Translating E. E. Cummings’ experimental poetry into Spanish within the framework of stylistics: exploratory case study of ‘it’s jolly’

Abstract

As restated recently in The New Yorker, E. E. Cummings’ style is identifiable from his particular use of punctuation and typography (Muldoon, 2014). Though this is more notably reflected in his experimental poetry, this part of Cummings’ literary production remains mostly untranslated into Spanish. This comes about as a result of the few translations of his poetry into Spanish in general (Canales, 1964; 1973; Paz, 1971; 1974; González de León, 197?; Perednik, 1995; Casas, 1996; Fonseca, 2003; Cueto-Roig, 2006) and, more concretely, of the tendency to exclude the more avant-garde poems in these anthologies. The difficulty that these poems may entail for the translation process, as well as the sometimes negative critical reception of this part of his poetic discourse, may have played an important role in this situation. My overarching aim, thus, is to make E. E. Cummings’ experimental poetry more visible for the Spanish-speaking general reader. This chapter takes the poem ‘it’s jolly’ (Cummings, 2016: 268) as a sample of Cummings’ more experimental poetry. This will be analysed stylistically, with a strong focus on the notions of foregrounding and deviant structures, and then translated into Spanish. My proposal here links the practice of translation with the analysis itself, heavily relying on the idea that style is essential to literary translation (Boase-Beier, 2006: 112). This work will serve as a test (and model) for the translation of other experimental poems by E. E. Cummings, which I plan to collect together and translate into Spanish in a bilingual anthology for the general public.