Monday, October 24, 2011

Pirenenqes // Pirenaicas

After a late evening filled with baroque poetry and a morning of modernist poetry, these lines from Maragall stand out -- as far as the etching of landscape is concerned.

I em vaig tobant tan bé an allà entremig
i em ba invadint com una immensa pau,
i vaig sent un troç mès del prat suau
ben verd, ben verd sota d'un cel ben blau.

Y cada vez más a gusto en este entorno
me ba invadiendo una inmensa paz,
me voy sintiendo parte de este prado
tan verde y suave bajo el cielo azul. (55)

The Spanish translation from the Catalan slightly displaces suau and misses the repetition at work in the last lines, which emphasizes a sort of continuity between the color (verd), its adverb (ben) and a texture (suau).  To speak a bit more on the translation, there is also a cool discrepancy between entorno and entremig.  The former implies the surroundings of a single point, where the latter actually gestures at a space between two different points (spatially or temporally).  This last point is crucial in the dissection of landscape poetics because one text emphasizes a singular viewpoint, whereas the other (the Catalan original), thinks between at least two points.

This last point plays out significantly in the poem's situation because in the previous sections, Maragall moves from an isolated mountain landscape, which is etched out through a series of negations ("les flors són esblaimades / les flors són d'un blau clar, / blavoses o morades;") to a more humanized environment.  This is carried through the mediating metaphor of the child (la niña mimada / la nina aviciada), a figure he likens to the mountain mist.  This movement (in the immobile mountain range) transports us to a coded environment that seems like a town.  The intricacies of the poem play out between these two places.

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