Notes on translating Romance de la luna, luna

Photo credit: (C) Morganka, dreamstime.com. Royalty-free license.

As I took up translating Lorca’s poem “Romance de la luna, luna,” from his 1926 book Romancero gitano, I looked at the images in a different way.

This time I looked at them as being very concrete. And instead of abstractions -- for example, in the first stanza:

La luna vino a la fragua
con su polisón de nardos

Polisón de nardos is usually translated as “petticoat of spikenard.” (1) I thought, what if this moon is coming dressed as a woman, in traditional Spanish garb, a floral skirt. I imagined the the moon as a flamenco dancer, in the traditional getup with an elaborate skirt with this big print of spikenard flowers.

Why did I never see that before?

And as I kept going...

El niño la mira mira.
El niño la está mirando.

I realized that this child is watching the moon dance.

If we're going to put a sort of dramatic spin on things -- because at the end of the poem, they find the child dead -- what if the child is very ill, and this is a hallucination of death coming for the child in the form of the moon? This is what he sees right before he dies.

En el aire conmovido
mueve la luna sus brazos
y enseña, lúbrica y pura,
sus senos de duro estaño.

This is a hard word to translate, conmovido -- it is “moved,” like emotionally moved. She is moving in a sort of sensuous way and showing off her “breasts of hard tin.” It’s a coldly sexual moon, moving her arms -- in flamenco they call it braceos -- So we see the moon is dancing and mueve la luna sus brazos.

But then the child interjects and says, Huye, luna, luna, luna -- he's telling the moon to flee, as if the moon is in danger, but also like “get away from me, you're scary.” The child is both afraid of and protecting the moon.

And then:

Si vinieran los gitanos,
harían con tu corazón
collares y anillos blancos

“If the gypsies were to come, they would make necklaces and rings white necklaces and rings out of your heart.”

Then the moon says, “Niño, déjame que baile.” “Leave me alone, let me dance.” And I'm just imagining this child in bed, delirious with fever, both watching the moon and knowing that the moon is there to take him away. There’s a tension there between protection and fear — just like there's an ambiguity in the relationship between the moon and the child.

Niño, déjame que baile.
Cuando vengan los gitanos,
te encontrarán sobre el yunque
con los ojillos cerrados.

“Whenever the gypsies come, they will find you over the anvil with your little eyes closed.” She is not worried about the gypsies being able to do anything with her heart. She knows that she has power. And she threatens the child with death.

The image of the anvil suggests a sword, or any piece of metal, that's going to be beaten into shape and formed by a metal worker. It's a shocking image, because the idea of anything on an anvil has that connotation of something being heated, forged. And also is sort of a metaphor for something that is on the altar of sacrifice.

The moon uses ojillos, “your little eyes,” a diminutive, so the moon has a real tone here. She says these things in a sort of carefree way, even though they're really sinister.

Then the child again:

Huye luna, luna, luna,
que ya siento sus caballos.

He's telling her, go away, go away, go away. I hear the gypsies coming -- I hear their horses.

And then she says:

Níno, déjame, no pises
mi blancor almidonado.

which means “Child, leave me alone. Don't step on my starched whiteness” -- which, if you can imagine, now the child's rising out of bed and maybe tugging at the moon like kids do. Like, “Mom, mom” ... poke, poke, tug, tug, tug.

But no pises mi blancor almidonado suggests “don't step on.” Don't step on my starched whiteness -- which makes me think again of that skirt, with its design of polisón de nardos. So if the child is either pushing the moon away, or trying to tug at the moon so that the moon will flee, maybe he's stepping on her skirt in a hurry. She’s annoyed.

There’s a stanza break , and then it says:

El jinete se acercaba
tocando el tambor del llano

This really struck me yesterday. I never put this together before, but the rider of that horse we heard about before is like playing the “drum of the plain” -- a metaphor for the sound of a horse galloping across the open plain that is like the surface of the drum. I don't know why this image never jumped out at me before.

And then:

Dentro de la fragua el niño,
tiene los ojos cerrados.

Inside the forge, the child's eyes are closed. We didn't really have a full setting before for where the child was in relationship to anything. We didn’t know whether he's in a house or what, but now we have a setting: the forge -- a liminal space where one thing is transformed into something else. And now that anvil makes a lot more sense.

