![]() 1 Sometimes I translated the Spanish with unnecessarily archaic terms sometimes I opted for contemporary, overly literal equivalents, approaching the intended meaning at a slant. My rule was to follow the order of the original text. My process was this: I translated as I read the dictionary, choosing only the parts that were interesting to me-sentences, fragments, and sometimes a single phrase extracted from an entry. For a time, working through this dictionary was one of the practices that governed my life. Its appeal as an object lies in its slender portability to me, though, it has felt very big. The English Treasure is small, materially, published as a poetry pamphlet with a stapled binding and a pale pink cover. The translation is unconventional in that I also erased most of the book to make a series of prose poems from it, in a volume much shorter than the original: forty-eight pages of text. It stretches to more than 1,500 pages in the version I worked from the entry for “elephant” alone is twelve pages. His Treasure is copious, encyclopedic, filled with citations from authority, personal anecdotes, popular refrains, etymological and theological speculation. He’s something of a Samuel Johnson, I sometimes explain to English speakers as a cultural translation, except that Covarrubias came first, which might make Johnson the translation, and to me Covarrubias is a more interesting writer. ![]() When I tell this to Spanish speakers, they often say brightly, oh, Covarrubias. When I tell this to English speakers, they often seem puzzled or amused. It was the first monolingual dictionary of a European language, the Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language by Sebastián de Covarrubias, originally published in 1611. In the essay below, Hendrickson describes the process of bringing Covarrubias's idiosyncratic entries into English, both erasing and translating his work to create a new poetic text.įor several years, I translated a dictionary. In her poetry pamphlet Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language, published by New Directions, Janet Hendrickson experimentally translates Sebastián de Covarrubias's four-hundred-year-old Spanish dictionary.
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