Translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas. El Paso, TX: Veliz Books, 2020. 90 pages. $18.00.
In her translator’s note, Jeannine Pitas writes of her friendship with Selva Casal, “There is something magical about poets who have lived and continued writing into their eighties or occasionally their nineties—their very age gives them a special authority.” We Do Not Live in Vain cements Pitas’s reputation, along with her frequent collaborator Jesse Lee Kercheval, as a preeminent translator of contemporary Uruguayan poetry. Pitas chose to translate this collection for its response to the military dictatorship under which Casal lived and lost her job. These poems capture, then, the voice of a woman in the prime of life, living under an oppressive government, who accepts the risks of dissent. Casal lived to see the end of that military regime, the implementation of a democratic socialist state in Uruguay, and the global rise of authoritarianism in former bastions of democracy, including the United States. For a North American audience, recent political events sharply illustrate the timeliness of this book’s translation. As Pitas notes, “It hardly seems coincidental that interest in Casal’s work increased dramatically after 2016.” Few writers can speak with Casal’s authority about how to live and resist with dignity in a troubling political climate.
The poems are powerful artifacts, testifying to the violence committed by the state and the trauma it induced for those who suffered, witnessed, and heard about it: the emanating quality of terror that can radiate from one act and affect many lives. In “Today My Eyes Fall, Shot by Guns,” Casal writes,
Today my eyes fall, shot by guns
with three police officers at my door
in my country
love is a blow
youth is a wound.
For contemporary readers in the United States, this poem could be about Breonna Taylor’s final moments, not to mention any number of victims of police violence. These lines help to establish early in this book that violence never remains a public event but instead infiltrates intimate spaces, poisoning them and the attempts at human connection that occur between them. Love becomes a paranoid, distracted act, as when she writes in the same poem,
yesterday while loving you
I saw a man in the grim half-light
teeth fossils moons
weeping suicides.
The ongoing trauma of living in fear is well-expressed in “Wind of Our Night.” The speaker narrates a flight outside of the body that closely resembles psychological dissociation:
I leave my body in a strange life
I leave my body and return
this afternoon I saw a man in the street
collapsed empty
it was my own death
detached from me.
In this poem, the speaker insists that the physical borders separating her from a dead man, and even herself from the outside world and its elements, don’t exist. The speaker’s empathy with the man’s body blurs pity and fear in the same way her location within her own body becomes destabilized. Fear, and the belief in her own vulnerability, actuate the violence whether or not anyone physically harms her. At the end of this poem, the vagrancy of the speaker’s identity reaches a full reversal when Casal writes, “I am not myself / I am them / watching you wounding you.” The full cycle of the violence becomes the transformation of a witness first into a victim and finally into a perpetrator of the acts of terrorism as a means of escaping the roles belonging to fear.
Shortlisted for the National Translation Award for her translation of Marosa di Giorgio’s I Remember Nightfall, Pitas’s skill as a translator is indisputable, but it is interesting to notice the degree to which she sticks to the poet’s words as closely as she can. Surprising phrases like “I’d like us enriched by insects and birds” will generally reveal themselves to be literal translations of the original (“quisiera que enriquecidos de insectos y de pájaros . . .”). Moments arise, as they always do in translation, where Pitas has to interpret the original to some degree, as when she translates “ayer cuando te amaba” as “yesterday while loving you.” The translation, “yesterday when I loved you,” might have been more literal or idiomatic, but since it precedes a preterit verb “vi un hombre en la penumbra,” Pitas has chosen to signal love as an active verb, essentially, to denote a sexual encounter. In doing so, some strangeness is introduced into the phrase: how often do women describe sex in that way, as something they do to another? Yet the attention this translation calls to itself, and that it leads right back to the original (this edition provides the Spanish alongside Pitas’s English), serves ultimately to highlight the strangeness of the original: what kind of loving does Casal mean when she writes “amaba”? Is she speaking of sex in this unusual, individualistic way, or is she talking about a fickle temporality for love, a thing to be doing one day and no longer the next? Elements of strangeness in this careful translation tend to illuminate the strangeness of Casal’s speaker and to emphasize the ways in which her view of the world is mediated by trauma and its distortions and dislocations of the self.
Occasionally, the choice by Pitas to follow Casal’s lack of punctuation creates strangeness or ambiguity that I wouldn’t have understood without consulting the Spanish. Using little or no punctuation, especially end-stops, is a common stylistic choice in Latin American poetry that can create difficulties in English renderings. In the poem “Man My Air,” whose first lines are “Man my air / in your head I touch worlds and beings,” the meaning seems to point to “Man” as a verb, as in to populate or inhabit as a worker. The Spanish, however, seems to point to “Man” as the addressee from the beginning so that the second line seems more naturally connected: “Aire mío hombre / en tu cabeza tocó mundos y seres.” In fact, the ambiguity lies in whether the speaker possesses the air or the man, which Pitas removes by making “air” possessive. Since Casal makes that choice anyway, I can’t help but think how “Man, my air” would make a perplexing title and opening much smoother without altering the text more than it’s already been altered by the necessity of assigning the possessive pronoun to only one noun. Still, Pitas’s faithfulness to Casal’s (lack of) punctuation reflects her abiding respect for the poet’s work.
I don’t think we have to be ninety to know that the worst episodes in history are too often refrains. Since the publication of this book and the death of Casal mere months ago, United States democracy has suffered yet more unprecedented setbacks and a few glimmers of hope. It seems to me that one of the most responsible intellectual acts we can do as Americans is to study and learn from the brave voices of past conflicts, especially those who contributed to robust democracies later. We are lucky that translators like Pitas have focused their efforts and talents on bringing the work of this generation of Uruguayan writers to the English reading public.