[mignon ledgard]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

Thanks for your guidance, Roger and mignon. Draft Four is posted above, with the main changes to the second quatrain.

You are both certainly correct that Rueda likes to leave things open to several meanings, and that my coming right out and saying "lava" excludes other possibilities (as well as spoiling the guessing game for the reader). Rueda's mention of joy rather than anger makes me think that "encendida" is likelier to refer to other aroused passions than anger/malice, in addition to the intensity of the red color, and to heat. The shape of the "oblong slash / mouth" might be, in addition to a description of the oval shape of most watermelons, a delicate reference to feminine anatomy and its juices. I was also struck by the various meanings of "freshness" in the contexts of watermelon, liquids (hot and cold), and femininity.

Rueda was noted for his playful coplas (quatrains), most of which can be read more than one way. Preserving as many of those dimensions as possible is a real challenge in such short pieces.

I mainly chose to translate this sonnet because I was in a summery mood.

mignon, I would recommend leaving the French accents in étagère.

Julie,

Definitely “other aroused passions than anger” when it comes to “encendida.” Then the following:

“Slice after slice, leaving marks
as the skilled knife separated them
alive to illusion as no others.”

The boasting of the "skilled knife" and the repetitive descriptions of the gashing. The violence of it. And the inserted “vivas / alive to illusion as no others. It does indicate a ‘favorable nod.’

“señalando” = marcando

Another word/meaning for ‘señalar’ may be ‘pointing to’ or ‘haciendo señales’ which would be ‘signaling’, but they don't apply.

This one is, perhaps, the most sneaky, because he has the article “las” starting the next line, immediately after “señalando”
and attaches what follows to it (to ‘las’). This works at least two ways: detaching the reader’s mind from the immediate: “señalándolas” and making it look like the author is getting away with a little slip, for the need to go on with the next bit. (The dictionary may be of little or no help.)

I don’t claim to have read all there is to this poem. And I’m not happy to break the illusion. But even the ‘freshness’ you mention is iffy, because there are many ways to interpret the word ‘fresh’.

Thank you, Julie, for the advice on ‘étagère’.
~mignon

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks, mignon! A new S3 has been posted to Draft Four, above, taking your comments on "señalando" into account.

I remain convinced that this sonnet really is, first and foremost, a celebration of the joyful drama of slicing a watermelon, and that the sexual connotations of the description are just playfully naughty.

I don't think that the sonnet is primarily about violent sex, and that the watermelon is merely a polite subterfuge for doing that publicly, as implied by your rhetorical question above, "Do you think that a poet of some stature would take the watermelon as a serious 'theme' to write about?" My answer to that is an emphatic "Yes!"

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a watermelon is just a watermelon. I hope that my translation choices leave both the light and dark possibilities open, but I strongly prefer a less dark reading, myself.

[mignon ledgard]

Julieee!

I am amused. More accurately, I am enjoying your demeanor and feeling a bit poorly because I cannot not see the darkness in this poem. But then, De Sade did it to impart pleasure, as seems to be the case in this poem. To each their own?
But all that raw red gives me the creeps, and about 40 years ago, I saw my daughter's leg sliced that way, by nails sticking out of a neighbor's fence while she was playing ball--a long gash that "widened" while waiting too long at the emergency room.

Yes, it's a watermelon.
Sigh,
~mignon

**I enjoy the fun you're having and hope nothing will ruin it. It is, as you say, a poem of many angles.

[mignon ledgard]

Julie,

You are exorcising the poem!

Ha,
~m

[Carl Copeland]

Julie, I know you’ve been going deeper into the Spanish with Mignon, but I thought I’d mention that I no longer understand the English in S3. “Ink” is an odd addition, but one I can deal with. But I come out of that stanza now with no idea what the words are doing. I read what Mignon said about Rueda stretching the language out of shape, but it can’t be that tortured, can it?

I also wondered if you might drop the article before “ebullience” to regularize the anapest. I don’t insist on maximum regularity (it’s one of the big lessons I’ve learned on the Sphere), but this opportunity seems too easy to pass up. (You may want it scanned as “th’ ebullience,” but who knows about poetic elision these days?)

[Julie Steiner]

Thank you, mignon and Carl. Tweaks to the second and third stanzas of Draft Four are posted above in response to your comments.

[Carl Copeland]

Brilliant, Julie! You’ve brought S3 into sharp focus for me now. I’m glad you’ve taken the “ink” out in favor of “stained,” but—based only on your discussion with mignon—I wonder why you didn’t use “marked” instead.

S2L4 now seems very dense, and I’m not sure what “that” is pointing to in the preceding line. You could create a wee bit more space with:

a fiery mouth whose spurts of joy reveal
a simmering ebullience, wildly fresh.

And it would avoid repeating “whose.”

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks, Carl! Suggestion for L8 gratefully accepted.

Whatever I do along the lines of mignon's suggested "marked them" works only on the level of seeing the knife primarily as a sexual metaphor, and the slices as the emotionally and physically traumatized recipients of its violent penetration.

I'm trying to leave my translation open to that sort of reading, since the original was; but I am still giving priority to the reading that the watermelon is, first and foremost, a literal watermelon, whose slices are sticking to each other, but which still show the cuts, perhaps with a bit of telltale juice marking those cuts, as if they were only drawn-on, with ink. That's what I'm seeing, anyway.

I hope my purple tweaks to LL9–10 get closer to allowing both of those readings.

In L5, I want to keep the "that" in front of "mouth" to prompt the reader to ask, "Huh? What kind of mouth could that be?" "The" instead of "that" doesn't seem strong enough to me. And using "a" instead of "that" would make my use of the present-tense "reveal" instead of the past tense "revealed" feel off. I may change my mind about that, but that's what feels right to me at the moment.

[Roger Slater]

I like it. It reads to me like something Rilke might have written, though I'm not sure why I say that. Anyway, that's a good thing. My only note is that I somehow don't like the sound of L11. Maybe it's just the mouth-feel of saying "illusion" and what it does to the line. I know it's a cognate of the Spanish word, but it sounds better in Spanish. Maybe "made it seem that not one slice was made"? In any event, the revision brought the poem alive.

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks very much, Rogerbob. Perhaps "maintained the ruse no slices had been made."

If this gave you Rilke vibes, the next one I'll workshop will, too.