issue 20: winter 2019

Editorial

Almost Island is privileged to have Anna Deeny Morales as editor of this issue. Her contribution to the field of translation in Latin American poetry is already immense—Raúl Zurita, Mercedes Roffé, Alejandra Pizarnik, among others. Much like the poets she translates, Morales is able to bring together an almost physical experience with the most vulnerable emotions and ideas, while keeping the tenor of each poet’s experiments in form and language. She is currently working on Gabriela Mistral and not long ago she wrote to me of her travels in Chile. “I went to the Elqui valley, I saw the Andes there. I had never seen such mountains and I had the opportunity to take them in for four days. Alone. That landscape is the foundation of Mistral’s poetics.” Morales begins then, at the very beginning of each poet’s work.

— Sharmistha Mohanty

This selection of Latin American poetry is dedicated to the memory of the Argentine poet, translator, and editor, Mirta Rosenberg (1951–2019). Rosenberg’s volumes of poetry include Pasajes (1984); Madam (1988); Teoría sentimental (1994); El arte de
perder (1998); El árbol de palabras: obra reunida 1984–2006 (2006); El paisaje interior (2012); El arte de perder y otros poemas (2015); Cuaderno de oficio (2016); and Bichos, sonetos y comentarios, co-authored with Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (2017). In 1990 Rosenberg founded the prestigious publishing house Bajo la luna. She was also the founding director of Extra / lecturas para poetas, and a member of the editorial board of Diario de poesía. Rosenberg was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2003; the Konex Prize in 2004 for her achievements in literary translation; and, in 2013, she received the José Pedroni Province Poetry Prize for her book El paisaje interior.

A survivor of Argentina’s Dirty Wars, Rosenberg began to publish poetry as the nation grappled with democratization and came to terms with thousands who were disappeared by the military regime. However, a sense of collective loss did not mitigate Rosenberg’s attentiveness to the intimacy of mourning as it reflects an ontology of language itself. She emphasizes that language and writing signal thematic content as well as the quotidian processes, people, and materials, involved in the production of that content. That is, for example, if we sit at wooden tables to write, the articulation of thoughts, feelings, and experiences does not necessarily begin in our minds or bodies. The tree from which the desk was built is also implicit in the production of meaning, in the sociability, Rosenberg would say, of words, and their constant shifting between presence (the table) and loss (the tree). She links this sociability to what she considers a simple, human yearning for the “ways of love.”

In “Inherence,” from Passages (1984), for example, she writes, “To be a person / is to be desperate / for the ways of love and the knot / where what’s said falls mute: / the only / possible of things is to name them in an endless roundup as they shift / place.” And in “Finished Portrait,” a lyric poem about the loss of a loved one from The Art of Losing (1998), Rosenberg writes, “It was a perfect sorrow: / speaking of her, / they spoke of themselves.” A poignant example of prosopopoeia, like Elizabeth Bishop, Rosenberg suggests that words, language, and writing reflect an unavoidable, quotidian, domestic, interconnectedness between the living and the dead.

Rosenberg’s brilliance was not limited to her own poetry. For over forty years, she extended her belief in the interconnectedness of language through her work in translation from the French, English, Italian, and Portuguese to the Spanish. Rosenberg has translated the plays of William Shakespeare as well as the poetry and essays of Katherine Mansfield, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Dereck Walcott, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, W.H. Auden, James Laughlin, Seamus Heaney, and Anne Talvaz. These translations made Rosenberg a crucial figure within Latin American letters because they facilitate and promote literary, political, aesthetic, and philosophical dialogues beyond the divisions of nation, language, or region. Rosenberg’s poetry has been widely anthologized as well as translated into the German, French, and English.

Ida Vitale was born in 1923 in Montevideo, Uruguay. As a student of literature, she was inspired by the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, a fascination for nature, and the works of José Bergamín. During the Uruguayan military dictatorship, she lived in exile in Mexico from 1974 to 1984 with her second husband, Enrique Fierro, a poet and professor. They returned to Uruguay for a few years and eventually settled in Austin, Texas. In 2018, Vitale returned to the city of her birth. Vitale was a centripetal force of the Uruguayan literary and artistic movement known as the “Generación del ’45” [Generation of ‘45]. She has written numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including La luz de esta memoria (1949); Palabra dada (1953); Cada uno en su noche, poesía (1960); Oidor andante (1972); Fieles (1982); Sueños de la constancia (1988); Léxico de afinidades (1994); Procura de lo imposible (1998); Un invierno equivocado (1999); Reducción del infinito (2002); De plantas y animales (2003); El abc de byobu (2004); Trema (2005), and in 2017, Poesía reunida, a volume of complete works.

