TRANSLATING  THE OUTRAGE OF THE YEARS

Harold Alvarado Tenorio is a very large man. His shoe size is 46, and the rest of him is in proportion.

He sometimes looks quite forbidding and even fierce; but it is not difficult to make out that his heart is also enormous. He is a generous friend and tirelessly dedicated to sustaining poets and poetry; and his capacity for compassionate identification with human experience reaches into all the times and places to which his wide and deep culture gives him access.

What first attracted me to his work was these glimpses of other lives, the journey through history and space stopping at a variety of briefly but intimately illuminated stations - shores, city streets, railway carriages, bars, bedrooms, real or imagined, in different eras, countries and continents. Gradually I realized also the subtlety of the perception behind the scenes. Not only the people portrayed but also the speakers of the poems, even when it seems to be the poet himself speaking, are ‘others’, masks. Very rarely does a reader feel sure that the poet’s feelings are being directly expressed; instead, his enveloping solitary gaze hovers over the whole.

My job as a translator was to lose none of the resonances of the apparently simple (though always cultured) language from which both the gallery of scenes and the emotional world of the poems are constructed. It was a struggle to preserve brevity, emphasis, subtle rhythm, while choosing the exact right words. I hope I have succeeded to the extent that a reader can appreciate something of the quality and tone of a poetry far removed from the narcissistic outpourings and the raw colloquial or experimental productions common today. In his style, the hugeness of Harold Alvarado becomes containment, delicacy, suggestion.

Critics have agreed on the power of these measured poems, and on the melancholy that arises from their celebration of many aspects of life, especially desire. Which, paradoxically, makes the grateful celebration no less vibrant and sincere. The sense of loss - of love, of innocence, of hope for the future – is not complaint. It is awareness of time passing, and of the crisis of our age, horror at our violence and sadness for the way we are forgetting to risk our limited selves and to serve excellence. The melancholy has a classical reference, in accordance with the subjects of some of poems; and at times it resembles ‘fin-de-siècle’ decadence and cynicism. But it can be closer to the detached sadness of Zen artists before the impermanence of beauty and of life itself. Death, though not often mentioned, is a presence among these poems.

For me it has been a challenge and a satisfaction to translate into English – to attempt to translate – this rich world with all its layers and contrasts.

Rowena Hill