The losses are not equal
Every translation of a poem is a negotiation with loss, and the first thing to say about that loss is that it is not evenly distributed. A prose sentence moved between languages surrenders surprisingly little: the information travels, the argument holds, the meaning lands. A poem is different. The sound is not decoration added to the sense — it is partly how the sense is made, and it travels badly. What translation keeps is whatever survives after the sound has mostly gone, and the choice of what to save in its place is the real decision the translator makes.
With Galician verse, the situation has a particular shape. Galician is spoken by a population roughly the size of New Zealand's, with a literary tradition that, after its medieval peak, was effectively silenced for several centuries before the Rexurdimento — the nineteenth-century revival — made it a literary language again. When Rosalía de Castro published Cantares gallegos in 1863, she was not simply writing poems; she was demonstrating that the language could hold a poem at all. By the time Xosé María Díaz Castro published Nimbos in Vigo in 1961, the literary tradition was less than a century deep in modern terms. A translator working from Galician into English is therefore also doing something implicitly editorial: the choices made in the target text are often the only access a reader will have, and that is a kind of power the translator of Spanish or French rarely holds so absolutely.
What sound carries, and what it cannot
Consider what a Galician poem does that a literal gloss cannot reproduce. The vowels of the language are open and distinct — Galician preserves a seven-vowel system in speech, in contrast to the five that Castilian Spanish deploys — and Díaz Castro's verse is tuned to those sounds. A line from Nimbos in which the open a sounds recur in a particular rhythm is not making a decoration; the sounds are activating something in the reader's ear that the meaning reinforces. Move the poem into English and you can choose words whose meanings correspond, but you cannot make English vowels do what Galician vowels do, because the phonology simply differs ↗. The sound-world goes.
What a good verse translation can do instead is find a different set of sonic relationships in English that are not the same but are analogous in function — that give the English ear something to work on the way the original gives the Galician ear something to work on. This is not equivalence; it is a compensating gesture. The translator of Díaz Castro working into English is inventing a parallel text that justifies itself by producing a poem that works in English, not by pretending to reproduce the Galician. The original remains necessary. That is why printing both together — the original and the translation on facing pages, as the best bilingual editions do — is not just scholarly scruple: it is an admission that neither text alone is sufficient.
The same problem applies to the line and where it breaks. Enjambment in Nimbos — the carrying of sense across a line ending without a syntactic pause — works in part because Galician syntax allows certain inversions and delays that English resists. When Díaz Castro suspends a noun for two lines before delivering the verb that governs it, the suspension is grammatically comfortable in Galician; in English the equivalent move can feel mannered or just confused. The translator who preserves the line break position is being faithful to the look of the poem on the page while doing something slightly wrong to the rhythm of reading. The translator who restructures the line to make the English flow naturally is doing something true to the experience of reading while changing the poem's shape. Neither is wrong exactly; both are choosing their loss.
The problem specific to a small language
With a well-translated language, a reader who does not know the original can still triangulate. Multiple English versions of Rilke exist, and a reader can hold them against each other, sense where they diverge, and infer something about the original from the divergence. With Galician poetry in English, the reader usually has one translation if they have any at all. That single version therefore carries more weight than it can honestly bear, and the translator's interpretive choices — which word to emphasize, how to render a term that has no English counterpart, whether to keep a place-name or domesticate it — become invisible authority.
The place-names in Nimbos are a small example of the larger problem. Díaz Castro came from Os Vilares, in Guitiriz in the Terra Chá — the flat inland country of Lugo province — and the landscape of that region, its light and water and particular flatness, lies under several of the poems. A Galician reader hears those names and a whole geography activates: the Terra Chá is a felt place. For an English reader the name is opaque. The translator can keep it, trusting that opacity is better than a false substitution, or can replace it with a description that explains rather than evokes. The first choice respects the poem; the second makes it more accessible. Both involve loss.
What translation tends to keep, when it is done well, is roughly this: the intellectual architecture of the poem, the movement of thought from opening image to closing turn; the emotional register, whether the poem is elegiac, fierce or tender; and something of the rhythm of the sentence, even if the rhythm of the line has been altered. These are not small things. A skilled translation of a Nimbos poem can convey what the poem is thinking and how it feels to think it. That is, arguably, the part of a poem that most resembles meaning in the ordinary sense, and there is no reason to pretend it is nothing.
But the translator of a poem from a small language into a large one is also doing something the translator of a poem between two large languages rarely needs to confront quite so starkly: they are, in practice, creating the poem's audience ↗. The English reader who comes away from a translation of Nimbos knowing something about Galician poetry is doing so almost entirely on the translator's terms. That responsibility is not a reason to refuse to translate — untranslated, the poem has no audience outside the language at all — but it is a reason to be honest about what the translation is. It is a made thing. It is not the original poem in another skin. It is a new object that points back toward an original it cannot replace, and that pointing — the sense of something audible behind the English, something the English is reaching toward — is, in the end, what the best translation of a poem from Galician keeps.
The sound is not decoration added to the sense — it is partly how the sense is made, and it travels badly.