Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.

−−Federico García Lorca, “Theory and Play of the Duende”

More than any contemporary Spanish poetry I’ve had the opportunity to read, David Leo García’s poems seem to seek,through careful playfulness, the same path as the duende—that “mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained” Lorca put at the sad and buried heart of all Spanish art (Falla as qtd. in Lorca). In this search, the poet has “neither map nor discipline”; as in Lorca’s description of the duende, “We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art (3). My job as a translator, then, has been to re-trace those inscrutable steps—to dive down to the duende of his poems and to bring back not simply his mastered greyness, but the greyness precisely in its moment of transformation into silvers and pinks, a flower just before it’s dead.

The initial tracing was nothing but pleasure: reading a David Leo García poem is as delightful as placing the last, snout-shaped piece in a puzzle of a cocker pug. Digging into “Dessert Menu,” for instance, I found absurd carrot after absurd carrot, chomped by absurd character after absurd character. The comic action began to overwhelm my senses; I was in an assembly-line of carrot-eating—a sensation emphasized by the repetition of “comiendo zanahorias” at the beginning of four lines and the ceaseless enjambment of the various chompers. It’s an odd and fun onslaught of images from a very Wonderland-esque world, but the poem’s speaker ends up somewhere completely surprising: right beside us, tilting his head to the side at the same strange sight, sighing in what might as well be my own exasperation.

Forgive me, ma’am, but why

would I want two perfect eyes

if—regrettably—the only thing I can see

is fields of men eating carrots (9-12, translation mine)

After reading these last four lines, what might have been an easy rendering of absurd images became a much more difficult task. Where exactly had that mysterious force crept into the blood of the poem, making tiny explosions of powdered glass? There is a sadness here—an awareness of the speaker’s circumscribed perceptive faculties, a loneliness in his ease of dismissing so important a sense as sight. There they all are, those people, who cares what they do, they’re all doing the same thing. But it’s a sadness felt only in the undercurrent of a flippant interaction with a waitress—and precisely in that undercurrent the speaker exhausts, rejects the vividness of imagination.

How was I to import his very smart lines of cheeky annoyance— “Perdone señorita para qué/ quiero dos ojos en perfecto estado/ si lo único que veo a mi pesar/”—into English without giving them a much too dramatic sense of futility? The key, for me, ended up being in the translation of that final image. I held on tightly to the to “plains of men eating carrots” as an English version of what the speaker sees in the end; I loved the ambiguity in the Spanish llanuras, as in plains or lowlands or flatness, the two-dimensional abstract quality that seems to be the lament of the poem. But it was much too-elevated diction for a crucial moment, and the substitute “fields” was a simple choice that made an enormous difference. It kept the visual image priority without losing the connotations of a flat expanse. The speaker seemed less like a bigote-clad hipster who spoke at inopportune times about geography; he became an ambiguous Seer of all of the disparate people in Spain eating carrots, the base ingredient of a carefully chosen dessert, having a special knowledge of it, aware of this keenness, reacting with just the right gradient of irony as the waitress (who has becomes much more ambiguous too, a sort of Deliverer of Desserts, an enforcer of enjoyment) who tells him to pick what’s yummy and good for him, to be a comrade, and of course he thinks, eh, what’s the point?

Of course I had many other obstacles in producing a satisfactory translation of “Dessert Menu”—how to import a list of Spanish professions into roles an English audience would be familiar with, for instance, while keeping the same sense of arbitrary social division (counselors became politicians, pedants professors). But I was astounded on how a translation can hinge on a single word and the journey it’s made “over the heads of the dead”—that though you might not be able to map the work of a poem or ever truly understand the poet’s own turns and bends, if you’ve luck you will eventually hit a magical hotspot; touch, for a second, the duende.

I’d also be a carrot-chomping dullard if I didn’t mention the subtle and genius use of form Leo García wielded in a lot of these poems. Unsurprisingly, the sonnets were especially hard to import from Spanish over to our clunkier, anglo-saxony tongue. I abandoned the attempt to rhyme at all in “Pink Moon,” but found that very discipline to be the only thing that helped me open up the world of “Sign.” More often than not, I abandoned the stricter guidelines of a form that in his Spanish seemed effortless for the benefit of carrying across more vividly the images of these strange little worlds—little worlds that nonetheless manage to drop a great arsenic lobster on you when you least expect it.