Ashon Francisco LaForce

Versos Alexandrinos

¡Biblia, mi noble Biblia, panorama estupendo,

en donde se quedaron mis ojos largamente,

tienes sobre los Salmos las lavas más ardientes

y en su río de fuego mi corazón enciendo!

Sustentaste a mis gentes con tu robusto vino

y los erguiste recios en medio de los hombres,

y a mí me yergue de ímpetu sólo el decir tu nombre;

porque yo de ti vengo, he quebrado al destino

Después de ti tan solo me traspasó los huesos

con su ancho alarido el sumo florentino

-Gabriela Mistral

Alexandrine Verses

Bible, my noble Bible, a wonderful scene,

Where my eyes had remained.

Your Psalms are the torch igniting flames.

And in his flaming stream, my heart begins to steem

You sustained my people with your robust wine

In the midst of men I stand upright

I rise with a drive to celebrate your might

I’ve returned with a fate that now is blind

From here, your words will stab through me

For your vastly scream reigns supreme

-Translated from Spanish by Ashon LaForce

Alexandrine Verses

Bible, my noble Bible, your stupendous view

My eyes remain longing for you

With Psalms rich, like lava

Within your lava that flows, your heart burns and glows.

You sustained my people with your sturdy wine

and stood a sturdy stance in the midst of men,

And I rise with the impetus to say your name

For I come to you with broken a fate

After you just pierced my bones

with its wide cry the Florentine topmost

-Translated from Spanish by Ashon LaForce

Translator’s statement

Born April 7, 1889,  in Vicuña Chile, Gabriela Mistral’s love for poetry started at a young age. Her Father, Juan Jerónimo Godoy Villanueva, while not very present in her early years, often wrote poems, and sang to her with his guitar. Her Mother, Petronila Alcayaga, influenced her attachment to family and Spanish, Basque, and Indian heritage. She also inspired her desire to succeed. Prior to her reputation as a successful poet, Gabriela Mistral worked in the educational systems of both Mexico and Chile, participated in cultural committees of the League of Nations, and was a Chilean consul in Naples, Madrid, and Lisbon. She obtained an honorary degree from the Universities of Florence and Guatemala, alongside being an honorary member of numerous cultural societies in Chile, the United States, Spain, and Cuba. In 1914, she established herself as a poet with her Chilean prize for her poem “Sonetos de la Muerte” (“Sonnets of Death”). From there, Gabriela made a multitude of classics: Desolación (1922; “Desolation”), Ternura (1924, enlarged 1945; “Tenderness”), Tala (1938; “Destruction”), Lagar (1954; “The Wine Press”).

The poem I decided to translate was “Alexandrino Versos” (“Alexander Verses”), taken from Fernando Silva’s podcast known as, Fernasssilvat. Gabriela’s “Alexandrino Versos” follows a four, four, two line structure ( The first two stanzas are composed of 4 lines each, while the last stanza consists of 2 lines), and follows an ABBA ABBA BB rhyme scheme. Translation is a tricky process; on one hand, you aim to illustrate the tone, and emotion present in the original work, while also trying to make it cohesive to a foreign audience. In an excerpt from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: “Languages as Bridges”, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o describes the role of a translator as:

“[T]he maker of bridges between languages. Translations have played an important role in the history of ideas. The much-talked-about European Renaissance would have been impossible without translation. Christianity and Islam and their spread all over the world have been enormously aided by the translations of the Bible and the Koran.” (58)

Keeping this quote in mind, I attempted to link the two languages (English, and Spanish) together with my first translation. In this translation, my goal was to capture the emotion and tone of the original text, while also staying true to the original format. One major challenge I faced when translating this poem, was the rhyme scheme and tone.  In the original poem, the first four lines are the following:

“Biblia, mi noble Biblia, panorama estupendo,

en donde se quedaron mis ojos largamente,

tienes sobre los Salmos las lavas más ardientes

y en su río de fuego mi corazón enciendo!”

The last word of lines one and four, estupendo and enceinte create the “A” in the rhyme scheme. When translated literally, it translates to:

“Bible, my noble Bible, wonderful panorama,

where my eyes were long,

you have on the Psalms the most ardent lavas

and in his river of fire my heart is burning!”

However, when translated literally from Spanish to English, it not only loses its rhyme scheme; which plays a vital role in creating the tone and feel of the poem, but it also breaks the two quatrains (4 lines), one couplet (2 lines) format. To compensate for the loss of flow and rhyme, my translation replaces the “o” sound found in estupendo with a hard “e” in the word scene. Similarly, to counteract the missing rhyme in the second and third lines, I replaced the “e” sound in largamente, with the hard “a” sound found in remained. In my translation it states;

“Bible, my noble Bible, a wonderful scene,

Where my eyes had remained.

Your Psalms are the torch igniting flames.

And in his flaming stream, my heart begins to steem”

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Bibliography

“Gabriela Mistral – Biographical - NobelPrize.org.” Nobel Prize, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1945/mistral/biographical/. Accessed 26 April 2023.

“Gabriela Mistral | Chilean poet | Britannica.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 March 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gabriela-Mistral. Accessed 26 April 2023.

Neruda, Pablo. “Gabriela Mistral.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gabriela-mistral. Accessed 26 April 2023.

Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ . “Langages as Bridges.” From The Language of Languages: Reflections on Translation. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2023.

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Ashon LaForce is a 16-year-old Meridian Academy student. Ever since he could hold a crayon, his love for art has stood by his side as a way of self-expression. Nowadays, instead of crayons on construction paper, Ashon now turns to video game development to express his creativity through story, animation, and music!