Two documents, not one
When a poem written in Galician travels into English, the translator faces a choice that is really a declaration: are you trying to let the reader hear the poem, or understand it? A verse version attempts the former — it accepts the sounds, the rhythms, even the line breaks as constraints, and shapes English to fit them as closely as metre will allow. A gloss — the word is old, meaning an interlinear note — does the latter: it gives the poem back sentence by sentence, baldly, without the dress of form, and trusts the reader to see through the glass even if the glass is plain.
Both are honest. What is dishonest is pretending either is enough.
The case of Díaz Castro shows why. The thirty-two poems of Nimbos are densely wrought — reading the line reveals how much weight falls on exactly where the syntax breaks, how a run-on couplet withholds its resolution until the very last stress. A verse translation can preserve that suspended feeling; what it tends to lose is the specific Galician word that was doing the suspending. A gloss preserves the word — or at least its dictionary equivalent — and loses the suspension entirely. Printing both side by side is not a compromise. It is an admission that the poem cannot be replaced, only accompanied.
What each document carries
A gloss disciplines the reader. Working through a literal rendering alongside the Galician, you are forced to notice what the grammar is actually doing: where the verb falls, how an adjective trails its noun in a way that English resists, how a single long Galician word answers to three short English ones that never quite settle. The Galician literary tradition that began with the Rexurdimento — the nineteenth-century revival whose chief monuments are Rosalía de Castro's Cantares gallegos (1863) and the work of Eduardo Pondal and Manuel Curros Enríquez ↗ — developed a written register that absorbed spoken, rural Galician even as it raised it to literary dignity. That register is not transparent. A gloss slows you down in front of it.
A verse version does something different: it tests whether the poem still works as a poem in the target language. If it does, the translator has discovered something real about what made it work in the original. If it does not — if the English sits flat where the Galician sang — that failure is itself information. The poem has a quality that English, at least in that translation, could not carry. Naming that quality, even by failing to capture it, is a form of critical reading.
The practice of printing both together — gloss facing verse version — has a long history in the translation of poetry from small languages into large ones, not because publishers lack confidence but because both documents together are more informative than either alone. The gloss tells you what the poem says; the verse version tells you what it does; and the gap between the two is where the poem lives.
For Nimbos specifically, that gap is wide in productive ways. Díaz Castro's syntax is often inverted, his imagery compressed, his sound-texture tight with assonance that Galician permits more naturally than English does. No single English text resolves all of that at once. The responsible move is to place two imperfect documents alongside the original and let the reader triangulate — arriving not at a replacement for the poem but at a genuine reading of it.
A verse version does something different: it tests whether the poem still works as a poem in the target language.