A CONTRA CORRIENTE
Una revista de historia social
y literatura de América Latina

Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2007, 202-208
www.ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente
Review/Reseña
The River Is Wide, El río es ancho. Twenty Mexican Poets, A
Bilingual Anthology. Marlon L. Fick, ed. and tr. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
Crossing the river, Cruzando el río:
Twenty Mexican Poets
Cecilia Enjuto Rangel
University of Oregon
The River is Wide builds a poetic bridge between Mexican and
American waters. Poetry flies over the border, defies immigration
officers, and leaves unexpected footprints in each of its trips. I’ve
been traveling with The River is Wide for the last couple of months. I
take it with me to read on the airplane, in my office or on my sofa,
and each time I read it I explore a different poet, a different poetic
language. As the title suggests, this anthology of twenty
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contemporary Mexican poets, most of them alive, embraces a wide
range of poetic styles and voices, from diverse historical and
aesthetic periods.
In the preface Marlon L. Fick eloquently describes the
overwhelming process of translating these poets: “For twenty
blackbirds, like twenty poets, the translator submits to a divine form
of multiple personality disorder.” The reader can experience a similar
dizziness, and that is why, one must read this book over time, slowly,
not necessarily following its order or sequence. Each poet is a whole
different book. The most notable absences are Octavio Paz, Rosario
Castellanos and José Emilio Pacheco, but these are poets who have
been translated into English and are very well known in the US. The
anthology includes nationally and internationally recognized poets
from Alí Chumacero, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Jaime Sabines and
Tomás Segovia, to Coral Bracho, Héctor Carreto, Elsa Cross, Juan
Cú, Jorge Ruíz Esparza, Jorge Esquinca, Gloria Gervitz, Francisco
Hernández, Elva Macías, Myriam Moscona, Óscar Oliva, Lillian van
den Broek, Verónica Volkow and three younger poets, in their
twenties, Francisco Ávila Fuentes, Hernán Bravo Varela, and
Bernardo Emilio Pérez. The impressive selection of poems by
Hernández, Sabines, and Volkow, in contrast to the glimpses of Cú,
Esquinca, and Macías, shows that there is a crucial need for more
bilingual anthologies of Latin American poetry.
The book is built upon a dialogue between the original texts in
Spanish and their English translations. Fick’s Preface gives its
readers an interesting take on that poetic dialogue, on how he
approached each poet and what his research tools were throughout
the translation process: “To translate Juan Cú, I combed dictionaries
of American slang, children’s poetry, and sixteenth-century
guidebooks for nuns. To capture Alí Chumacero, I re-read parts of
King James Bible. To intimate Coral Bracho—her enormous
vocabulary, her textures—I re-read Hart Crane…” I understand the
Crossing the River, Cruzando el río 204
connections between those texts, and yet I was intrigued by how they
determined the words, the tone and the rhythm he used in his
translations. Fick also comments on the task of the translator and its
difficulty when one translates living poets. Yet he really doesn’t
expand on the process of “collaboration,” only signaling his walks
and talks with Tomás Segovia. Full of catchy anecdotes, in a page and
a half, Fick gives us a taste of his book, which he has been slowly
cooking and digesting, but as readers we need and want more than a
taste. I am not sure if this was Fick’s decision, but this anthology
clearly needed an introduction, and a longer preface or a translator’s
memoir.
These poets need to be introduced, and although we can argue
that the poems stand on their own, and that they speak for
themselves, an introduction to their respective poetic works is
imperative. At the end of the anthology, there is a very short
summary of each author’s biography, but it is just a few of sentences
that don’t contribute much to our reading of the texts. The
introduction to each poet and their respective works should have
been included before their selection, particularly if one considers that
most of these poets are unknown to the great majority of U.S. and
English readers. The other main problem with the presentation of the
texts is that they appear in a contextual vacuum. The poems are not
dated, and most of the time, the poetry books in which they were first
published are not specified. However, one may argue that readers
who are interested in a particular poet can do more research on their
own.
Still, Fick’s meticulous, respectful and loving translations
establish a dialogue with the original texts that reveals their multiple
and complex layers of meaning. He tries to be faithful to the text
itself, and most of the time he captures its rhythm and its word plays.
For example, in his translation of Elsa Cross’s “Orilla” he enriches
the translation by evoking the movement of the snake with the use of
Enjuto Rangel 205
alliteration: “A snake crosses my path, / a visitor, / streaked with
gold reflection / slides like water.” In Francisco Ávila Fuentes’s
“Yoviendo,” Fick faces the word play in the title and tries to reveal its
double meaning. “Yoviendo” combines “I see” or “I, seeing” with
“Raining” which is written in Spanish, “Lloviendo.” Fick translates it
“I See I Rain,” which interprets and anticipates the poem’s metaphor
of an internal rain, the speaker’s desire to “rain.”
The anthology is uneven in its attention to each author. It is
clear that Fick carefully and admiringly worked on his translations of
Francisco Hernández, Jaime Sabines, Tomás Segovia, and Verónica
Volkow. He finds the irreverent tone of Sabines’ “Canonicemos a las
putas”, (Let us canonize the whores) and the cutting-edge verses,
“cortantes” in every sense of the word, in Francisco Hernández’s
political critique in “Manhattan arde” (Manhattan Burning). The
selection of these poems is excellent, and most of these translations
are elegant and poignant.
