Author: C. Sandbatch

Amanecer / Dawn

(On the Bosporus, In Two Voices)

Space is trembling again—hear the cannons awake—
Smoke unravels the sky, stains the robe of the dawn.
morning’s garments blackened
by smoke unspooling.

Oars are tumbling and playing on waves that laugh back;
In the thickets of Thrace, tiny birds trill and call.
from Thrace, in the thickets,
little birds gurgle and trill.

The mind is made gentle; the senses arise
With the whisper of wind and the cool of the hour.
the cool breath
of this world’s edge.

Palace chambers of light, cut from alabaster,
Greet the muezzin who sings to the vanishing star.
royal chambers,
alabaster-bright,
welcome the muezzins
who praise the departing star.

Hear the hamal intone his slow ritual prayer;
From Yildiz to the kiosks, reverberations ascend. 
the hamal intones
its ritual supplication;
from Yildiz, to the kiosks,
palace echoes arise.

Aromas drift pure in the blue of the air;
Pigeons flicker their wings over towers of stone.
pure scents wander
through the blue expanse—
pigeons scattering
their wings to the wind
above Istanbul’s towers.

Bright voices are rising through Genoese halls,
While the sickle’s sharp laughter is lost in the wheat.
bright voices ring
from Genoese khans,
and the sickle’s call
spills through the ripened fields.

All the ruins grow bright, lose their sorrow and gloom;
Butterflies spiral up, and the insects hum low.
ruins lose their gloom,
their sorrowful aspect—
butterflies are loosed,
 mariposas spinning—
and insects buzz their secrets.

Now the kadinas tune up their idle headscarves
In the jangle of the harem; black swallows awake. 
headdresses tune
the idle kadinas
in the hush of the harem;
black swallows awaken
in the murmuring chambers.

Flowers unfold and stand tall on the stalk;
Seraglio’s razored brow blazing with color.
petals unfold,
lifting along the stalk—
se inunda de colores 
la Punta del Serrallo.

Melodies run with the waves on the sea,
Touching columns and brushing the heights of the minarets.
melodies stream
over the ocean,
slipping into colonnades,
rozando en alminares.

There is music that fills every court with its peace—
But a siren’s long wail stirs the calm in the bay.
a tranquil concert
fills every courtyard;
in the harbor’s waters,
a siren’s note
disturbs the calm.

Now delight in the clamor, the clarion’s ring
That is torn from the barracks where Selim’s men sing.
Turkish battalions are lifting their voices
And the glory of morning resounds in their song.

A Note on Translation

Translation, as Vladimir Nabokov so tartly reminds us, is never a matter of simple substitution. Translators, as he tells us someone else told him Pushkin once said, are like “horses changed at the posthouses of civilization.” To speak of translating poetry — especially a poem of intricate vernacular, as are the jewelled tapestries of Antonio de Zayas’ Spanish Modernismo — is to admit from the outset that something will always be exchanged, displaced, or transformed along the way.

Nabokov, who I am often amazed never wrote a book explaining why he writes such good books, delineates three kinds of translation and dubs them thusly: paraphrastic, lexical, and literal.

The first, paraphrastic translation, is the “wildest steed in the stable,” and envelops a style most associated with Ezra Pound: it runs freely, discarding or adding as it pleases, galloping toward the tastes and expectations of its new audience, sometimes so intent on elegance that the landscape of the original poem is left far behind. Nabokov, not being a practitioner of this style, disliked it and warns us not to mistake the sleek coat of stylishness for fidelity; the cost of too much freedom is that the poem ceases to be what it was. I am less critical, but it is not really what we have done here.

The second, lexical or constructional translation, follows the path more dutifully, word by word, line by line, aiming to mirror the original’s grammar and vocabulary as closely as possible. Here, the poetry often gets stabled in a kind of semantic livery: the basic sense remains, but the fire of the poem—the animating rhythm, the quicksilver play of sound and association—is often left behind in the straw. These, are, in my opinion, the worst.

The third, and for Nabokov the only “true” translation, is the literal: a method that seeks to render, as far as the constraints of a new language allow, the exact contextual meaning, the full associative power, and the unique syntactic flavor of the original.

Nabokov though, and this should be emphasized, was always hiking trails with a map. His most famous translation, Eugene Onegin, had already been butchered and rebutchered so many times, that his own corrective literalness served its own purpose. Not so lucky here are we here on this is new ground. We must try to grab the reader and ferry their imagination across the gatepost whole and intact.

Modernismo is not just another branch of the international modernist tree. While English and French Modernism often hunger for fracture, irony, or psychological interiority, Modernismo pursues sensual abundance, layered ritual, and the colors and perfumes of distant places. Tactile orientalism, we might also call it. De Zayas’s poem, from his collection Byzantine Jewels, is perched at dawn above the Bosphorus, and is not a lament for loss or an experiment in despair, but an act of synesthetic celebration: a tapestry of light, prayer, commerce, song, and the mingling of languages in a city at the crossroads of civilizations.

In ferrying de Zayas from an old horse to a new, I’ve chosen not to chase rhyme at the expense of accuracy, nor to reduce the poem to a lexical skeleton. I do not have a name for what I’ve done, but I try to hold to the poem’s sequence and sensory richness, letting the imagery, architecture, and ritual drift as close to English as the language allows.

Yet there remain names, professions, flavors—hamal, Yildiz, Selim’s barracks—that cannot be truly rendered by translation, only transplanted. Here is where my method departs from strict literalism: I let the Spanish (or Turkish) surface, as an echoic call and response, weaving it into the English line. This is not just code-switching for ornament’s sake; it’s a structural acknowledgment that Amanecer en el Bósforo inhabits the liminal space between languages and worlds. The result is a kind of poetic border crossing polyphony in two voices. The English reader is invited to inhabit these echoing borderlands, to slow down, to listen for what refuses to be footnoted, explained away, or abandoned.

In this way, I hope to keep Zayas’s dawn alive in English — not a domesticated sunrise, but one that arrives across languages — with dawnbreak in the City of the World’s Desire bearing the charge and bloom of the original, changed as all travellers are, but still unmistakably itself.

A small bit of advice to the “out loud” reader: the italics are scored for a woman’s voice, but in the case of a solo reading may be improvised or excised entirely.

C. Sandbatch is an American writer and poet based in New Orleans.