Translator’s notes:

When I started translating Guerrero Peirano’s poetry from Spanish to English for a different project a few years ago, I had known her through her writings on the pages of her artbooks, and virtually, when we started to discuss my queries and drafts electronically. At some point, I received a text message from her, telling me that she was visiting a friend in a city called Albany, asking whether that was maybe the Albany I lived in, “although you never know with the many repeating names of cities in the US.” Three hours later we sat together at a local coffee shop, scribbling notes in our notebooks. Her friend turned out to be a colleague of mine teaching Spanish at a college in the area, Lisette Balabarca-Fataccioli. The jumps from the page and screen to the in-person encounter, and from one language to another have now become expanded jumps between three languages, with the help of even more generous translational guides in varying real and virtual spaces. I finish this triple translation, reading over the printed versions in each of the languages, put next to each other on the floor. I make final choices to allow Guerrero Peirano’s poetic style marked by syntax-defying word orders and minimalist use of punctuation that give the impression to be floating on the page and resonating way beyond the end of lines be translated into the English and German languages with their syntactical norms so different from Spanish.

This spatial quality of my practice echoes the poem’s focus on spaces, locations, sites that spark memories, perceptions, and encounters in the poems themselves: it starts on the microlevel, with the challenge to render lines made up of single words from one language into a language that relies on a different word order. A case in point is the adjective “infinita” (infinite, endless), the sole constituent of line 7 of the poem “En la disco”, harking back to “una única madrugada” at the conclusion of the previous line. The infinity of an endless dawn reverberates and expands powerfully in the Spanish original in the four-syllable word, with its triple repetition of the vowel ‘i.’ The German “endlos” and English “endless” with their sparse two syllables ending in a sibilant sound don’t quite capture this rich echo of an extended (seemingly unending) reverberation. I decided on the German “ohne Ende”, even though it duplicates the single word in Spanish. My motivation for doing so was mainly phonetic: its tone is similarly grave to the Spanish one, as it is made of four rich syllables with a resounding triple repetition of the vowel ‘e,’ stressing the next-to-last syllable as does the Spanish original. My English rendering is not the single word “endless” (the direct translation of the Spanish) or the two-word option “without end” (the direct translation of my choice in German), as both these English words resound much less than the original “infinita” with its phonetic focus on the third, repeated ‘i’ prior to slowly disappearing in the final syllable ‘ta.’ In order to reproduce this rich echo on the space of the page, and when read aloud, my English translation alters the original syntax, has the “one” conclude the previous line that triggers an enjambment towards the “endless dawn.” This pondering over one single word (admittedly, the word “infinita”), and my leaping from the printed draft in one language to another to yet another had me experience the profound interplay of sound (expanding in time, but also traveling through space and encountering obstacles such as the human eardrum to be translated) and location (positions on a page, moments during a reading) in this poetic work.

Intradiegetically, Guerrero Pairano’s poems germinate in shared spaces, at a club, church, on a bridge, at a precise address in Lima. These spaces are marked by networks of experiences, gazes and desires that travel from, say, the dance floor to the elevated dj’s console, or from one side of a coffee table to another, to refer to Gottried Benn’s lines that serve as the epigraph of “Baile” (from Benn’s poem “Teils Teils”/ “Partly Partly”), where “he smokes/she twists her rings.” These minute everyday gestures reveal broader significances such as boredom, insecurity or utter estrangement. In the two poems selected here, perception is eminently space-bound. Yet it is never fixed, as it can travel, such as in the form of a quote (“cita”, the Spanish word for quote, also means date, appointment, engagement or rendez-vous) and be inserted into, hence mark and open up to a different linguistic and geographical context.

The most direct spatial marker of Guerrero Peirano’s poems, the apparently easiest ones to translate, were related to names of specific locations, the Peruvian desert or urban centers such as Lima, Boston and Berlin. Yet again, these locations are not still, but are perceived to be in flux or overlapping. When the overly tired dancers step out of the club, they are blinded by the light of dawn: “The white light of Lima (are we still in Berlin?)...” This leap from the Peruvian to the German capital establishes an encounter on the page based on experiences, affinities and images that build up on each other.

The images or experiences never glorify or hypnotize. Instead, they create neo-surrealist countertimes or counterspaces that allow for a fleeting self-perception and experience in language beyond the maddening repetition of the broken record of the ever same. Guerrero Peirano’s poetic dances are thus rebellions against the devaluation of experience. It has been one of the main aims of mine to carry over this movement as a potential creator of experience in two new languages. In the words of Georges Didi-Huberman, citing Walter Benjamin: “The course of experience has fallen, it’s true. But it’s up to us not to play the market. It’s up to us to understand where and how this movement ‘at the same time is making it possible to find a new beauty in what is vanishing’ (Benjamin ‘Storyteller’ 146).” (Survival of the Fireflies 67). Guerrero Peirano’s works describe such movements of intense experiences as inventions, ever fragile, but filled with desire, in the middle of nothing less than our everyday lives.