Carolina Dávila Díaz : Cutting ties : translated and transfluxed by Ryan Greene

 

 

 

Visual description: A gif featuring red text on an ivory cream background, the colors approximating the printed version of Carolina Dávila Diaz's book, animal ajena, published by Cardumen (an imprint of Laguna Libros) in Bogotá, Colombia in 2022. Around the text, there is a circle that looks digitally sketched, its edges mimicking the tactility of hand-drawn marks. The text itself consists of two texts, arranged in two columns. The column on the right is upright, legible, in either English or Spanish (depending on when you look). The column on the left is upside down, in the other language. Periodically the gif springs into motion, the outer circle rotating 180 degrees in one direction and the text rotating 180 degrees in the other. Thanks to the rotational shift in perspective, the language of legibility shifts. And then shifts. And then shifts... 

 

 

Static textual transcription:

Cutting ties

You gnaw at your nails
Everything sets me on edge you say
and the irritation grinds on 

You retain the pain of the organic
calcium peels off in your fingers
and your mouth drips wet with acidic spit 

Better the inhospitable you think
blood has been the tribute
Better this muck and mire
your blood your own blood never again 

Tradition spins you shift your gaze
you move with another familiarity
and you forge new kinships 

You look at your fingers
you slide them like freshly sharpened pencils
a slash struck through names
you won’t respond to anymore 

(homo) neanderthalensis
(homo) sapiens
cyborg

from alien animal
by Carolina Dávila Díaz
tr. Ryan Greene

 

 

Romper el lazo

Cortas con los dientes las uñas
Se me destempla todo dices
y aún no termina el rechinar 

Conservas el dolor de lo orgánico
el calcio se descascara en los dedos
la boca se llena de saliva ácida y liquidísima 

Mejor lo inhóspito piensas
la sangre ha sido el tributo
Mejor este cenagal
tu sangre tu propia sangre nunca más 

Rota la tradición volteas la mirada
te mueves con otra familiaridad
y creas nuevos parentescos 

Miras tus dedos
los pasas como lápices recién afilados
un tajo sobre nombres
a los que ya no respondes 

(homo) neanderthalensis
(homo) sapiens
cyborg

de animal ajena
(Cardumen, 2022)
por Carolina Dávila Díaz 

 

For an added treat, click on the gif below to experience an interactive "transfluxion" of three lines from the poem (works best on screens bigger than a phone).

Visual description: Another gif, with ivory cream text on a red background, its colors inverted from the gif above. Here three lines from the poem hover with arrows below. As the recorded mouse clicks on the arrows, we become aware of the text as a (seemingly) three-dimensional entity rotating along one of its axes to reveal either the text in the other language or a small snippet of paratext. The text itself reads "tradition spins you shift your gaze / you move with another familiarity / and you forge new kinships" and "rota la tradición volteas la mirada / te mueves con otra familiaridad / y creas nuevos parentescos".

 

 

 

 

Carolina Dávila Díaz is a poet and editor from Bogotá, Colombia. Her book Como las catedrales won the National Award of Poetry in Colombia in 2010. She is also the author of Imagen (In)completa (2018), animal ajena (2022), and Buenavista, un kilómetro (2026) and co-editor of La trenza, a poetry, essay, and illustration magazine. She is part of Contaminación Cruzada, an artistic and poetic intervention project that explores the possibilities of language in public spaces. She lives in New York, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ryan Greene writes, translates, makes, and caretakes books in "Phoenix, Arizona," the city where he grew up. His most recent translations include projects with Carolina Dávila, Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Ana Belén López, Yaxkin Melchy, and Giancarlo Huapaya. He's learning.

 

 

Ryan Greene : on EL REY MURCIÉLAGO // THE BAT KING, by Yaxkin Melchy Ramos

 

 

 

 

Visual description:

A gif featuring images of small square pieces of paper (some blue, some light brown, some white notebook paper with blue lines). Each frame of the gif has a photo of my left hand holding a stack of square pieces of paper, and you can slightly see the edges of the other pieces of paper lower down in the stack. In the background is a tilted spread from the chapbook THE BAT KING where there are a few interspersed words but mostly unreadable text formed from commas, "O"s, and some other punctuation marks. In the poem those unreadable bits mimic layers of soil and sediment underground. Every 9 seconds the gif shifts to a new image and it cycles infinitely.

Textual transcription:

Title page:
9 Notes
a short reflection
in short fragments
by Ryan Greene 

Fragment 1:

I've been working with Yaxkin to translate the first three books in his project "THE NEW WORLD" since the end of 2019/start of 2020. I first started reading his poems in 2015 or 2016.

