Translation: Claudia Lars

Here's my chapter on Claudia Lars. I found this a hard poem to translate. Though I could't do it justice, I enjoyed trying. Vanguardist poetry is hard, in general. I think because it is built on so much symbolism from other poems, but is trying to break free of that dependency; it feels like shorthand. Sometimes the poems I like the most, or like the most to translate, don't come out that well. Maybe it's overthinking. I'd like very much to translate her little book on Laika the cosmonaut dog.

Of course, I am especially fond of Lars because of my love of feminist science fiction. She's a little bit science-fictiony, don't you think? And this is certainly a feminist response to patriarchal poetics -- a description of "woman" in poetry, but not with the metaphors and language that describes women in terms that are disempowering. It is possibly a difficult poem for that reason too; because it is trying to evade something.




Claudia Lars (1899-1974)

Margarita del Carmen Brannon Vega is her birth name; she is also called Carmen Brannon Beers or Carmen Brannon de Samoya Chinchilla. She was born in El Salvador. She studied and lived in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

Her early work in the 1920s and 1930s was compared to Agustini, Mistral, Storni, and Ibarbourou. She lists as her early influences Cervantes, Fray Luís de León, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Góngora, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Burns, Coleridge, Whitman, Poe, Dickinson, Shelley, Byron, Yeats, Blake, and Darío (Barraza 142). Critics called her a lyrical postmodernist. Later, she was considered part of the Vanguard, writing in both formal and free verse.

Her books include Tristes mirajes (1916); Estrellas en el pozo (1934), and Canción redonda (1937). She also wrote poems and books for children, sonnets to famous women writers of many countries, and, later in the 20th century, she wrote a poem cycle on the cosmonauts of the United States and Russia–including the dog Laika.

“Dibujo” sets out a bold feminist vision of the future. The poem’s woman “que llega,” who’s coming, arriving now, or will soon arrive, transcends the usual gendered metaphors. Her ascension is not like flight, and not like the growing of a plant that is rooted in the earth. Instead, Lars describes a woman who stands up, who has agency and raises herself up with all her intelligence and power.

Dibujo de la mujer que llega

En el lodo empinada,
No como el tallo de la flor
y el ansia de la mariposa . . .
Sin raíces ni juegos:
más recta, más segura
y más libre.

Conocedora de la sombra y de la espina,
Con el milagro levantado
en los brazos triunfantes.
Con la barrera y el abismo
debajo de su salto.

Dueña absoluta de su carne
para volverla centro del espíritu:
vaso de lo celeste,
domus áurea,
gleba donde se yerguen, en un brote,
la mazorca y el nardo.

Olvidada la sonrisa de Gioconda,
Roto el embrujo de los siglos,
Vencedora de miedos.
Clara y desnuda bajo el día limpio.

Amante inigualable
en ejercicio de un amor tan alto
que hoy ninguno adivina.
Dulce,
con filtrada dulzura
que no daña ni embriaga a quien la prueba.

Maternal todavía,
sin la caricia que detiene el vuelo,
ni ternuras que cercan,
ni mezquinas daciones que se cobran.

Pionera de las nubes.
Guía del laberinto.
Tejedora de vendas y de cantos.
Sin más adorno que su sencillez.

Se levanta del polvo . . .
No como el tallo de la flor
que es apenas belleza.


Sketch of the woman of the future


Standing tall in the mud.
Not like the flower's stalk
and butterfly’s desire . . .
No roots, no flitting,
more erect, more sure
and more free.

Knower of shadow and thorn,
With miracle held high
in her triumphant arms.
With obstacle and abyss.
beneath her stride.

Absolute queen of her flesh
returned to the center of her spirit:
vessel of the celestial,
domus aurea, home of the golden;
clod where shoots burst forth into
maize and fragrant flower.

Forgotten: the Mona Lisa's smile.
Broken: the spell of centuries.
Conquered: the fears.
Bright and naked in the pure, clean day.

Unequalled lover 
in enjoyment of a love so lofty
that no one today could predict it.
Sweet,
with controlled sweetness
that doesn't hurt or intoxicate the drinker.

