title as “The Lovers,” which seems to me to capture the essence of what Paz was trying to convey.

Original poem copyrighted by Octavio Paz.



Tendidos en la yerba 
una muchacha y un muchacho.
Comen[2] naranjas, cambian besos                                  como las olas cambian sus espumas.                                    

Tendido en la playa
una muchacha y un muchacho.
Comen limones, cambian beso
como las nubes cambian espumas.                                    

Tendidos bajo tierra
una muchacha y un muchacho.
No dicen nada, no se besan,
cambian silencio por silencio.         

    

Lying in the grass
a girl and a boy.
Eating oranges, exchanging kisses
like the waves exchanging their foam.

Lying on the beach
a girl and a boy.
Eating limes, exchanging kisses
like the clouds exchanging foam.

Lying underground
a girl and a boy.
Saying nothing, nor kissing
exchanging silence for silence.



[2] To eat; double entendre for sexual relations in Mexico (Paz is Mexican).  Although I found it impossible to translate this meaning (and it should in all likelihood be left vague anyways for poetic value), I felt that this note was important for interpretation of a nuance that may have gotten lost in translation.

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