So we have the child with his eyes closed, and then it says:

Por el olivar venían,
bronce y sueño, los gitanos.

I have some opinions about these four verses. The gypsies are coming through the olive orchards, but bronce y sueño -- they're coming back from work in the olive orchards. They're bronce, the colors of their skin, and sueño -- their exhaustion from working.

Las cabezas levantadas
y los ojos entornados,

— their heads raised and eyes half closed. We only see the whites of their eyes, like they look up to the sky. Entornados is a word that I'm going to have to wrestle with, but it gives a real image of these gypsies coming in from the field, sunburned and tired and heads held high, their eyes betraying their fatigue.

And then there's a stanza break and it says:

¡Cómo canta la zumaya,
ay cómo canta en el árbol!
Por el cielo va la luna
con un niño de la mano.

Suddenly we have this bird, the zumaya. (2) “Listen to the zumaya singing, how it sings in the tree.” Suddenly there's this eruption of sound. Right now I don’t know if this zumaya has any kind of cultural connotation.

And then going through the sky is the moon, with the child by the hand. So that's the way we know the child is now dead:

Por el cielo va la luna
con un niño de la mano.

The moon has kidnapped the child.

And then the final stanza:

Dentro de la fragua lloran,
dando gritos, los gitanos.

Inside the forge, the gypsies are crying and shouting, or screaming. They've found the child dead, and they cry and they shout. And the final two lines are:

El aire la vela, vela.
El aire la está velando.

What’s interesting about these final two lines is that there's a certain ambiguity about the direct object, the pronoun la. So the air is watching it, watching it right now... but what that “it” is, is sort of ambiguous. Could it be the moon, because la is used, or could it be the fragua, the forge? This editon of Romancero gitano says that it can only possibly be the forge, and then they have some apocrypha that they say confirms this and whatever.

But I think that the ambiguity of the la, for translation purposes, is not the thing that causes the problem. Because you can sort of leave it out in translation, but the problem is the words la vela and velando. We can't say watches because we've already had watches in the first stanza, where it says:

El niño la mira mira.
El niño la está mirando

So we have this mirroring effect in terms of the structure, but vela is literally to watch. The child is watching the moon, and there the reference is very clear, but velando is a little bit more specific. It doesn't mean just to watch, it's like what you do when you're at a viewing of a work of art, for instance. You can't say “the air is viewing it, viewing it” because the word also has an essential sense of guarding. Like you're keeping watch over, but in this religious way. So maybe it's a vigil. Yes. it's a vigil.

How you capture that in a verb is really interesting. It's really hard to do. So this is my current puzzle, but it’s something like “the air watches over, watches over.” You want to preserve that verbal structure. If we wanted to kick out the second vela, you could say “the air keeps vigil.” But that would ruin the translation in a way, because it doesn't respect the structure of the line. It would sound really awkward to say “the air sits vigils, sits vigil.” Maybe use an alternate: “sits vigil, watches over;” but then you're getting too far away from the original, which requires a repetition.

You really need that sense of paying attention, that idea of vigil and sitting, and the connotation of mourning. It's really hard to capture in English. So that's what I'm struggling with right now.

Also, vela as a noun means candle. So whether it's there or not, you cannot help but feel this tug between the verb to watch over or to keep vigil. And also the image of the candle -- even though it's sort of not there, it's there in the homonym.

Notes

(1) Spikenard — Lavandula stoechas, or Spanish lavender, a flowering plant in the family Lamiaceae, occurring natively in several Mediterranean countries, including France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.

(2) Zumaya — The European nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus) is a crepuscular and nocturnal bird in the nightjar family that breeds across most of Europe and the Palearctic to Mongolia and Northwestern China. The preferred habitat is dry, open country with some trees and small bushes, such as heaths, forest clearings or newly planted woodland. The male European nightjar occupies a territory in spring and advertises his presence with a distinctive sustained churring trill from a perch. Feeds on a wide variety of flying insects, which it seizes in flight, often fly-catching from a perch. It hunts by sight, silhouetting its prey against the night sky. Its eyes are relatively large, each with a reflective layer, which improves night vision. (Wikipedia)