YENY DÍAZ WENTEN
We Are Not Scared
Translated by Rodrigo Rojas Bollo
The Mapuche are a native nation of South America that has lived in the central valley of Chile and in the grasslands across the Andes, in Argentina. Their language, Mapudungun, has been studied since the Spanish and other Catholic Missions were established in the region and admired only by a few dedicated scholars throughout the centuries. From their very first contact with the Spaniards in the 1540’s they have been fighting for the survival of their culture. The poets in this selection challenge the central cannon of poetry in Chile by expanding the sensibility and cultural references in the poetic repertoire. Part of the linguistic and artistic resources that they use are a particular syntax, words in Mapudungun and references to the experience of displacement, among others.
Read works by two other Mapuche poets Maribel Mora Curriao here and Daniela Catrileo here.
Descansito
Those ridiculous garden cemeteries
with flowers that never fade as if life had always
shades like that, I prefer
the claws of sinister shadows of an old trench
to the beauty of the dry flowers in painfully cracked vases
Those clean little headstones as if death
was transparent, something less dense, thinning down the sense
of my brush and soap as I scrub my family’s gravestone
I Declare
Being a true mestizo creature a tree
growing on freezing rivers
being that snow can be eaten
with sugar, where children walk
barefoot upon it, and I recognize
the butcher O beast keep me from smelling
the hunter the killer whistling on the street
calling to sharpen all knives
with the arrogant stride
through an ever-slimmer country
And yet I tell you
local and foreign beasts
of the people, we are not scared,
he has left with October eyes
turned to fallen stars
leaving an imprint over our left
shoulder that’s where they rest, they
our loved ones who’ve parted
in rafts and canoes towards the colder sea
the deeper love of Chile
now bored of the fierce
Being feral and leafy I approve
of the flames in the composition
of us, I approve the liberation
of water from its captive clamor
the demand of elders for a chant
of approval that can set a blaze
our treeless blocks
the throats
of all our beasts, the vermin and healers
The ancient text is rejected and later approved with new writing
Is it because it begins as an outcry and later order?
Yeny Díaz Wenten (1983) is a middle school Spanish Language teacher. The natural elements in her poetry are as alive as her syntax, and both conform a distinct landscape of the mestizo experience, the culturally hybrid identity that resides in a political interstice. The poems selected come from her fourth book poetry, “Quejido, canto y arrullo” (Moan, song and hum) published by Garceta ediciones in 2024. These are poems written in layers of oral tradition, musical experience and memory.
Rodrigo Rojas, b. 1971, is a Chilean poet and translator. He is a graduate from NYU’s MfA where he worked with Philip Levine, Derek Walcott, Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Alexander, among other poets. He is the author of two books of essays and four poetry collections, the latest is “Estrella de la mañana” (Garceta ediciones, 2016). His translations into English are available in Barbaric, Vast & Wild (Black Widow Press, 2015); and in journals in the United States, Mexico, South Africa, Peru, Spain and Chile. As a contributing editor to Rattapallax Magazine, from 2003 to 2009, he constantly published poets from South America in translation. He is currently collaborating with visual artists in creative projects and curatorship. Among these projects is the Mapuche artist Francisco Huichaqueo who explores pottery shattering and the language of dreams as a creative practice of resistance. He is also part of the art collective Setebos that develops a transdisciplinary creative practice across Patagonia, and part of the faculty in the Creative Writing program at Diego Portales University, Santiago.