go for it

“La sirena y el pescador,” Elisa Chavez.

Hey all! This poem is part of my chapbook Miss Translated, which I produced in a limited run as Town Hall Seattle’s Spring 2017 artist-in-residence. The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.

and something about…blood? and transformation?  oooh yikes.  she didn’t want legs in the spanish version did she.  and it was a painful process.

First, I should tell you my experience of reading this. I didn’t even look at the English at first, because I didn’t know that the mistranslation was the point, and of course I didn’t need it. So I read the whole poem in Spanish and thought it was really sad and moving. Then I looked at the English and my eyebrows went right up to my hairline. Why the hell would you translate it this way, I thought. 

Then I read the caption and realized that this is a genius way of demonstrating how translation into English can be an act of colonization and violence.

I would translate the first two lines as “The mermaid rose from the sea / To see the dry world.” They’re very neutral lines. She was curious about the dry world, so she went to check it out. That’s a very different connotation from the mistranslation, which tells you that the mermaid preferred the land to the sea.

The second two lines I would say mean “She found a fisherman on the beach / this beautiful fish without a net.” She’s the one with agency here, not the fisherman, and she thinks of herself as a free fish, unconstrained by a net, not as a fish without a home.

The next three lines by my lights read “She had a gleaming tail; scales / that covered her breasts, arms, and face / and a wake of lacy waves.” Again, it’s from her perspective, not the fisherman’s, and she thinks of herself as having a gleaming rather than oily tail, a lacy wake rather than a frothing one.

Next stanza: “The fisherman caught her by the tail / and cut it in half.” From her point of view, the fisherman has committed a sudden and senseless mutilation. Then he goes, “’Now,’ he said to her, ‘you have legs. / Why don’t you walk?’” It’s almost like an accusation. You have legs now, why don’t you just get up and walk?

My read on the next stanza is: “The mermaid began to sing to the sea / for aid, her blood transforming / the sand of the beach into rainbows.” The sea is her home, not the land, and she’s crying out to her home in pain as she bleeds.

Then the poem ends with “She sang to the fisherman, ‘I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.’”

The reason this mistranslation is so brilliant is that it takes a story about a mermaid trying to forgive a man who’s committed senseless violence against her, and turns it into a story about a man who uplifts a woman to a better life out of the kindness of his heart. And the thing is, that’s exactly what happens to so many stories from colonized cultures when they’re adapted by the oppressor. Translation into English, and further the cultural language of the oppressor, can be an act of violence and erasure rather than one of respect.