Having been invited to read some poetry in Mexico City thanks to our good embassy (which paid for my trip to take part in the Nuit de la poésie, so I can very well thank them again!), I set out to discover to what degree I had no knowledge whatsoever of Mexican poetry beyond, say, Octavio Paz and Hugo García Manríquez. Having begun this search too late to get my hands on any books before my trip, I consulted a mass of algorithms through a search engine and read a series of poems in no particular order. And since I thought I would write about reading these poems in translation, I couldn’t be satisfied with simply claiming a right to eclecticism. What fun would that be for you? Instead I will take a series of steps sideways, leaving out some and missing a whole lot more.
All potentially ill-fated searches aside, there are always guides. They in turn have their own guides, their paths are never entirely new. We speak of them after they have been well established, well traveled, proven dependable. To speak of Mexican poetry is then to speak of those who have spoken of it. José Ortega knows this, and weaves together a reflection on Mexican poetry and on those who have attempted to make sense of it.
But I also know enough about Canadian poetries to be fully aware that an encompassing view is impossible. This absence is not a failure. It brings our attention to the voice, to the line of sight, to the specific field, to the gestures and the actions that the description helps materialize. Ortega wants movement, dialectics, perpetual beginning in poetry; he creates them in his selection of poems and in his reading, playing with and against Octavio Paz’s and Xavier Villaurrutia’s earlier attempts and failures, making his way through the diversity of poetries and of the languages in which they take place, and introducing a series of poems.
In "To Tell," the poem by Maria Baranda (transl. by Paul Hoover) that follows Ortega’s presentation, we get a figure of this movement: displacement, the motion that follows sidestepping, the life that is supported by transplantation. The poem creates such displacements: Baranda lets us hear a cry before letting us know it comes from the water, where the world is supposed to be still and quiet or immense and silent in its roar, self-referential and closed upon itself. Likewise, this poem refuses self-referentiality, closedness; the elements themselves are reaching out – and Baranda is not simply recording or voicing, she is vocalizing, displacing the origin of speech outside the body, in cries that are so many calls.
Ortega then gives us to read a poem that contradicts this perspective and nestles itself in those sites where upheaval seems inevitable – an untitled poem by Ana Belén López. In the constant return of phrases into the poem, words crash into the next like waves, ultimately indistinguishable, separate only in the moments of the motion.
In the following poems adjectives become nouns, the poems are said to relate back to work in philosophy (Mariana Bernárdez and Elsa Cross – whose French translator I happened to speak with during this trip), the poems stop before what cannot be understood. And of these I particularly notice a poem by Natalia Toledo that let itself be translated so fully that its symbols morph into one another, holding hope and loss together, loss of language and of life in the same breath:
"I will go back to
being the girl who wears a yellow petal on her right eyelid,
the girl who cries
flower’s milk."
Long before this trip, I had talked to, or more precisely written with Whitney DeVos about translation. Her telling of Martín Tonalmeyotl's poems brings Náhuatl into English through Spanish, brings the language together with the attempt at its destruction.
Here, again, we find cries, the piercing aspects of voiced language. Because I am reading it on an airplane in English, but also in Spanish, and to some degree I am sure through French, those languages which were meant to pierce it and replace it, Náhuatl resists me, lets me know that, like nêhiyawêwin at home, it waits without awaiting me on the land where I am about to alight:
"But time is short
and human walls
will not allow my song
to be a healing herb
because, if they did,
it would spread across
the earth like a weed
and harm a broad, inhuman
swath of society."
There is so much to be swatted away and chased out. So let's talk about gesture, again, and singing, still. It is flesh that speaks, it is flesh that gestures, it is flesh that hauls thought, as Rocio Ceron suggests in the poems she translated with Tanya Huntington. It is flesh that makes the gaze, that is at once the gaze and its fall into disuse onto the objects that call it upon them. It is flesh that, as an element, folds onto itself, becomes heavy and experiences its own pressure, becomes barren and full, wound and healing.