Maternal still,
without the caress that holds back flight
nor tenderness that traps,
nor submission and giving in, that little by little, smothers.

Pioneer of the clouds. 
Guide to the labyrinth.
Weaver of veil and song.
Adorned only in her simplicity.

She stands up from the dust . . .
Not like the flowering stem
that’s not so beautiful.

Feminist research and anthologizing

Here's the introduction to my anthology of some poems by women from Latin America, translated from Spanish to English. It explains my research methodology and the theories I developed while reading and translating.

* Introduction to Towards an Anthology of Spanish American Women Poets, 1880-1930 - HTML

* Introduction to Towards an Anthology of Spanish American Women Poets, 1880-1930 - PDF (154K, 42 pages)

Here are a few of my main points.

I considered poems by several different criteria; any one of them were sufficient.
* work of high literary quality by my own judgment
* work that was important in its time
* work is by a woman who was part of a known community of women writers
* work has a strong feminist message
* work is representative of a well-known category or type of poetry of its time and place
* work that was intertextual with other poems

I chose to use chronological juxtaposition, not by author's birth date or publication of first book, but by when they were active in literary communities.

Some of the point of the anthology is to provide a backdrop for the more well known poets of that time and place. So, for instance, I believe that readings of Gabriela Mistral or Delmira Agustini may change when seen in context with the poems by their contemporary female authors writing in Spanish.

And,

Last but not least, I would like to shift the balance of gender in the practice of defining literary movements and other groupings of poetic styles. By re-presenting a broad range of women's work from a particular time period, I hope to make it possible to refocus current definitions of literary quality. For example, modernismo as a movement was defined from men's work, and then, in many cases, quality was determined from whether a poem and a poet's life fit that definition of modernismo. Therefore, I feel it is a useful experiment to begin to define literary categories from a body of women's work, from which it is possible to form other parameters of literary quality. To begin that task, it was first necessary to find the women’s poetry.
I began this project with the assumption and belief that there were women poets in Latin America 100 years ago who are worth reading today. My initial questions were: Which women were writing? What were their names? Where and how can I find their work to judge it for myself?

One more bit where I quote myself. (I am SO cheating.)

I noticed a common theme in many anthologies, including those which were promoting a feminist view: they hailed women's recent work as if women's poetry were a new phenomenon. As Adrienne Rich said in 1980: "Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own" (11). Joanna Russ also pointed out this problem in How To Suppress Women’s Writing (1983); she calls it “the myth of the isolated achievement” (62). This isolation was especially apparent in short biographical notes in poetry anthologies, in which male poets were discussed in a context of other men, while women poets were presented as lone examples of excellence.

This bit about the "myth of the isolated achievement" is a pattern I see over and over again when women's work is discussed -- in literature, in poetry, in technology, in politics, or anywhere.

Look for it yourself in articles with a supposedly positive spin. Once you start to see it, and if you start looking at history, and women's history, you will see the poison for what it is -- the perpetual erasure of our history, and a tool that keeps us isolated from each other and from generations past and upcoming.

The time changes, but the pattern remains the same; not just in Latin American poetry, but poetry in general. And not just in poetry, but any genre of writing. Not just in writing, but in many, many fields. In poetry, a distant foremother is invoked, perhaps Sappho or Sor Juana. The lack of (significant) women is pointed out. Then a comparatively recent "appearance" of women is celebrated. The women appear, as if by magic or spontaneous generation. The crest of that wave of women's achievement is always right now, or just about to happen.

You think you have achieved something in life? Made the situation better? Broke ground? Our daughters will be pointed at as if they were the first... over and over again. Unless we break through the wall, somehow, as I hope that the Net and blogging will help to achieve. Women have been achieving great things for as far back as I have ever tried to look.

María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira: Las ondines

I promised a poem or translation this week, to balance out the political posts. Here's a couple of my translations of poems by Uruguayan poet María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira. They were published posthumously in 1924, though I am fairly sure they were published in Uruguayan or Argentinian magazines much earlier in the century. I've mentioned Vaz Ferreira a few times before in this blog, including a funny moment where I was irked at a critic: Damming with Faint Praise and No Space.



