Throughthe empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over theheads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind withthe odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing theendless baptism of freshly created things.

−−FedericoGarcía Lorca, “Theory and Play of the Duende”

More than any contemporary Spanish poetry I’vehad the opportunity to read, David Leo García’s poems seem to seek,throughcareful playfulness, the same path as the duende—that “mysteriousforce that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained” Lorca put at thesad and buried heart of all Spanish art (Falla as qtd. in Lorca). In thissearch, the poet has “neither map nor discipline”; as in Lorca’s description ofthe duende,“We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejectsall the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya,master of greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art (3). My job as atranslator, then, has been to re-trace those inscrutable steps—to divedown to the duende of his poems and to bring back not simply his masteredgreyness, but the greyness precisely in its moment of transformation intosilvers and pinks, a flower just before it’s dead.

The initial tracing was nothing but pleasure:reading a David Leo García poem is as delightful as placing the last,snout-shaped piece in a puzzle of a cocker pug. Digging into “Dessert Menu,”for instance, I found absurd carrot after absurd carrot, chomped by absurdcharacter after absurd character. The comic action began to overwhelm mysenses; I was in an assembly-line of carrot-eating—a sensation emphasizedby the repetition of “comiendo zanahorias” at the beginning of four lines andthe ceaseless enjambment of the various chompers. It’s an odd and fun onslaughtof images from a very Wonderland-esque world, but the poem’s speaker ends upsomewhere completely surprising: right beside us, tilting his head to the sideat the same strange sight, sighing in what might as well be my ownexasperation.

Forgive me, ma’am, but why

would I want two perfect eyes

if—regrettably—the only thing I cansee

is fields of men eating carrots (9-12,translation mine)

Afterreading these last four lines, what might have been an easy rendering of absurdimages became a much more difficult task. Where exactly had that mysteriousforce crept into the blood of the poem, making tiny explosions of powderedglass? There is a sadness here—an awareness of the speaker’scircumscribed perceptive faculties, a loneliness in his ease of dismissing soimportant a sense as sight. There they all are, those people, who cares whatthey do,they’re all doing the same thing. But it’s a sadness felt only in the undercurrentof a flippant interaction with a waitress—and precisely in thatundercurrent the speaker exhausts, rejects the vividness of imagination.

How was I to import his very smart lines ofcheeky annoyance— “Perdone señorita para qué/ quierodos ojos en perfecto estado/ si lo único que veo a mi pesar/”—into English without giving them a much too dramaticsense of futility? The key, for me, ended up being in the translation of thatfinal image. I held on tightly to the to “plains of men eating carrots”as an English version of what the speaker sees in the end; I loved theambiguity in the Spanish llanuras, as in plains or lowlands or flatness, the two-dimensionalabstract quality that seems to be the lament of the poem. But it was muchtoo-elevated diction for a crucial moment, and the substitute “fields” was asimple choice that made an enormous difference. It kept the visual imagepriority without losing the connotations of a flat expanse. The speaker seemedless like a bigote-cladhipster who spoke at inopportune times about geography; he became an ambiguousSeer of all of the disparate people in Spain eating carrots, the baseingredient of a carefully chosen dessert, having a special knowledge of it,aware of this keenness, reacting with just the right gradient of irony as thewaitress (who has becomes much more ambiguous too, a sort of Deliverer ofDesserts, an enforcer of enjoyment) who tells him to pick what’s yummy and goodfor him, to be a comrade, and of course he thinks, eh, what’s the point?

Of course I had many other obstacles inproducing a satisfactory translation of “Dessert Menu”—how to import alist of Spanish professions into roles an English audience would be familiarwith, for instance, while keeping the same sense of arbitrary social division(counselors became politicians, pedants professors). But I was astounded on howa translation can hinge on a single word and the journey it’s made “over theheads of the dead”—that though you might not be able to map the work of apoem or ever truly understand the poet’s own turns and bends, if you’ve luckyou will eventually hit a magical hotspot; touch, for a second, the duende.

I’d also be a carrot-chomping dullard if Ididn’t mention the subtle and genius use of form Leo García wielded in a lot ofthese poems. Unsurprisingly, the sonnets were especially hard to import fromSpanish over to our clunkier, anglo-saxony tongue. I abandoned the attempt torhyme at all in “Pink Moon,” but found that very discipline to be the onlything that helped me open up the world of “Sign.” More often than not, Iabandoned the stricter guidelines of a form that in his Spanish seemedeffortless for the benefit of carrying across more vividly the images of thesestrange little worlds—little worlds that nonetheless manage to drop agreat arsenic lobster on you when you least expect it.