Evans-Corrales has new book, translations, memoir published

If you ask Dr. Carys Evans-Corrales, professor of Spanish, what she has been doing lately, you better have a notepad handy.

With a new book of translated poems published this summer and another 40 translated poems and a memoir due to be published in Spring 2014, she is also looking for a publisher for her Galician-to-English translation of a novel by a former student. It is the first time she has worked on translating a novel.

Although she speaks several languages, she specializes in Spanish and Galician, a language spoken in the northwestern portion of Spain that she fell in love with while teaching in that area.

Her current flurry of projects began in 2011 when she was asked to translate 40 Galician poems for Metamorphoses, a journal of literary translation published by Smith College. While translating those poems (which will appear in the journal’s Spring 2014 issue), she came across two by the Galician poet Pilar Pallarés that piqued her interest.

“I was stunned by the flexibility of her language and vastly attracted to the way she was able to express complex aspects of human emotion,” Evans-Corrales said. She arranged to translate Pallarés’s prize-winning fourth volume of poetry, “A Leopard Am I” from the original Galician to English.

“These poems allow you to share the experience of loss in all its manifestations, yet you also feel the poet’s personal victory as her mastery of language transforms her varied reactions to grief into these fine poems,” she said. “And Galician translates so well into English, especially where emotion and irony are concerned.”

Evans-Corrales discovered Galician, which is linguistically close to Portuguese, while teaching in Galicia. For many years, speaking Galician in public had been banned by regimes that insisted official business be conducted in the official Spanish dialect Castilian. At the time she was teaching, Galician language and literature were going through a resurgence in the area. Adept with languages from a childhood of globetrotting, Evans-Corrales enjoyed the opportunity to study and speak the new language.

A third project, also due out in late winter or spring, is written in English but revolves around her youth spent in Malaysia, Singapore, Jamaica, England and Spain. The memoir, “Talking Girl,” explains how each language she learned in each place resonated with a different part of her personality.

Currently, you can see her translations of two poems by Yolanda Castaño online at the Buenos Aires Review.

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