Enjoy!

This poem "Vaso Furtivo" was lovely to translate. If you read it over a few times, and let it sink in, or let yourself sink into it, you'll begin to get what Vaz Ferreira was all about.

Vaso furtivo


Por todo lo breve y frágil,
superficial, fugitivo,
por lo que no tiene bases,
argumentos ni principios;
por todo lo que es liviano,
veloz, mudable y finito;
por las volutas del humo,
por las rosas de los tirsos,
por la espuma de las olas
y las brumas del olvido . . .
por lo que les carga poco
a los pobres peregrinos
de esta trashumante tierra
grave y lunática, brindo
con palabras transitorias
y con vaporosos vinos
de burbuja centelleantes
en cristales quebradizos . . .



A quick drink


To all that's brief and fragile,
superficial, unstable,
To all that has no foundation,
logical argument or principles;
for everything imprudent,
quick, mutable, and finite;
to spirals of smoke,
to thyrsus-stemmed roses,
to foam on the waves
and forgetting's sea-mist . . .
to all that's nearly weightless
for the wandering folk
of this transient earth;
grave, moonmad, I drink to all that
with transitory words
and heady wines
sparkling with bubbles
in the most breakable glasses . . .

What could be more in tune with my own beliefs than this defiant celebration of ephemera! I worked hard to convey her floating and delicate line breaks. This translation of "Vaso furtivo" was published a couple of years ago in the journal Parthenon West.

In the next poem, I felt that Vaz Ferreira was deliberately evoking Sappho. As many of her contemporary women poets did, Vaz Ferreira wrote about the ocean and dynamic chaos as essentially feminine.

The ondines


At the shore
where the cool and silvered wave
bathes sand,
and the shining stars
flare and die
at dawn’s first rays,

from sea-foam
the ondines lightly leap,
swift curves
and forms,
ethereal dress of ocean nymphs,
fair visions.

They roll onward, clear green,
resplendent as emeralds,
the bright waters
that lend color
to their polished shoulders,
snow-white swan . . .

Some wrap themselves
in diaphanous blue mists
dressed in dawn,
others in the wind
let fly light floating gauze
the color of heaven

and the fair ones sink
svelte forms of sonorous ocean
beneath the waters,
and over the waves
their hair snakes
like rays of gold . . .

Here's the original poem:

Las ondinas


Junto a la costa
donde la arena tibia y plateada
bañan las ondas,
y los lucientes
rayos primeros de la alborada
brillan y mueren,

de entre la espuma
surgen ligeras de las ondinas
las raudas curvas
y los informes
trajes etéreos de hadas marinas,
blancas visiones.

Ruedan, verdosas,
resplandecientes como esmeraldas,
las claras gotas
que se destiñen
en la tersura de sus espaldas
de níveo cisne . . .

Unas se envuelven
las vaporosas gasas azules
del alba veste,
otras al viento
sueltan los leves florantes tules
color de cielo

y hunden las blancas
esbeltas formas del mar sonoro
bajo las aguas,
y serpentean
sobre las ondas cual rayos de oro
sus cabelleras . . .

Here is some background and commentary straight out of the enormous poetry anthology I compiled and translated a few years ago. (It was my thesis.) I had thought I'd send it around as a book proposal, and I put out some feelers. No one really wanted to take on an enormous anthology of poems of dubious copyright status from 14 different Latin American countries. Some of my translations from this book have been published in little magazines or online journals.

Vaz Ferreira was a member of the "Generación del 1900" of Uruguayan intellectuals, which included José Enrique Rodó, Julio Herrera y Reissig, Ernestina Méndez Reissig de Narvaja, Florencio Sánchez, Samuel Blixen, Alberto Nin Frias, Horacio Quiroga, and Carlos Reyles (Verani 9). She began publishing in 1894. After her illness and death in 1924, her brother, who published her book, La isla de los cánticos, downplayed the friendship between María Eugenia and Delmira Agustini. In 1959, her unpublished poems were printed as La otra isla de los cánticos.

