Translated into Spanish by Pilar Villar-Argáiz and Manuel Villar-Raso

Dunstable, UK: Small Fat Boy Press, 2025, 79 pp.

ISBN: 979-8-296711-39-7.

“In a poetic work, only a small part of the message is encoded linguistically; the rest is implied and lies within the translator’s area of responsibility” (Lahini 2022: 3). The translation of poetry, thereby, is a dynamic process of disembodiment and semantic re-inhibition within a new linguistic paradigm. Pilar Villar-Argáiz and Manuel Villar-Raso’s translations of Gerry Murphy’s (Cork City, 1952) poems exemplify a phenomenological fidelity to the Irish poet’s semiotic impetus, effectively channelling his wry voice, eidetic aesthetics, and liminal undertones into Spanish with skill. In his latest publication, Translation and its Discontents. La traducción y sus insatisfacciones: Selected Poems by Gerry Murphy (2025), the poems’ transpositions showcase the effectiveness of preserving Murphy’s written art of vacillating at the threshold of the readers’ consciousness into a Cervantine constellation.

Prominent academic journals have disseminated a significant portion of Pilar Villar-Argáiz and Manuel Villar-Raso’s translations of Murphy’s poems. Thus, this latest volume represents a milestone by building upon translations published in the Journal Estudios Irlandeses (2013). It stands as an alchemical synthesis of Villar-Raso’s literary sensibility for visceral themes of love and disruption, which merges with Villar-Argáiz’s scholarly mastery of Irish studies, poetry, and gender studies. Coincidently, their approach is intuitively underpinned by theoretical frameworks that move beyond mere linguistic transfers such as Carl Jung’s conception of symbolism,[1] Paul Ricoeur’s theory of translation and metaphors,[2] Parmenides’s importance of structural gaps or doxa,[3] and Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic.[4] These frameworks, at play, enable them to navigate the subconscious affective currents of Murphy’s poems while making the translations an example of hermeneutical craftsmanship.

To maintain Murphy’s lyrical style, visual impact, and surges of subversive passion without compromising the poems’ intelligibility or semiotic charge, the translations have been conducted not on the basis of literal transposition, but rather through a deeper emotive and psychological sensitivity and intellectual sharpness. The selections of the translated poems span Murphy’s career, from A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards (1985) to My Flirtation with International Socialism (2010). The compendium of translations embodies what Lawrence Venuti termed the “illusion of transparency” (1995: 21), offering a fluent Spanish discourse that eschews domesticating Murphy’s distinctive voice, while employing a nuanced poetic foreignization through “the effect of fluent discourse” (1995: 1) in their translations. Thus, Villar-Argáiz and Villar-Raso approach Murphy’s works methodically, demonstrating their understanding of the undercurrents that drive imagistic and emotive impetus of each poem rather than relying solely on superficial rationality. This intellectual and affective feat also concurs with Ricoeur’s ideas that “symbols give rise to thought” (1967: 437) because there is a “semantic essence that stimulated the intellectual activity of finding hidden meaning” (1970: 18). It also underscored Jung’s perception of poetry as a “threshold phenomenon” (1966) and “Parmenides’s importance of the ‘space between’” (Coxon 2009) that demand in-depth comprehension of the importance of the liminal spaces and breaks between words and lines that function as mechanisms in capturing imagistic brevities and subversive juxtapositions central to Murphy’s method.

Indeed, one of the most salient qualities that seems to constantly emerge in Murphy’s poems, which remarkably remains intact in Villar-Argáiz and Villar-Raso’s translations, is the imagistic brevities that function through subversive juxtaposition, resisting obvious paratactic exposition. This idea lies at the heart of Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic, which is arguably a phenomenological condition essential in the hermeneutics of poetry translation, given its semiotic nature that provokes a rise of inner symbols that become embedded in the poems’ rhetorical semantic charge and metaphorical particularities. Through their translations, Villar-Argáiz and Villar-Raso adeptly incorporate dualistic elements into a harmonious Spanish conception of Murphy’s dissidence without compromising the dynamic forces that characterize the poem’s intent. In essence, the accomplishment aligns with Kristeva’s concept that “[t]he (pre-linguistic) drives have aims prior to their emergence into language, because language invariably represses or sublimates these drives that are manifest only in those linguistic expressions which disobey the univocal requirements of signification within the symbolic domain” (qtd. in Butler 1988: 106).

Pilar Villar-Argáiz and Manuel Villar-Raso’s translations illustrate tenacity and skill in Gerry Murphy’s Translations and Its Discontents. La Traducción y sus insatisfacciones (2025). The dynamism inherent in their translations can be exemplified in “Memories of Moscow”, where a stark contrast between nature and the political machine is preserved not only through seamlessly integrated breaks and imagistic juxtapositions, but also in the friction of these two images that remain intact both in the poem’s encapsulation and within its emotive essence; “leafing trees” becomes “árboles frondosos” – the former conveys a timeless unfolding of becoming, while the latter opts for a temporal “isness” of being, ensuring the retention of the signified without the need to domesticate the signifier or sign.[5] As a direct result, the visual aesthetics of its concise, haiku-like composition are stylistically preserved, along with the ideological intrusions conjured by the eidetic clashes.[6] The second half of the poem abruptly introduces the unannounced intrusion of a political machine, which disrupts the flow through the insertion of dualistic features. These features create a distorted mirror of the poem’s first four lines. Villar-Argáiz and Villar-Raso’s intentional rhetorical simplicity ensures the preservation of Murphy’s tonal fractures and rhythmic flow. Furthermore, they consistently adhere to the visual spaces and pauses, respecting the significance of these interstices as catalysts within the semiotic disruptions; it is in these hiatuses that the liminal emerges as a force of réassemblage in the final alchemical stage, manifesting as a cathartic re-inhibition of the poem capable of permeating into the logic.

