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Song of the Snow

by Amado Nervo (1870-1919)
translated by Isabel Chenot

How miraculous Nature is!
Doesn’t the snow give light? Immaculate
and mysterious, tremulous and quiet:
it appears to kneel in noiseless praise
__while falling … Oh snowfall!
your weightless and glacial eucharist
this day, my vital sin absolve
and make my soul, like you, revolve
white, cold, silent, and luminous.

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Original Spanish

Jaculatoria de la Nieve

¡Qué milagrosa es la Naturaleza!
Pues,¿no da luz la nieve? Inmaculada
y misteriosa, trémula y callada,
paréceme que mudamente reza
al caer . . . ¡Oh nevada!:
tu ingrávida y glacial eucaristía
hoy del pecado de vivir me absuelva
y haga que, como tú, mi alma se vuelva
fúlgida, blanca, silenciosa y fría.

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Isabel Chenot lives in California. Some of her poems are available in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood books. She’s currently illustrating a few childrens’ books.

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12 Responses

  1. Monika Cooper

    This is so delicate and beautiful. “Weightless and glacial eucharist” is especially fine. And I appreciate your decision to end on the note of “luminous,” though diverging from the original word-order. It makes a full circle as it ties back to the question in the second line. (But the poem still feels like it opens out widely into the seeming infinity of snowfall. It’s a white lyric blurt, a micro-rapture.)

    You should know I’ve admired your work from a distance before this. I have multiple pages in a commonplace book dedicated to the poetry of Isabel Chenot, which I once chased from site to site, in wonder.

    I hope you get a warm welcome at the Society. It’s good to see your work here.

    P. S. “Nevada” is such a marvelous word. How did I not know?

    Reply
    • Isabel

      Oh wow, that is so kind, Ms. Cooper! It’s very nice to “meet” you here. I’m truly awed that anyone would hunt my work out and copy it out, the way I do with poetry I love. I have copied out reams of poetry in my life 🙂 … I’m so glad you’re one of the people a few of my own efforts were meant to find, apparently — I will go hunt up some of yours today :-).

      I wish I could have figured out how to end on “cold” — I feel like his ending so was linked to the sin of living (which I rendered vital sin, because I think it is a play on mortal sin). But every way I figured out how to do that wreaked more alteration than a word order change, earlier in the poem. And yes, I felt that “luminous” tied into his very first thought, so was a justifiable word order alteration when I had to decide between those two approaches. Perhaps I’ll learn how to translate without having to make such decisions someday … but it’s a gorgeous poem, and I hoped mostly to communicate something of his love for structure and beauty, of his meaning, and of his awe.

      Reply
  2. Paul Freeman

    Not knowing Spanish, I can only say I enjoyed the idea of snowfall’s pristineness being cleansing.

    Reply
  3. Alan Steinle

    I like Nervo and your translation. I hope we see more of your translations on this site. I also translate from Spanish, although I usually have to look up many words in Spanish. You can find some of my translations of Nervo on this site. The only things that might be mistranslated here are “reza” (prays) and “que… se vuelva” (let… become; “volverse” also means “to become”).

    Reply
  4. Isabel

    Thank you, Mr. Steinle — I will search for yours. I appreciate your thoughts here very much too. — On “Reza”, I understood recited prayers ? the content of which is often praise or adoration. I thought Nervo was thinking of that praise element as much as petition, which is often what we are primarily thinking of with “prays”. With Volverse — again, I thought Nervo (who seems to have a really fugue-like approach) may have had in mind with this transformation the idea of transubstantiation in his practice of eucharist, as well as the spinning of the snow (“return” is one of the wider usages of “se vuelva”, and in context he seems to be longing for a return of the soul to innocence). I can see that someone else might make a different judgment on those words, but that’s my rationale!

    Reply
    • Alan Steinle

      Thank you for your reply. It is usually very hard or impossible to translate double meanings and puns into another language. So it ends up being a judgment call as to how to translate these words. The reason I mentioned these two instances is because, to me, snow doesn’t appear to be kneeling when it is falling and because revolve doesn’t seem to be Nervo’s principal meaning in volverse.

      For the last line, I might have written:

      “and let my soul become, like you,”

      Having said all that, there is a nearly infinite number of ways to translate a poem, and one is not absolutely better than the others. Since I am not a Catholic, I don’t have the same word associations as you do, so I would tend to find different meanings in the words.

      Reply
  5. Alan Steinle

    I just realized a few minutes ago that your translation rhymes. In my defense, there is only one “perfect” rhyme: absolve/revolve, but I am a little slow sometimes… 🙂

    Reply
    • Isabel

      Thank you for these thoughts; I am grateful for them. My husband and I talked about these very word choices, and some others, as I was working on this; so I understand your points. I appreciate that other people would make different choices for sound reasons, and that I myself might make different choices down the road. I will readily admit that I am not able to write at the level of someone like Amado Nervo, so my efforts to render his poetry are going to be limited by my own faculties in many respects. And I think that in any language, the more brilliant and nuanced a poet is, the more he’s working on all the levels of the craft — the more difficult it becomes to render the poetry faithfully — not just linguistic nuances and form (I didn’t quite catch either of those — though I tried to catch some echoes), but the beauty and awe that is on the original. If something of the awe on this one came over, that’s especially what I hoped to share. It was definitely worth his saying in the grimy, cynical world, and worth trying to say again. Maybe my effort will inspire someone else to say it again too :-).

      Reply
      • Alan Steinle

        I am planning to submit some short Spanish translations to this site. I was wondering whether you and/or your husband would like to provide some feedback on my translations before I submit them. If not, that’s okay. If so, you can email me at the following address (it is only “mail” and not “gmail”):

        alanwriter
        at mail period com

  6. Margaret Coats

    A lovely and careful translation, Isabel. Appreciate seeing your concern for each word evidenced in the discussion. I very much like “vital sin” and the choice of “revolve.” The latter simply realizes how much a fine poet like Nervo considers varied meanings of his words, and presents readers with more than what may be most common according to the dictionary. Translations shine when they are able to reflect multiple or allusive meanings.

    Reply

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