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Two giants of Chilean poetry have been translated into French; Raúl Zurita and the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gabriela Mistral. Thanks to two lovers of poetry and of Chile, Laëtitia Boussard and Benoît Santini, and the Caractères publishing house, French-speakers can now get closer to the works of those authors who are “a banner” for Chilean youth.
After three decades of the last French translation of a work by Gabriela Mistral, the French-speaking public can enjoy an anthology of her poetry and prose. “We found it essential to re-propose more up-to-date translations that may be of interest to the reader today,” said Laëtitia Boussard, teacher and translator.
In the case of Raúl Zurita, a tormented character and at the same time very complex in the construction of his poetry, the title of the work recently translated into French is ‘Purgatorio’.
“It is a challenge. The poetry translator faces a series of difficulties, formal conciseness in particular, and in the case of Zurita syntactic disorder, the use of neologisms”, points out Benoît Santini, also a translator and teacher.
“It is very important to us to respect the particularities of the source text, it is a meticulous job that forces us to let the text rest and then return to it and make a series of decisions. That is why this work with four hands seems important to us”, adds Santini.
The complicity of the translator’s work joins the passion for the two Chilean poets, who immerse the reader in a coming and going of images and texts from which it is difficult to escape.
“Working with four hands is a very enriching experience because it allows us to cross our gazes from a point of view, from a common ‘translational’ position; our looks complement each other, we can exchange, debate and reach an agreement. And we also listen to the text. It is very important to us that the text sounds good in French. We read it out loud, always; we let it rest, we reread it again. So there is a form of wealth that arises from that complementarity at work”, notes Boussard in Escala en París.
Despite the age difference of six decades that separates the two poets, Gabriela Mistral and Raúl Zurita are closely followed by the public in their country, particularly young people. His political commitment and the wealth of his work seduces a new generation.
“Young people rewrite poems by Gabriela Mistral, as is the case of Pablo Paredes and Diego Ramírez, for example. It is more difficult to know in the case of Raúl because he continues to write, he is well integrated into these current cultural media. But his spiritual son –which is what he calls him- is Héctor Hernández Montesinos”, Laëtitia Boussa tells us.
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