“Deep Well of Stars”: The Translation of Images in the Poetry of Antonio Colinas

Abstract

Researchers of literature, myself included, do not tend to study poetry from a very scientific perspective. I tend to examine the aesthetic aspects of poetry, primarily literary images. When considering a very visual body of work like that of Antonio Colinas, it is intriguing to look beyond the limits of the literary field to see the connections that exist among the eyes, imagination, poetry, the arts, and the mental functions that allow us to enjoy poetry, especially that which can be experienced with all the senses. I say all the senses, not only sight, because an image also can be auditory, gustatory, olfactory, or tactile, although this study centers largely on the visual. In the following pages, the roles of the eyes and mind will be connected to the translation of poetry and the translator’s personal process of translating not only the text of a poem, but its visual landscape. As José Enrique Martínez Fernández writes in his introduction to Colinas’s collection En la luz respirada: “El [. . .] entendimiento simbólico de la realidad, [. . .] consiste en ir más allá de las cosas, en intuir su lado oculto, un paso más allá de lo que perciben los sentidos.” (The [. . .] symbolic understanding of reality [. . .] consists of going beyond things, of intuiting their hidden side, one step beyond what the senses perceive.) This study explores sensory perception in relation to verse, and also reaches past this, seeking to illuminate some of the hidden processes of translating poetry. I always have understood poetry as something that resides in the visual part of the imagination, although this is not true for everyone. When I read or translate a poem, its images (but not always its words) linger in my mind. Let us begin by briefly examining how the human brain forms mental images and by connecting this phenomenon to poetic images. Neuroscientists have demonstrated that the two hemispheres of the human brain have separate functions and different ways of processing information. The left side of the brain, in general, is the base of “logic, language, orderliness, sequential time, and arithmetic,” according to researcher Thomas West. It is believed that the right side is in charge of “visual images, spatial relationships, face and pattern recognition, gesture, and proportion,” in addition to intuition, emotions, creativity, art, and music. While the dominance of the left hemisphere in the general population results in a majority of verbal thinkers, “the opposite tendency—to think in pictures instead of words,” also exists. In brief, people process information in verbal and visual ways at different levels in the two sides of the brain. From this idea, we may deduce that there are different levels of ability in forming mental images and of the innate tendencies to form them in the first place. A 2020 article by Serena Puang in The New York Times explains that the lack of ability to form mental images, called aphantasia, also exists. Today, research into mental imagery continues to grow within several scientific and academic fields, including literature. As William J. T. Mitchell asserts in “Showing Seeing,” his 2002 article about visual studies, seeing is an act that is learned. For many people, acquiring internal images is part of this learning process. Mitchell writes that “visual images [. . .] are actually symbolic constructions, like a language to be learned, a system of codes that interposes an ideological veil between us and the real world.” Given this explanation, we should ask whether, or how, the way in which mental images behave within our own imaginations is something learned by way of society or culture. If, in fact, one learns to see in the way that Mitchell explains, one also learns to imagine visually. Upon reading a text, our visual education and mental storehouse of images can allow us to see something of what the poet has seen and experienced, such as places, objects (including art), and people. Developing this mental and visual database gives us, as readers and translators, more information to be able to produce a translation that TRANSLATION REVIEW 2023, VOL. 116, NO. 1, 16–27 https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2023.2226699