The poem as a whole: translating Chris Mccully’s Icarus and Houses

Abstract

This article presents translations from English into Spanish for Icarus and Houses, two poems from Chris McCully’s Selected Poems (2011), along with a critical commentary. I discuss the controversial topic of poetic translation and some of the most relevant theoretical issues related to it, including the dichotomy of originality and equivalence, the usefulness of framing the endeavour within the principle of equivalence effect, the importance of treating the poem as an organic whole, and the benefit of considering different forms of intertextuality during the translation process. Using Robert Bly’s Eight stages of Translation (1982) as a methodological guideline, I discuss some of the decisions that led to the final Spanish version of the poems. I conclude that translation, even beyond poetry, should be framed as a creative act rather than a passive rendering of what has already been said.