Tiffany Troy on Translating Santiago Acosta

As a literary critic, I often begin my interviews with: “What is the act of literary translation to you?” Translators often respond with some version of the sentiment that translation is an act of radical activism. That is all well and true, but at its most fundamental level, literary translation is much simpler. In a Tupelo Quarterly interview I conducted with Lara Vergnaud, translator of Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences, she explained what translation is to her toddler son as: “Mommy takes books written in French and she changes all the words into English. They are different words but they mean the same thing.”

The verisimilitude of language—carrying over syntax, diction, and tone—allows for the original work to shine through. Percy Bysshe Shelley calls this exercise the “vanity of translation” because “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.” I would argue, however, that translation requires a high degree of accuracy to convey the appearance of sameness. So it is an exercise of precision and artfulness, in not falling to the trappings of the ego. Often times, the choice of one word versus another relies on intuition and common sense.

This all feels very nebulous, doesn’t it? In action and in practice it often means having multiple bilingual dictionaries, monolingual dictionaries, and thesauruses open all at once together with the reading aloud of Santiago Acosta’s words.

But beyond the mechanical act of translation are the translator and the poet. And I would like to touch upon how Santiago has changed me for the better.

I first met Santiago at the top floor of Columbia’s Casa Hispánica (also home to Sundial House), close to a decade ago. I was a girl from Queens who grew up in a non-English-speaking household, who migrated to New York City, where Spanish was taught in public schools. Santiago taught a section of Hispanic Cultures II on the Anthropocene and of course I had no idea what the “Anthropocene” was. I was eager to interpret on behalf of first-generation immigrant workers from English and Spanish. My role, to put it bluntly, is to translate their exact meaning onto the page for the courts. The Spanish class would help me hone my fluency.

Often times, the choice of one word versus another relies on intuition and common sense.

What began as a need to translate Spanish well morphed into a deep admiration of Santiago’s poetry, which is unlike the intensely personal lyrical poetry typical of the American canon. If my view of the world has been focused on the here and now, within air-conditioned offices and courtrooms, Santiago’s The Coming Desert looks to how “in the free circulation of commodities, there is no center or edge. / We are all part of the same untraceable sludge.” His vision of servitude, forced labor, and exploitation in student protests looks at the precarity of politics in Venezuela, the Global South, and around the world, with “lines of bulldozers parked at the bottom of the valley, awaiting the final order.”

In collaborating with Santiago and in having some poems workshopped by the Women in Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin, led by Lori DiPrete Brown and Sarli E. Mercado, I’ve learned to be sensitive to the valences of specific words, to convey the apocalyptic linkages between the past to the future’s ruin. There is something prescient in Santiago’s self-described fever dreams that move me in my own writing about my community and identity within the diasporic community, in thinking about the broader meaning of the word “toxicity” beyond the “positive toxicity” of the workplace. Instead, Santiago teaches me to look at “toxins” accumulated at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn and elsewhere, and the bullet-studded walls of student protests, and the broader implications of real environmental and political catastrophes. Santiago’s poetry does not offer solutions or resolutions, but visions—as when you see “the border where hope and death reconcile.”

I am elated that my co-translation of Santiago Acosta’s “Dead Horse Bay” and “Bone Broth” are included in Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation. In writing and in life, it is toward this border that I wake up and forge forward each morning.

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (2023). She translated several poems for the anthology Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation, edited by Elvira Blanco.