Biographical notes on Vaz Ferreira often paint her as a frail, waiflike young maiden with a posthumous "slim volume of poems" who had a tragic illness before her early death (Jacquez Wieser 8). Her illness is sometimes alluded to as mental: Sidonia Rosenbaum implies that Vaz Ferreira, embittered by Delmira Agustini’s fame, lost her mind because of jealousy and a combination of caprice and frustrated, “sterile” sexuality (50). However, other sources emphasize her positive, charismatic qualities as a rebel, speaking of her literary and intellectual influence, her fondness for wearing men's clothes, her shocking bohemian manners, and her notorious love of practical jokes. She was the first woman in Uruguay to fly in an airplane, in 1914, at the Fiesta Aérea, a public event. Juan Carlos Legido describes her as one of the most cultured, sure of herself, famous, and popular women in Montevideo’s social circles (Legido 6). She was a literature professor at the Women's University of Montevideo, along with Dr. Clotilde Luisi. Vaz Ferreira was also a dramatist, composer and pianist. Her works were often performed at the Teatro Solís (Rubenstein Moreira 12). Vaz Ferreira was especially fond of Heine and other German poets and philosophers.

The critic Alberto Zum Felde counted Vaz Fereirra among modernista writers, influenced by the Mexican writers Salvador Díaz Mirón and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (Rubenstein Moriera 46). Anderson-Imbert, in Spanish American Literature, refers to her as "the nucleus of Uruguayan poetry" and of modernismo; then he calls her "a solitary voice, solemnly religious, although capable of creating sharp images on a high level" and goes on to discuss Julio Herrera y Reissig, "not a great poet . . ." for several pages. (Andersen-Imbert 279). The general pattern is for literary historians to call Vaz Ferreira’s work brilliant, and then to pay more attention to the work of poets who are men.
With typical blunt condescension, María Monvel says of Vaz Ferreira:

Interesante "caso" de mujer, de letras, esta uruguayana, que a pesar de haber nacido en 1880, tiene en sus versos todo el acento libre de la mujer nacida en pleno siglo veinte. Gran poeta lírico, con algo de reflexivo y meditativo a la vez, esta mujer es uno de los más finos cantores que ha tenido América, y tal vez es su influencia la única perceptible en Delmira Agustini, que la superó en pasión y en arrebato lírico, pero no en cultura y sensibilidad. (Monvel 63)
Interesting “case” of a woman of letters, this Uruguayan, who despite the burden of being born in 1880, has in her verses all the free tone of a woman born right in the 20th century. A great lyric poet, with something of reflexivity and meditativeness at the same time, this woman is one of the finest poets that America has had, and perhaps her influence is the only one perceptible in Delmira Agustini, who surpasses her in passion and in going overboard with lyricism, but not does not surpass her in culture or sensitivity.

My translation of the title of “Vaso furtivo” was a difficult choice. The poem is toasting and drinking to impermancence, lightness, madness, surfaces and illusion. “Sly toast” does not work in English, and “Furtive glass” does not convey the meaning of a toast. The poem itself celebrates qualities that have traditionally been attributed to women. Considered in this light, it is a radical feminist aesthetic statement. “Las ondinas,” a poem about the beauty of ocean waves at dawn, emphasizes feminine beauty, impermanence, and dynamic movement; Vaz Ferreira’s poems often celebrate an ethereal world of ideal beauty, writing modernista aesthetics from the viewpoint of a powerful woman, as in her poem “Yo soy la Diosa de las azules, diáfanas calmas” ‘I am the Goddess of all blue, diaphanous calm” (Vaz Ferreira, Otra isla, 57-58).

Call for submissions: WisCon Chronicles, volume 3

Call for Ideas and Contributions
WisCon Chronicles Volume 3 - WisCon 32


Were you at WisCon 32 in 2008? Aqueduct Press would love to hear from you with ideas and materials for Volume 3 of The WisCon Chronicles.


ANY panel, event, or paper you'd like to write about is fine.

