Publishing house Valparaíso Editions’ newest poetry publication, “Herbarium” was written by Elizabeth Mirabal, third-year Spanish Ph.D student at the University. Originally from Havana, Cuba, Mirabal wrote “Herbarium” as a 205 page collection of free verse poems about the flora of Cuba.
Two years ago, “Herbarium” was translated by a group of six undergraduate students in Professor Nieves Garcia Prados’ class, SPAN 4040, “Translation from Spanish to English.” The English edition was published in November 2024 and presented to the public last month at an event in collaboration with the University’’s Sigma Delta Pi chapter, a national Spanish language honor society.
Herbariums, a practice dating back to 15th century Italy, are collections of botanical specimens that are dried and pressed onto paper for scientific study. Mirabal’s “Herbarium” does not contain physical plants but rather poems, all of which relate somehow to the vegetation of her home country in contexts ranging from the medicinal to the culinary to the purely aesthetic.
“My grandmother and my aunt, they used to have this garden in my house, but I have been living in the U.S. for 10 years. I have been far away from those plants,” Mirabal said. “Because I cannot have the plants of my homeland near me, I decided to write a book with all the memories that I have about the plants in my life.”
Mirabal describes the book as being made up of memories characterized by plants of her youth in Cuba and vignettes from the perspective of past writers with connections to Cuba. This blend of Mirabel’s personal nostalgia for Cuba and its herbage, as well as similar reflections from writers that preceded her, allowed her to fully embrace the complex emotions that memory can elicit.
“I think the book is written around nostalgia, and nostalgia is like a bittersweet feeling,” Mirabal said. “If we think in the origin of the word, ‘nostos algia’, ‘nostos’ is’ place’, and ‘algia’ is’ pain’, and it's a pain for a place that you cannot be anymore.”
The book features tones both sad and humorful, and the poems themselves range in length from a single sentence to paragraphs. This decision, according to Mirabel, allows for readers to flip back and forth between pages on their own accord and approach the book with total freedom when reading.
The process of translating the book started a little over two years ago in Garcia Prados’ translation class. A normal final project in SPAN 4040 consists of translating four or five poems or pages of a novel as part of the class’s coursework. According to Bliss Bodawala, student translator and fourth-year College student, Garcia Prados typically selects several students to work on a special translation project. This time, however, Garcia Prados met with Gordon McNeer, director of Valparaíso Editions and professor at the University of North Georgia, who agreed to publish some poetry that had never been translated into English. After Garcia Prados proposed a few different projects, the two settled on “Herbarium” as the work to be translated.
“This book has some cultural references that we talk about in the translation class, how to translate very specific cultural references [of] plants, plants, trees, and she used the colloquial term of the plants,” Garcia Prados said. “So how can you translate that into English? I thought that it could be very interesting to see [what] would be the solution for that.”
After Garcia Prados’ conversations with McNeer, students now had an opportunity to be selected to do a professional translation for the publishing house. Students in the class submitted their translations of the poems, and in the end, a group of six were selected off of the quality of their samples to translate “Herbarium” — Bodawala, Class of 2023 Alumna Leah Baetcke and fourth-year College students Mitchell Francis, Amelia Pearson, Ben Riley and Thomas Tayman.
Bodawala said that the process of translating poetry is complex, as poems often contain literary devices and a rhythm specific to its original language, so translators must find a delicate balance between word-for-word translation and capturing the spirit of the original text. Trying to find this balance was Bodawala’s central focus in her translation of “Herbarium”.
“One of the hardest parts is to find that fine line in between literal translation and completely figurative and poetic translation, because you don't want to distort what the author's original message is,” Bodawala said. “So what I would try and do is translate the feeling of it, and then again, incorporate that feeling into the English version.”
When asked about the most challenging factor in the translation process, Mirabal and Garcia Prados pointed to the balance between literal and poetic translation. Mirabal’s description of Cuban flora often uses the colloquial terms for the plants, rather than the scientific names. According to Bodawala, identifying what plants Mirabal refers to in some of her poems was a major difficulty in this balancing act. Still, the choice to use the colloquial names was an intentional one, and the translators worked hard to maintain the nostalgic feeling that comes with them when translating.
“We had to find botany books just to understand which plants were which so we could have an accurate translation of them,” Bodawala said. “We were also trying to avoid using the scientific names, because the scientific names kind of take certain emotions out of the feelings that are associated with such plants, like poison ivy.”
For Mirabal, having her work translated means a continuation of the literary connection between the United States and Cuba. She cited examples from American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who spent much of the last part of his life in Havana, to José Martí, a Cuban writer and national hero who helped unite Cubans in the United States.
“It's always a joy of inspiration and sometimes also a sort of comfort, because even when I am alone, I feel that the spirits of the writers that used to live and write and think and feel here are with me, and they are part of my tradition,” Mirabal said. “I am not alone.”
The last 60 years of damaged relations between the United States and Cuba has led to a lack of cultural exchange and common ground between the two countries, Mirabal said. However, with Mirabal’s “Herbarium” and the students’ translation of it, a window into Cuba and its diverse plant life tied so deeply to Mirabel, is opened for Americans to experience.
“If you are not translating, you are not showing the world of the people who are writing, of the authors,” Garcia Prados said. “If you are translating a work in another language, you are opening possibilities, opening windows and you are showing the culture of the author.”
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