Amid the picturesque Argentinean landscape of Entre Ríos, a mysterious man, a river, and a greening horse intersect with themes of gay desire in this seemingly simple yet highly evocative poem by Washington Atencio.
Argentinean poet Washington Atencio was born and currently lives in Entre Ríos, a vast province in eastern Argentina. The province is called ‘between rivers’ as it is located between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers. Rivers and the subtropical landscape are prominent features in Washington’s work, as are the contrasts between earthy and ethereal substances, emotions, and homoerotic desires.
At the 2024 Ledbury Poetry Festival’s translation workshop, we discussed how to translate the expressive title ‘Nuestra sombra volcada en el río’. We explored the various meanings of ‘volcar/volcada’, particularly in the context of shadows blending into the river. We considered words such as ‘gushed’, ‘flowed’, and ‘merged’, and even delved into the word’s origins and its resemblance to the noun ‘volcano’. After much discussion, we ultimately settled on ‘tumbled’ as we felt it better captured the sense of a sudden fall.
There was an interesting discussion about the translation of the word ‘llanura’, which represents a specific landscape of Argentina often associated with Gaucho literature and prominent Argentine writers like Jorge Luis Borges, José Hernandez, and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. Some participants suggested translating it as ‘plains’, ‘steppes’, ‘tundra’, or even ‘grasslands’. After a thorough discussion about the unique qualities of the landscape, we decided to keep the word in Spanish to directly connect it to the landscape, the country, and its literary traditions.
In the fourth stanza, we were presented with a fascinating dilemma: How do we translate the lines “lo acaricio/lo revuelco/me deshago” while maintaining the rhythm, rhyme, music, and tonality in those verses? We reached a consensus by using the present participles “caressing/wrestling/dissolving”, emphasizing not only the homoerotic elements in the source text but also its connections to the river and the lyrical “I” flowing into the water.
Leo Boix- Poet and facilitator