Here are a few that we've noticed people talking about:


* Maureen McHugh and L. Timmel Duchamp's Guest of Honor readings and speeches
* Women and Hard SF
* Elves and Dwarves: The Racism Inherent in Fantasy
* Fanfic and Slash 201
* The Battlestar Galactica panel
* The Eclipse One Cover Debate
* Not Just Japan: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy
* Writing Working-Class Characters

We'd also like to see writeups of your hallway conversations: What fantastic discussions did you have in the interstices? In the hallway, in the lobby? At parties, at dinner, in your room, or online?

If you were at WisCon and would like to participate — to offer ideas or to submit an essay — please get in touch with us. Don’t be shy.

If you were blown away by a WisCon panel that we haven’t mentioned and would like to see its ideas expanded upon in The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 3, please let us know. Tell us the name of the panel, which participants (including audience members) most engaged you, and what was valuable to you about the discussion. What was thought-provoking, inspiring, enraging, hilarious, worthy of deeper discussion? If you’re interested in writing an essay on the topic or contributing to the book in some other way, let us know.

Please query before writing an article. If you want to submit an article or essay, please email a query or proposal by September 15, 2008. (The earlier the better.) The deadline for the submission of finished essays will be October 15, 2008. Text in the body of the email is preferred, or rich text format (.rtf) files as attachments. We’re looking for essays of 800-3000 words. If your submission is published, you will receive a small payment and a copy of the book.

Feel free to forward this call for submissions!


Thanks,
Liz Henry
email ideas and submissions to: liz@bookmaniac.net

Reading in Seattle this Friday, Apr 25

Liz Reading at Queer Open Mic
Originally uploaded by Liz.

I am road tripping up to Seattle this week! If you are there please come see me at this event ! I would love to see you all and would love the support. April 25, 8pm, Annex Theatre, 1100 East Pike Street.

You will hear me say the word "Lezzie" in a Texas accent. Also, I promise to wear leather pants. There will be bubbling, and silliness, and insane talk of poems and roadside geology and the roots of the Klamath Mountains. I will pop a wheelie for you and you may pat me on the head and tell me I am brave (JUST KIDDING about the patting).

I will not have my child with me, but you can bring yours, as long as you keep them out of the bar area and don't mind them hearing some intense stories of playground bullies and maybe some cussing, plus you realize my story is about being queer, queer, queer. All the stories are AMAZING and are written about elementary school and early middle school experiences & with that audience in mind!

Get info & buy tickets here: Can I Sit W/You reading

Tickets are priced at $5 and $12, which means you can choose how much to donate. Money all goes to my hometown Special Ed PTA.

Poetry Month: Day 3, Anthologies

I love, love, love anthologies. I love to read their prefaces and introductions and all the surrounding "matter" and to think about how they were put together. I love to have a whole lot of different poets conveniently in one place, just like I love a rapid-fire reading with 30 people in a row, rapid exposure to many styles.

Pretty soon the Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers will be out! Yeah! Anything with Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Cho, Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, and Bikini Kill in it all together is going to be fucking glorious!

A couple of weeks ago I got my copy of Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv. A couple of years ago there was hot discussion on the Women Poets mailing list about doing a book. It was feminist collective hullabaloo combined with large-scale mailing-list-drama! And it came out beautifully, affirming my faith in the Magic Internets and in amazing people who do hard work.



Editorial tasks were divvied up - Everyone stuck with it - A policy was set to accept and publish one poem by anyone on the list who sent something in - People who feared the prospect of putting their precious Work into something that would label them as Amateur, or Vanity-Press, or that would Suck because of no hierarchical editorial control, were argued against passionately - Inclusivity and anti-snobbery won the day for many people. The result, a very beautiful, thick, amazing book from Red Hen Press. 259 contributors from 19 countries. It is incredibly beautiful. The poems are good. I'm not at ALL embarrassed to be in this book, and I can't say the same of some other more "legitimate" journals or books. The poems are good and they're not all the same-samey workshoppy voice that drives me crazy about so many poetry journals.