In the translation of Segovia’s poems, Fick chooses to include
the commas and other punctuation marks that the original texts lack,
but this actually serves the English versions better. Segovia’s “El
viento en Montevideo” (The Wind of Montevideo), “A solas” (Alone),
and “Llamada” (The Call) are some of the best poems of the
anthology, and yet one can find some errors in both the Spanish and
the English texts. In “El viento de Montevideo” (“El viento en la
ciudad” (The Wind in the City) in Segovia’s Poesía (1943-1997)), it
reads “los delicadas flancos” [sic] (your delicate flanks) which is
masculine in Spanish and therefore it should be “delicados.” In
“Llamada” (The Call), “tus extrañas” is translated as “your viscera,”
and as the original version in Segovia’s Poesía (1943-1997)
demonstrates, it should be “tus entrañas.” These “typos” are just
“little” details, which just show carelessness in the editing process,
but in the case of “A solas” (Alone) it becomes a problem of
interpretation and mistranslation when “y me abres la puerta de mí
Crossing the River, Cruzando el río 206
mismo y pones a mi alcance tu riqueza” is translated as “and you
open your door to me and leave your richness / within my reach.”
(my emphasis) The alliteration of “richness” and “reach” works well.
But the door is not “your door;” it should be translated “you open the
door of myself” or “my door.” This is a fundamental detail because
this is an erotic poem, and the verse could be easily misunderstood as
a metaphor of a “physical” door, but this is an image that evokes the
erotic experience as a spiritual, intellectual journey into the self. The
poem is a self-reflection; the metaphysical door into the self is
“opened” through the encounter with the lover, regardless of the final
revelation that it is an imaginary encounter, and that the speaker is
faced with his own solitude.
His rendering of Myriam Moscona’s work is also rather
careless. For example, in Moscona’s first poem, “Quise conocer la
exultación de su carne” (I wanted the exultation of her flesh), there is
a clear mistranslation, that does not depend on the interpretation of
the text. He translated “durmió bajo el castaño de mi casa” as “she
slept under the brown of my house;” but “castaño” in this verse
means “chestnut tree.” Another example in Moscona’s “La mujer de
Lot encuentra nombre” (Lot’s Wife Finds a Name), the verse “La
muerte llegará temprano” is translated as “The dead will come early,”
when “la muerte” should be read as “Death” itself, and not the dead
in plural. Nevertheless, most of the anthology’s translations are not
characterized by such missteps.
Fick engages with an immense variety of poets and poems,
and some of his translations also reveal the humor and the word
plays in Spanish the authors put emphasis on. For example, Lillian
Van Den Broeck’s minimalist poetry is witty and equally funny in
Fick’s English versions. “María y su Hijo” (María and Her Son) is just
one verse, “El primer hijo de María lo engendró Don Nadie,” which is
translated as “María’s first son was a gift from Don Nobody.” The
English version is not totally “faithful” to the Spanish, but it is well
Enjuto Rangel 207
done, because “gift” carries the ironic, irreverent tone of the text, and
in the case of “Don Nobody,” instead of easily using “Mr.,” “Don”
gives him a paradoxical “name.” There are some word games that are
just too hard to incorporate in any translation; for example, in Van
Den Broeck’s “Desesperada” (Desperate), the title plays in Spanish
with “pera” (pear) and “espera” (waiting), and this is only limited to
“pear” in the English version. Even though most of his translations of
Van Den Broeck are sharp, there are some blunders in “Instrucciones
para un verano” (Instructions for a Summer). The “typo” in Spanish
“Se la leva,” which should be “se la lleva” (He sweeps her away) is
irrelevant in comparison to the confusing “extra verse” in English,
“She folds the paper and throws it away.” This poem is about María,
whose “diploma with its pink tassel” falls from her hand when she is
swept away by a man. As Fick translates: “A little girl picks it up. She
tears off the tassel and ties it to her hair. She peels the photo off the
paper and throws it away.” But then the translation falls when “Dobla
el papel. Como un acordeón. Como un abanico.” is translated as “She
folds the paper and throws it away. She folds the paper. Like an
accordion. Like a lady’s fan.” She does not throw away the paper, just
the photograph. This is a crucial detail because this text parodies the
significance of a diploma by suggesting its multiple uses if touched by
the imagination of a little girl, who transforms the symbol of
knowledge into a commodity. The fan is a symbol of femininity with
its own practical uses, yet the main critique is the ‘uselessness’ of the
diploma.
Fick remains a “friend” to the texts in Spanish, and when
pertinent, and feasible, he establishes his own musicality, his own
word plays and sense of irony. His work captures Verónica Volkow’s
tone, creativity and individual voice, but it also gives it a new sense of
self in English. In Volkow’s “Río” (River), the musicality of “se alza el
viento / rumor desglosando lo multiple,” is embraced in “the wind
rises / multifoliate chorus of rumor,” a verse that through the
Crossing the River, Cruzando el río 208
synesthesia evokes the sounds and the imagery of a chorus of leaves
moving and singing with the wind. Fick has chosen the poems he
decided to translate well, and I’m sure that his translations will
provoke a multiplicity of connections with other cultural products. I
was particularly impressed by Volkow’s “La historia del laberinto”
(The Story of the Labyrinth) as a poetic seed of the moving and
amazing film by Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, El laberinto
del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth). As in Escher’s works, in Volkow’s poem
the labyrinth is an intricate web that erases and recreates the
princess and her steps. And like Pan’s Labyrinth, the multiplicity of
poems in The River is Wide connects the fantastic and the magical,
with political and historical critiques.
The anthology’s translations fall and rise again, and although I
signaled many of its missteps, I also tried to recognize and appreciate
Fick’s valuable and skillful project. His anthology is an ambitious and
overwhelming work, and for the most part he successfully captures
the Mexican poets’ intentions. It is not structured by literary themes
or historical eras. It does not aim to be a comprehensive anthology; it
aims to be “borderless,” and to “connect” through its translations,
poets and readers from Mexico and the English-speaking world. The
greatest contribution of The River is Wide is that it narrows the gap
between Mexican and U.S. literatures, and creates a few more
bridges from which to cross those rivers.