La marcha hacia ninguna parte / Motion Towards No Place

Author: Tania Favela Bustillo

Translator: William Rowe

Publisher: Veer Books (2023)

"That sound is lost in the translation of poems is a thing generally said; and sense too, given their intertwining. But in William Rowe’s translations of Tania Favela there’s no loss but instead a series of sonorous-semantic operations and alterations that involve a gain in the English.  In Favela’s poems a voice—embodied as arm, jaw or mouth—mingles with other voices—read, heard, thought—in a minor tone. To say minor tone is not to say weakness of speech: the whispers that run through her poems are full of vocal force, embodied in hesitations, iterations—of words, phrases and sounds—and constant detours that create a rhythm as if they were theatrical directions inside a work without narrative, without representations. What Rowe achieves in these translations is to give a sharper sonority to Favela’s poems: a distinctly dryer timbre through the play of the larger quantity of monosyllables available in English. The result is a condensed, tense movement of sound centred on the rhythm, which is where the emotion of these poems materialises. An instance, from the first poem: punza la voz como mordida de hormiga - the voice pierces like an ant-bite."

—Luis Verdejo