Later today I'll post some excerpts.

provocations

While I'm writing all this feminist criticism I do find that I spend a lot of time describing and refuting sexist criticism.

There should actually be a special category or word for works that especially offend, that are so egregiously sexist that they sting feminist to action. They make it all very clear. Really, work like this does us a favor. It needs special mention, a category of its own.

This occurred to me the other night as I was talking about feminist science fiction with Laura Quilter. What to put in the femsf wiki? I was trying to argue for this "worst offenders" category for feminist sf. What are the books that outraged me when I was 12, and made me suddenly realize I was not, as a girl, included in (male) universalist claims to represent humanity? What made me shriek, "Hey! That's not ME... and it pretends to be. So I better stand up, say something, and represent." What are the touchstones of sexist thought?

Instantly a few revolting candidates spring to mind... Asimov's Foundation trilogy, and certainly Podkayne of Mars. For me, I think, attempts to create the "plucky girl" stood out more strongly than the usual objectifications of women in fantasy and SF. I identified with John Carter of Mars easier than I did Arkady Darrell, for god's sake.

Well, I'm led to think of all this again as I contemplate the horrors of Sidonie Rosenbaum's "Modern Women Poets of Spanish America." It sounds good, doesn't it? But its horrible sexism was one of the main inspirations for me to translate Juana de Ibarbourou's work. Rosenbaum praises and insults Ibarbourou sometimes in the very same sentence - she'll refer to her freshness and sponteneity and then "lack of profundity" and "superficiality of thought." She's primitive, she's ardent, etc. It's a classic example of what (in How to Suppress Women's Writing) Joanna Russ calls denial of agency. It's as if the poetry just flowed unconsciously from Ibarbourou's "brain"... not that Rosenbaum thinks she has a brain, so I should probably say "flowed unconsciously from her very being." As soon as Ibarbourou writes about anything other than "take me now, i'm nubile and willing!" then the critics slam down on her for being a) pretentious b) boringly intellectual c) pretending to have understood suffering d) being obscure e) being too complicated. Even though they were previously saying she wasn't complicated or mature ENOUGH.

Well, it's endlessly annoying.

My point is, in part, that I have a strong impulse to slam the people who are trying to make anthologies of women writers and who do it in a way that exacerbates the entire sexist discourse of what women write and how and why and whether it's "really" any good or not.

This means that as I leap into publishing my thoughts on the subject I will be criticizing pretty much everyone else in my field.

Luckily most of them are dead.

List of poets in the anthology

Here's the list of women poets that I have translated so far (some, many poems; some, only one).

limitation is that they should have been publishing or writing between 1880 and 1930. I have another list of many more poets from the same era - some that I want to translate and expand into a really big book. I will probably put the bios of the poets online. In fact I feel like I could have more of an effect by making Wikipedia pages for all these poets, and by tagging them up. But I would like a book.

The long list (not posted yet) is only a few of the many hundreds of women whose work I've seen.


*Luisa Pérez de Zambrana (Cuba)
*Jesusa Laparra (Guatemala)
*Maria Luisa Milanes (Cuba) (1893-1919)
*Maria Villar Buceta (Cuba) (1899-1977)
*Salomé Ureña de Henríquez (Dominican Republic) (1850-1897) "Herminia"
*Elisa Monge (Guatemala) (18XX-1932)
*Adela Zamudio (Bolivia) (1854-1928) "Soledad"
*Mercedes Matamoros (Cuba) (1851-1906)
*Nieves Xenes (Cuba)
*Aurelia Castillo de González (Cuba) (1842-1920)
*María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (Uruguay) ( 1875-1924 )
*Emilia Bernal de Agüero (Cuba) (1884-1964)
*Delmira Agustini (Uruguay) (1886 - 1914)
* Antonieta Le-Quesne (Chile) (1895-1921)
*Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay) (1894 - 1979)
*Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva (Venezuela) (1886-1962)
*Gabrela Mistral (Chile) (1889-1957)
*Emma Vargas Flórez de Arguelles (Colombia) (1885 - )
*Alfonsina Storni (Argentina) (1892-1938)
* Adela Sagastume de Acuña (Guatemala) (18XX - 1926)
*Magda Portal (Perú) (1901-1989)
*MARIA MONVEL (Chile) (1897 - 1936)
*Nydia Lamarque (Argentina) (1906-1982)
*Olga Acevedo (Chile) (1895-1970)