Nuanced semantic variations spread across the collection can be seen in other poems, including “Landscape with Auburn Hair”, which becomes “Paisaje Caoba”; “Keeping My Feet”, which moves beyond literal rendering to capture the poem’s core metaphor and existential meaning to a sensical conception of “Manteniendo el equilibrio”; and a similar semiotic fidelity is captured in “Under the Dog Star”, translated to “Bajo la estrella alfa”. In line with these observations, the translators reiterate their craft as poetic and translational hermeneuticists by deciphering the symbols and sustaining the agonal shifts, allowing the Spanish reader to experience the subtle counterpoints between irony and candor that characterize Murphy’s poetic rhetoric.

Within the translated works, Murphy’s expressionist techniques that critique contemporary immediacies affecting the status quo surface. For instance, “Twenty One Words for the Security Council” reappears as “Veintiuna palabras al consejo de seguridad”. The poem’s impact is preserved through its structure, the discomfort caused by the metaphors, and its visceral yet shocking economization of words. This economization of words remains faithful to the original English version, even in terms of word count. In “Haiku with Cap and Bells”/ “Haiku con visera y campanillas”, the translators adopt a direct approach, eschewing language or imagistic softening while maintaining the sharp critique and sustaining the poem’s cruel climate; here, the cynical indifference to human suffering is conveyed with precision and without any trace of unnecessary embellishment. This poignant display by Pilar Villar-Argáiz and Manuel Villar-Raso proves their intimate acquaintance with both Murphy’s audacious voice and personality. The complicity between author and translator is further highlighted in Villar-Argáiz’s publication, “Flirting with International Socialism: Love, Politics, and Intertextuality in the Poetry of Gerry Murphy” (2013); she identifies and elaborates on the manner in which the Irish author “amusingly flirts with politics” using “witty images” and a “subjective perspective” (Villar-Argáiz 2013: 118-19), while also noting that the Irish author does not attempt to rationalize the atrocities committed by war; rather, he simply exposes them with all their rawness (Villar-Argáiz 2013: 119). Coincidentally, Murphy’s inclination towards economic locution makes Murphy’s poetic style a matter of quality over quantity, allowing his poems to resonate with contemporary preferences for brevity and impact. This quality arguably leverages his works in traditional literary circles as well as within popular mainstream literary guilds. The preservation of connotative charge in the translations of Murphy’s brief yet imagery-rich constructions, which could otherwise be overlooked and overwhelming to the untrained eye, appear as a fluid second nature exercise in these translations.

Indeed, translating Gerry Murphy’s poetry is a rite of passage that demands attuning to the whimsical pragmatics that interplay between two linguistic realities, encompassing two contextual possibilities. Pilar Villar-Argáiz and Manuel Villar-Raso’s translations of Gerry Murphy’s poems introduce a unique abridgement of the Irish author’s poetic dialogue and tone to the Spanish-speaking audience. The equilibrium between lyricism and sharp irony flourishes through a temperate Spanish rendition that eschews hyper-elaborate language yet retains its emotional charge. Hence, the claim that poetry is untranslatable is a “fundamental misrepresentation of the mechanisms that interplay in retaining the essence of poetic pieces and the nature of translation itself” (Brock 2025). The depth and brilliance of Pilar Villar-Argáiz and Manuel Villar-Raso’s translations of Gerry Murphy’s poems is one of scholarly etiquette, linguistic accuracy, and genius contextual navigation. Within these translational renderings, Gerry Murphy’s poems have been elevated not by obliterating his distinctive linguistic idiosyncrasies, but by preserving and quantifying his profound sensitivity, his imagistic yet wry rhetoric, and his ideologically charged temperament, making this volume not only an indispensable contribution to scholars and readers alike, but also an enduringly potent and compelling archetype of restrained artistry and translational genius.

Notes

[1] For Jung, a symbol could be a word or an image that emerges from the subconscious – often appearing during a dream. Jung believed that symbols appeared during the semiotic states of human consciousness. Subsequently, they could be sublimated (Jung 1966: 44).

[2] Ricoeur writes throughout his works about the hermeneutical idea that symbolic language demanded more than a purely rational approach to interpretation; it called for participatory action that led to a holistic understanding of its meaning. This was often achieved through emotional, conscious, and subconscious processes that lead to its conscious recovery.

[3] In The Fragments of Parmenides, by A.H. Coxon, the importance of “space between” (2009: 283) – gaps, voids, silences, and intervals – belongs to the Doxa, the “deceptive world of the senses” (Conte 2020:176); they are a part of the appearances necessary to provide a space for thought and emotions that may arise in the reader or listener.

[4] Kristeva’s Theory of the Semiotic uses the term “semiotic” as the equivalent of Jung and Ricoeur’s “symbol” –not to confuse it with Kristeva’s use of the term for “symbol”, which refers to the language that describes the semiotic state but not a characteristic of that pre-linguistic state. Judith Butler distils this idea in her paper “The Body of Politics” (1989).

[5] Saussure argued in his Course in General Linguistics (1959) that a sign what anything that conveyed meaning but required a signifier that provided meaning to mental concept or the signified.

[6] Other poems that strikingly resemble this pattern are “A Word at the End”, “Twenty One Words for the Security Council”, “Requiem for a Patriarch”, “Landscapes with Auburn Hair”, and “Haiku with Cap and Bells”. These translated poems touch on taboo themes through decadent imagery to illuminate the words and ignite the readers’ emotions.