31. #PopsugarReadingChallenge: Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Verse: A Bilingual Edition

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book in 2 languages
Book: Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Verse: A Bilingual Edition (Christopher Maurer, Ed.)

This book really brought home how difficult it is to translate poetry, especially for a poet with Garcia Lorca's wide-ranging vocabulary. Spanish is a language that lends itself to lyric poetry, as most verbs have regular endings that make for easy rhymes. The English translations in this book gave a good sense of the meaning of the poems, but sometimes lost the music. For instance, here's the opening of one of his most famous poems, "La Guitarra:"

Empieza el llanto
de la guitarra.
Se rompen las copas
de la madrugada.
Empieza el llanto
de la guitarra.
Es inutil
callarla.
Es imposible
callarla.

Here's the translation by Cola Franzen:

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless 
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.

It's accurate in conveying the meaning, but without the rhythm and rhyme, it loses the musical feel that makes the poem memorable.

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