Vitale was conferred a doctor honoris causa by the Universidad de la República Oriental de Uruguay in 2010. She has received various awards, including the Octavio Paz Prize (2009); the Carlos Monsiváis Medal for Cultural Merit (2010); the Alfonso Reyes Prize (2014); the Reina Sofía Poetry Prize (2015); the Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize (2016); in France, the Max Jacob Prize (2017); in Guadalajara, the Romance Languages and Literature Prize; and, in Spain, the Cervantes Prize (2018).

Given Vitale’s experience of exile, this selection often presents meditations on distance and the observation of brutal realities from afar. Unlike Rosenberg’s poesis that grounds itself in close proximities, Vitale establishes paradigms of knowledge grounded in retreat. For example, in “Reply of the Dervish” from Silica Garden (1980), the poetic voice asks, “Maybe / wisdom consists in retreating if something quivers to our movement / (because the awful spider / falls on the victim) / to see, / like a star it reflects, / the distant reality.” In fact, Vitale goes as far as questioning our ability to mourn appropriately when distance is involved in loss as she similarly considers the efficacy of commemoration. Such gestures are particularly salient given the Latin American dictatorial practice at the time of disappearing anyone who represented a true or imaginary threat to their power.

Isabel de los Ángeles Ruano was born in Chiquimula, Guatemala, in 1945. She is a poet, novelist, journalist, and teacher. The 1954, US-backed military coup d’état forced Ruano to flee to Mexico with her family. The coup would eventually lead to the Guatemalan Civil War that lasted from 1960 to 1996. The family managed to return to Guatemala in 1957, and Ruano received her teacher’s diploma from the Educación Primaria Urbana in Chiquimula.

In 1966, Ruano went back to Mexico and published her first book, Cariátides. Upon her return to Guatemala in 1967, she worked as a journalist, and in 1978, she received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American Languages and Literatures at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.

Ruano’s published works include Cariátides (1966); Cantares ¿Quién dijo cantares? (1979); Canto de amor a la ciudad de Guatemala (1988); Torres y Tatuajes (1988); Los del viento (anthology, 1999); Café express (2002; 2008); Versos dorados (2006); Poemas grises (2010); and Los muros perdidos (2013). Her unedited novels include Los soliloquios de María Ixcamparic; Reprisse de los inmortales; and Carta de una bruja a una condesa medieval. For over thirty years, Ruano has struggled with mental illness, and Guatemala City’s neighborhood, Justo Rufino Barrios, zona 21, has become her home. She was awarded the prestigious Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature by the Ministry of Culture in 2001.

Ruano emphasizes the conditions of language as they relate to her local, everyday life, her struggle with mental illness, and precarious living conditions. These conditions are the foundation of her approach to poetic form as physical, singular, and urgent, for example, in poems like “My Hands.” Similarly, in “My House and Word,” from Towers and Tattoos (1988), she writes, “The house has no walls or doors / but it’s my house, / like my horse with no hooves, / my horse with no saddle, / like my dreams coarse, / and the word to the wind, waving, / like this tuberose throat, / my throat.” Like Rosenberg, for whom to be human is to be desperate for the ways of love, Ruano establishes a basic, pressing, need to reach, like hands, toward the other, even if it is to stumble into them, even if that reaching is “harsh / and untamed.”

Diana Bellessi was born in Zavalla, Argentina, in 1946, and lives in Buenos Aires. She is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Bellessi studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, and from 1969 to 1975 she travelled by foot throughout the American continent. This journey, along with her country’s Dirty Wars that lasted from 1976–1983, deeply inform her work. For various years, Bellessi gave poetry workshops in prisons throughout Buenos Aires.

Her numerous volumes of poetry include Destino y propagaciones (1972); Crucero ecuatorial (1980); Tributo del mudo (1982); Danzante de doble máscara (1985); Eroica (1988); Buena travesía buena ventura pequeña Uli (1991); El Jardín (1992); Crucero Ecuatorial. Tributo del Mudo (1994); The Twins, the Dream (with Ursula K. Le Guin) (1996); Sur (1998); Gemelas del sueño (with U.K. Le Guin) (1998); Mate cocido (2002); La Edad Dorada (2003); La rebelión del Instante (2005); Variaciones de la luz (2006); and Tener lo que se tiene: Poesía reunida (2009). She has translated works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and Olga Broumas, among others.

