#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews SUR(RENDERING) by Mario Martín Gijón

Poetry often means experimenting, with the language itself, with its textures, its structure and building blocks. Mario Martín Gijón does exactly this in his highly inventive and very playful work. He takes the language apart, separating it into its most fundamental elements and then reassembling it, both in straightforward and not-so-straightforward ways, creating mirrors, duplications, adding strata with slightly changed tinges, or sometimes with a strong contrast, and reassembling broken words. Just read/listen to this: I sense / the world (t/b)urn /(w)r(i/ot)ting.

The name of the game is simultaneity and ambiguity. It’s about unpicking, getting the layers out in the open, about seeing. This intricate mosaic is created and re-created through the use of brackets, slashes, dashes and other punctuation marks – their role being to point to the cracks and ruptures, to deepen them, to make them more visible, but also to heal them, to join and re-join, like a strong render. A bit like the Japanese art of kintsugi. The old and the new meet and coexist. The puzzle is constructed in the process, but it’s the reader’s choice what they actually see in the final image. As with all good poetry – it’s very much up to the reader …

As I was reading this ingenious translation, I kept kicking myself for not being able to penetrate the original Spanish. I kept asking myself how closely the English versions reflected the originals. The translator, Terence Dooley, explains his process in the introduction to the collection. He admits that he made a decision to remain faithful to the meanings created by the poet while ‘completely displacing and reconstructing his effects’. Words had to ‘be found in English (often elsewhere in the poem) capable of the dislocations and relocations, the Russian doll/Rubik cube effect, his method demands’. I think the end result in English is not only skilful, but truly gifted.

One more thing is bugging me, though – how do you read such poetry at live events? How does Gijón read his poetry in Spanish and Dooley his translations in English? How do they mark the simultaneity and ambiguity so strongly built into the verse?

As a reader of poetry, and as someone who can’t read Spanish, I can’t wait to see and hear more of Gijón’s poetry translated into English. And if Terence Dooley is the translator, that’s even better.

Reviewed by Anna Blasiak

SUR(RENDERING)

by Mario Martín Gijón

Translated by Terence Dooley

Published by Shearsman Books (2020)

Read The Spanish Riveter here or order your paper copy from here.

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Anna Blasiak is a poet, writer, translator, journalist and Managing Editor of the European Literature Network. Recently she translated According to Her by Maciej Hen, published a bilingual poetry and photography book with Lisa Kalloo Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime, and a book-length interview with a Holocaust survivor, Lili: Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation with Anna Blasiak.

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