Fragment 2:

Still, after all this time, his poems catch me by surprise. I think I know where we're going, and then suddenly we're somewhere I don't know if I've been before.

Fragment 3:

That sense of disorientation feels a bit heightened with a chapbook like "THE BAT KING" which was plucked from a much larger work, a book called "THE GREEN SUN."

Fragment 4:

In those moments of not knowing where I am or how I got there, I wonder why I ever expected to know in the first place. Do we ever really know?

Fragment 5:

As a translator, I often think about how expectations of "correctness" can distract from the work of honoring a feeling of not knowing.

Fragment 6:

Maybe another way to say that is that I want to put my energy toward honoring and listening to the contours of ambiguity.

Fragment 7:

I don't want to feel tricked into providing (only) "clarity." Or, I don't want "correctness" to be my only metric.

Fragment 8:

Part of what I love most about Yaxkin's poem is the way they seem to hold room for an honest multiplicity.

Fragment 9:

Life and its interconnected complexities dance across scales, timelines, and realities. Yaxkin's poems remind me it's all fractal. Alive.

Gratitude page:

Thx to rob for the invitation to write this reflection in celebration of the late-summer release of EL REY MURCIÉLAGO (THE BAT KING) by Yaxkin Melchy with above/ground press :heart emoji

 

 

 

 

Ryan Greene [photo credit: Dennis Dominguez] writes, translates, makes, and caretakes books in "Phoenix, Arizona," the city where he grew up. For the past several years he has been working with Yaxkin Melchy to translate the first three books of THE NEW WORLD. He’s learning.

Yaxkin Melchy Ramos: Three poems : translated by Ryan Greene

 

 

 

BLOG

The blog scratched my eyes the blog burned my face and hung from my scar

The mosquito on the rock was burned by the blog
the animal under the rocks emerged evaporated
the animal was water and rivulet
The hands of tenderness transformed into numbers
on a screen I write downwards

until I turn blank white

body { my body
  background:url(" image of my body ");
  margin:23 years;
  padding:10px 0 14px;
  font:x-small Verdana, Sans-serif;
  text-align: aimless;
  color:# here I put the color of my face homeland style : green white and red;
  font-size/**/:/**/ white electric sky    the asterisks are questions

Yes or No— every answer they’ll ask from me in life:  

01110100 01101000 01100111 01101001 01101100 00100000
01101111 01110010 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100011
01101111 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110101 01110011
01100101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000
01100001 00100000 01100010 01101111 01101111 01101011

 

 

 

MEME ROCHA OR THE THEORY OF ELECTRONS

It’s a poem
that’s what the painted airport bathrooms say
it’s an insect
that’s what the kids scavenging in the trash say

it’s a milligram of star
that’s what the physicists who looked into its heart say:

Aha this is a point
chock-full of panic

 

 

DIAMOND MOON

The police are dead
the Sun’s word police
the Sun who’s a hole at the bottom of a vat called sky
where the clouds pass by

Clouds and seafoam
and my life of air
because I can’t write because I’m so awake
so much so that the police have left
and I’m a streetlight
and so
death’s never seen me

my eyes open a compass to draw
What do they see?
neither pain nor pain exist

I’ll lock up what’s left of this epoch in little boxes
in little boxes
in little tiny metal boxes

flying sarcophagi
reality is a diamond Moon
and death will never find me

Yaxkin Melchy Ramos (Mexico City, 1985) [photo credit: Asahiko Omiya] is a Mexican and Peruvian-Quechua poet, translator, ecopoetics researcher, bookmaker, and artisan-activist-editor. He is the author of THE NEW WORLD, a five-part “cell-book, constellation-book, or choreography-book” which was written intermittently between 2007 and 2017. Currently he is a post-doctoral student at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, where he is researching ecopoetic currents between Japan and Latin America. Since 2017, he has been translating contemporary Japanese poetry to Spanish, and currently he runs the artisanal press Cactus del viento, which focuses on ecological, spiritual, and transpacific poetics. He also publishes on his personal blog, Flor de Amaneceres.

Ryan Greene (b. 1994) is a translator, book farmer, and poet from Phoenix, Arizona who is currently working with Yaxkin Melchy to translate the first three books of THE NEW WORLD. He's a co-conspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS and a housemate at no.good.home. His translations include work by Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. Since 2018, he has co-facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore. Like Collier, the ground he stands on is not his ground.