Bellessi was a founding member of Revista Feminaria and participated on its editorial board; she was on the editorial board of Diario de Poesía; and a founding member of the publishing cooperative, Nusud. She has received various awards, including a 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry; the Antorchas Foundation Fellowship in 1996; the Konex Prize, Quinquenio 1999–2003, for her achievements in poetry in 2004; the Argentine National Prize in Poetry in 2007; and, again, the Konex Prize, Quinquenio 2009–2013, for her achievements in poetry in 2014.

Through a sustained and detailed meditation on nature, Bellessi grapples with paradigms of human consciousness, Judeo-Christian concepts of good or evil, and Darwinism, as she simultaneously draws from indigenous cosmogonies, cultural practices, and belief systems. Bellessi also dialogues with US, European, and Asian literature, particularly written by women, as in “Reading a Poem by Li Ch’ing-Chao,” from The Mute’s Tribute (1982), in which she entwines poetic sensibilities across temporalities, geographies, and languages. At the same time, Bellessi establishes an ethics of otherness in her practice of poetry and translation. For example, in “Oh Kiepja Do Not Let Me...,” from South (1998), she writes, “If we seek / infinitude where she may be / found: in carefulness / Carefulness for what is other and / power to not possess, / to let oneself / go”.

Rosabetty Muñoz was born in Ancud, Chiloé, Chile, in 1960. She is a Professor of Spanish at the Austral University of Chile and has participated in the cultural development of her country’s southern region. Muñoz’s works include Canto de una oveja del rebaño (1981; 1994); En lugar de morir (1987); Hijos (1991); Baile de señoritas (1994); La santa, historia de una su elevación (1998); Sombras en el Rosselot (2002); Ratada (2005); En nombre de Ninguna (2008); Polvo de huesos (anthology, 2012); Chiloé, ovejas en la memoria (2016); Hijos (2016); Ligia (2019); and Técnicas para cegar a laos peces (2019).

Muñoz is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the Pablo Neruda Prize (2000); the Consejo Nacional del Libro Prize for Sombras en El Rosselot for best unedited work (2002); and the Altazor Prize (2013) for the anthology Polvo de Huesos. Muñoz is a member of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua and a recipient of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Neruda Foundation.

Muñoz persistently critiques the effects of global warming, colonialism, and neoliberalism on local and indigenous communities, especially in her natal archipelago, Chiloé, of Southern Chile. She pays close attention to the effects of these forces on what is an already damaged ecosystem, directly linking that “damage” to intimate familial relations, gender roles, and, more specifically, women, children, and girls. Her poems are often populated by anonymous “ningunas,” the feminine form of “nobodies,” for example, in her 2005 book, En nombre de ninguna [In Nobodies Name]. In this work, the poetic voice laments forms of maternal loss involved in childbirth, miscarriage, and abortion. However intimate and hushed these losses are, Muñoz demands they be communally recognized and mourned. For example, in “River Mouth,” she insists, “The one whose fright makes him look away / should bend down and drown his own eyes / facing the girl with belly swollen. / He has to grieve.”

I’m grateful to Sharmistha Mohanty for the invitation to feature a selection of Latin American poetry in Almost Island. Indeed, these poets represent only a handful of the vast regional and linguistic diversity of Latin American poetic forms. Another selection might include poetry in Portuguese from Brazil, Mapuche, Náhuatl, Chorti, Maya K’iche, or any one of the hundreds of languages and aesthetic practices represented throughout these regions.

Many thanks to Souradeep Roy for his patient work as editor of this issue. Mirta Rosenberg’s son, Miguel Balaguer, and Francine Masiello, provided careful readings and suggestions. Thanks as well to Diana Bellessi, Ida Vitale, Rosabetty Muñoz, and their families for the permission to publish their work, as well as for their thoughtful suggestions. Lastly, I’m grateful to Carmen Lucía Álvaro Benitez for kindly permitting me to publish Isabel de los Ángeles Ruano’s poems and making the translations available to her.

— Anna Deeny Morales