Paul Muldoon’s poetry naturally drifts away from expected meanings, simple and predictable forms and linearity. Reading and interpreting Muldoon is by no means an easy task; it requires a willingness to confront bewilderment and find one’s way through it, or else simply to give up and walk away. His poetry is unsettling, but does not leave us indifferent; it challenges and draws us in, and invites us to reflect, search, explore and take risks. We may not emerge from the reading completely satisfied; nevertheless, something has stirred within us, has called us forth, and surprised us as we engage with his poetry, and that, in itself, is no small thing.

With this in mind, I chose to approach his work through a poem taken from Hay (Heno), one of the collections included in Selected Poems 1968-2014. This anthology, which brings together forty-five years of Muldoon’s poetic work and whose selection was made by the poet himself, was translated into Spanish by Pablo Ingberg and published in Argentina by El Cuenco de Plata. Ingberg’s translations are both valuable and daring, offering an insightful approach into the complexity and playfulness of Muldoon’s poetic language. With a degree in Literature and a career as a literary translator, Ingberg provides a bilingual edition that also includes highly useful comments and specific observations on his translation of the poems.

He comments, “Among the extensive list of translations that I have been fortunate enough to undertake, many of them highly complex, Paul Muldoon’s poetry has indeed been the most difficult of all. I do not mean that his poetry is intricate—which, it certainly is, and that is part of the challenge—but rather that it is extremely difficult and complex to translate.”¹

I confess that I was not familiar with the poet, but I had the opportunity to discover his work when he visited UNLa on the occasion of the screening of the film “Paul Muldoon: A Life in Lyrics”, directed by Alan Gilsenan, who was also a guest at the event, organized jointly with the Embassy of the Republic of Ireland in Buenos Aires. I found Muldoon fascinating in his particular way of being simultaneously present and absent, and in his subtle air of nonchalance—perhaps a certain controlled amiability—which suggested to me that I was in the presence of a difficult, singular character. I then decided to get to know him through his work, which seemed to be the most sensible way to move beyond the personal. After all, authors are defined by what they create.

I searched for his book around Buenos Aires and began reading it on the train back to the southern suburbs. After a first, disciplined reading, I began to feel unsettled and started skipping pages. As I was reaching my destination I thought of Ingberg. The task of translating his poems must surely have tested him, or perhaps even tormented him at times. And yet, it is likely that—as happens to us translators—he may have felt a certain thrill in undertaking the challenge posed by such difficulty. Translators like to suffer; so I put myself in his shoes or—rather, his nervous system…or was it mine? We translators have a tendency to empathize with the challenges our colleagues face.

I imagined tight deadlines, untranslatable words, linguistic challenges. And I wondered: How can we translators survive such a complex task and negotiate the intricacies of language—the secret codes, the shifts in register and style, the puns, the local expressions, polysemy, ambiguity, and the unexpected—without collapsing along the way?

The article Conocer a Paul Muldoon² [Getting to know Paul Muldoon] gave me further insight into Ingberg’s experience, “Muldoon employs scientific, technical and political languages and jargons, regional varieties (following in Joyce’s footsteps, he incorporates words and phrases from Irish English into British English, and also uses American English), colloquialisms, archaisms, vulgarisms, erudite terms, proverbs and deformed words, phrases and words in several other languages, (Irish above all), multiple and multifaceted literary references to different periods and places (sometimes juxtaposed and used in analogy), personal references, wordplay and sound play.” Oh, Muldoon, with such a complicated menu, bless the person who translated you…and did it so well!

Once I was back home, I set out to choose a poem and work on it; not to translate it—since Ingberg had already done a great job—but to explore the intricacies of its lines, to immerse myself in and grasp the sensory experience, what the poem first suggested to me in its immediacy, and finally to reflect on the experience. I would have loved to arrive at what the poet meant, but I could only approach it through my own sensitivity, my own history, and my own imaginary world.

I remembered that the film explores Muldoon’s life through his poems and songs based on them, performed by various artists and musicians. Paul McCartney’s choice caught my attention, so I decided to focus on Symposium, the poem he had selected.

Below is Muldoon’s poem, together with Ingberg’s translation.

Let us begin with the title “Symposium”.³ Here I had to pause and do some research to find out what the word symposium referred to. The translator is a curious creature too, a frustrated detective. And so I found myself in ancient Greece, where wealthy men would gather for banquets known as “symposia”, occasions for reflection, philosophical discussion, enjoyment and contemplation, where wine, women, good food and music were never in short supply.

The symposium was a place of enjoyment, camaraderie, andrevelry. There was singing, games, riddles, and also a certain loss of restraint once the alcohol began to take effect, which sometimes led to an excess of euphoria that turned into vulgarity. Today, by contrast, the word has acquired a solemn academic connotation: an event devoted to discussion and the exchange of knowledge on a specific subject.

On May 26, 2024, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary chose symposium⁴ as its “Word of the Day” and, after giving the current definition, returned to the ancient meaning of a gathering in which alcohol takes center stage, that is, a “drinking party.”

In Muldoon’s case, I prefer the first meaning, although not in its absolute literal sense. I think his “Symposium” suggests a form of playful exercise, a play on words in which different proverbs and sayings engage in dialogue with one another, like those witty reflections that might have emerged from some Greek symposium, resulting in a construction that, despite its apparent absurdity, produces a powerful poetic effect. By no means do I mean to suggest that Muldoon was intoxicated when he wrote this poem; it could well be a playful, humorous and joyful exercise in which fragments of sayings and proverbs are combined to challenge conventions, surprise and unsettle readers, and open their minds to new meanings and poetic experiences.

As for Ingberg and his translation choices, I was impressed by his skill. He succeeds in producing in Spanish an effect comparable to that of the source poem. He had to draw on every resource at his disposal, put himself in the author’s mind, and resort to the same strategy of combining proverbs—whose meanings and purposes may or may not coincide—in order to sustain the playfulness without sacrificing sense or rhythm. No small achievement when faced with a poetic voice as singular as Muldoon’s. And yet—and perhaps this says more about my perception and the way I resonate with the text than about the translator’s work—the English version struck me as more powerful. This may be because in his original language, the author was able to combine fragments of proverbs in ways that produced the sonic, musical and semantic effects that he deliberately sought, nuances that owing to the very nature of the two languages, do not always have the same impact in Spanish.

Certainly, this difference in no way diminishes the merit of his craft. Ingberg truly excelled, producing a version that also breathes with its own cadence and sonority, at times achieving effects that, while different, are no less powerful. Reconstructing such a difficult and intricate poetic mechanism indeed requires creative courage.

Personally, “Symposium” took me back to my adolescence, when my friends and I would randomly combine well-known proverbs—much as Muldoon and his translator do in this poem—to create absurd and nonsensical effects. I can still recall some of those playful inventions, which, so many years later, still make me smile fondly because of the silliness of the ideas and the results they produced.

In the end, I felt that I was, in a way, part of the symposium: I invited myself to the gathering, entering that space of creation and enjoyment, both as a reader and as a translator, and this led me to explore further. I came to understand that this Symposium is not merely something to be read; it is something to be inhabited. One sits at the poem’s table, listens, plays, interacts, intervenes, and leaves with the feeling of having raised a glass and made a toast to language itself.