Versión castellana del poema “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856) de Walt Whitman
English text at http://www.poetryfoundation.org
Spanish Interpretation by JMN
[Translator’s note: I’ve arbitrarily divided part 6 into 3 segments. The third of the three segments follows. The poem has 9 parts.]
[6.3]
[I] Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Unido fui con los demás, los días y sucesos de los demás,
Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Llamado de mi nombre familiar fui en voz alta y clara por los chavales cuando me veían acercar o pasar,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Sentí sus brazos en el cuello estando yo de pie, o bien el apoyo casual de sus carnes contra mí cuando me sentaba,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Vi a multitudes que amaba en la calle o en el buque o en la asamblea pública, y no les dije jamás palabra,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Viví la misma vida que los demás, el mismo reír, roer, dormir,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
Hice el papel que todavía recuerda al actor o a la actriz,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
El viejo papel de siempre, el papel que resulta ser lo que hacemos de él, tan grande como deseamos,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
O tan pequeño como deseamos, o bien grande y pequeño a la vez.
[End of part 6]
(c) 2021 JMN. All rights reserved
‘Miner of Difficult Truths’
I can study all day Alice Neel’s brushwork and modeling of flesh and features, how she gestures at her subjects’ surroundings with casual precision. Her “Carmen and Judy” has a frank, womanly exactness and searing intimacy that The New Yorker’s pages show, and Hilton Als’ words ponder, with greater authority than I command here:
These great, almost unbearable late works bear witness to a bravura without a trace of self-consciousness. You can see it in “Carmen and Judy” (1972), a portrait of Neel’s cleaning lady nursing her disabled child. The curators point out that it was unusual for a woman of color to expose her body to the artist in this way, and I can vouch for that. Privacy is one of the few defenses there is against poverty and racism. But Carmen was no doubt able to reveal herself to Neel because she knew that Neel would see what she needed to see: Carmen’s trust, Judy’s dependence, all those years of living in a difference that was not difference to the artist, who had her own years of loss, of children’s love, of trying to render this and so much more in works that would continue to live, despite the darkness of her obscurity and then the light of her fame. Looking at Carmen look at Neel, and thus at us, is like staring straight at the sun. We can’t do it, but we try anyway.
One of her early influences was the work of Robert Henri, a founder of the Ashcan School—a movement that challenged the bourgeois prettiness of the work of the American Impressionists. The Ashcan School focussed on what the Impressionists left out—poverty, dereliction, ugliness. Neel’s developing realism went further. She was not Ashcan but emotional gutbucket, a miner of difficult truths.
(Hilton Als, “Alice Neel’s Portraits of Difference,” thenewyorker.com, April 26 & May 3, 2021 Issue)
(c) 2021 JMN