Very much relatedly, Lawrence Schimel describes how it is possible for Carmen Boullosa to cut and illuminate in a single word. In spite of what it cannot render, his translations can give her, her poems, something else: he allows her to make English curl up on itself by transforming crinoline into what holds and what is held all at once.
There is also the question of this medium. Paula Abramo's poems don't live happily on the webpage. There's something with the site, the spacing both horizontal and vertical, that makes the poem’s materiality unstable. But perhaps it's my tiny phone screen, my tiny airplane seat, that pull me in on myself and makes me feel constricted. As I read her, I hoped to find a print edition of Fiat Lux, in Spanish, so I could be a tourist within its pages, sight-see, focus on melody and on the words I can catch (I couldn’t, though I ought to have checked at the Bibliotheca Vasconcelos, which has a great Mexican poetry section – there is still Dick Cluster’s translation). Already, in the translated words, there is stoppage, enclosures, unevenness in length. Surprise. Like the match of fiat lux, of let there be light, a scratch, almost painful, then a flash of light, which could become painful to the eye, to the finger. The surprise that something, anything, happens. Light, here, is dissent, is anarchism, is bread – poetry, like what is new in politics, illuminates. And even though it does not feed us, it brings us back to the bread, to the stove.
Juxtaposing Abramo and Alí Calderón (as I did, picking up my reading at Vocablo Café y poesía once I had wifi), the need for such light emerges against the darkness of much of political life. “Mexican Democracy” is a reaction to executions and corpses found in bags; “And We Went Up the One Hundred and Fourteen Long Steps of that Temple” brings these deaths together with the sacrifices at Tlatelolco. Heads are spiky, heads are on spikes – he does not say or suggest that nothing changes or that inhumanity is everywhere, and especially not that there is a straight line between Aztec and Mexican violence; only that some things haven’t changed. Only that it seems we still need to sacrifice bodies to our gods, and especially those of women and girls.
This reference to a bloody past is heavy with political significance within Mexican poetry, as criticisms of Octavio Paz made clear several decades ago. There is no straight line between the Aztec past and the Mexican present (to take only one people among many), no allusion that can be straightforward, and no absolute divide between the Indigenous peoples of the past and the colonially established society of the present – especially as relations between Indigenous peoples have constantly evolved. And it seems just that there is at least some pushing back against the appropriation of the almost entirety of the past of the country’s territory (except for its colonialism) that was such an important theme of Latin American artists and poets in the latter half of the twentieth century (see Neruda’s imposing and magnificent Canto General).
Indigenous poets in Mexico are thus, unsurprisingly, confronted with similar attitudes as Indigenous peoples in Canada, through the manifestations of colonialism particular to the country's history (as we can see in the section of the same article as above on the Zapotec poet Víctor Terán, for whom I had to search so I could access his poems). Because yes, of course, an Indigenous poet can be at once urban and rural. Of course, Terán can write poems that focus on longing and loss (or at least, in those that were chosen for translation). Leaving this obviousness nonsense aside, we can approach his poems for what they offer: quick contrasts, images that are at once strong and soft – the precise instantaneity of “Whirlwind” and the surreally logical images of dreams in “I Woke with Your Name” for instance.
There is something broken in colonial societies. And although broken is not a sufficient word, it does lend itself to the reinvention of long-used images. The multilingual poet and translator Marina Sánchez picks up the image of the broken vase (used for instance by Walter Benjamin to illustrate the work of translation with regard to pure language) in “Fracture in Gold”. Moving from vase to belly to mouth and to heart, she smashes the uncomfortably common metaphor to make it new again, enmeshing life, language, and their absence while wondering about the feeling of being put back together.
It wouldn’t be right to say that by looking at these poems I haven’t done much more here than point at a few fragments, since nothing is broken, nothing needs to be pieced back together. Perhaps I haven’t done a lot more than recount a few impressions of my movements through some of what I could find, relatively quickly and online, of contemporary Mexican poetry in English translation. Perhaps I have found a doorway, or a passage into this poetry – one whose awareness might be useful for others as well.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