Fitting and not fitting

While I was doing my research I pretty much ignored Chile and in fact I have completely ignored Gabriela Mistral because I figure everyone else has written about her already, and she's well known. Ultimately I have to go and read her poems and read something about her life - in fact, probably I'm being stupid and there's a biography of her out there in English that would be easy for me to find, with pointers to lots of other good poets.

My poet this week has been Olga Acevedo, a Chilean born around 1895. Acevedo fits firmly with the other women I've been translating, all the ones who are "not quite modernists". Well what if they're not? Why not call them something else? Because there was definitely something. Why not call it a genre? For god's sake.

My special favorite, Juana de Ibarbourou, doesn't fit strict definitions of modernismo in her early work mostly because she's not quite rigorous and formal enough. I read somewhere in an interview with her that until after her second book, she didnt' even know what a sonnet was. She'd read plenty of them, and written them, but had never studied the rules of verse. (All the poets did not study the rules of verse, but the ladies DO roll their eyes.) She just DID it - but slightly "wrong".

Back to Acevedo. I got very excited at her early poems. Acevedo mentions silence a lot. There's a lot of not-speaking, and dot-dot-dot ellipses, ghosts and statues that can't speak but who want to speak and paradoxically ARE speaking through the poem. The sort of poem that goes like this, "I'm totally mute, I'm a statue, I can't speak! Oh, the sadness!" (Not an actual line.) It's a beautiful rhetorical strategy that makes me aware of all the things they're not saying. Despite my writing ALL THE TIME there is plenty I'm not saying and can't say because of social convention or attempts to be private -- and I don't always feel comfortable with that. Show me a wall and I want to break it. Reflex! But these early 20th century women, their silent speaking statues are all talking to Rodó, in response to his essay "Ariel" in which a philosopher explains to his students (gatherred around a statue of Ariel) all about their duty as artists.

I wondered about the phrase "la tristeza de ser", which was in quotes in Acevedo's poem "Serenata". Is it a quotation/translation from French? Or Kierkegaard? I could translate it as "existential despair" but I'm not sure if I want to be anachronistic if it's an anachronism. If you're going to say "sadness of being" you might as well say "existential despair". Anyway, Acevedo's angst is expressed thusly: She's passionately addressing a ray of pure white moonlight as it streams into her room, and she wants to hide her face in its gauzy negligee and melt away into perfumed nothingness like a ravished bride. Hot stuff!

In other early poems by Acevedo, I noticed a lot of blue which is now a red flag, or really a blue flag, for me that something is going on about Art and Poetry with capital letters. Anything that's blue, or anything about fountains or swans, and the poet is definitely talking to/about Darío and "Azul" -- and so is addressing the ideas of modernismo; the poem should be read in the context of modernismo whether you "count" it or not in that genre. Pure art, inspiration, beauty -- Beauty -- as a way of being. These women, these adherents of maenidismo, saw themselves as living their lives as art. I feel like the more I read, the more I am in their dream-world. Edith Södergran is there -- and the Comtesse de Noailles -- and I'm sure so many more from other countries and languages. I want to put my Latin American women together with them in a lovely anthology, someday, to show the connections.

My own dreamworld is still this imaginary, beautiful data structure of all the texts in the world. I want it to be easy to see relationships between books. I want people to be viewable as nebulous clouds of text-production and consumption or maybe those are the wrong words; texts and people have conversations and relationships.

How much happier I am to be putting all this out into the world, instead of just in private notebooks! And not to be a lonely super-reader autodidact freak anymore. I mean, I still am, but the value of it is different once I'm not talking to the air.

Genre classifications and sexism

I come up against this again and again. Critical literature focuses on defining a genre, and women end up just outside that definition. So it always looks like they just miss the boat because they're not quite good enough. Really, though, if you look at the moments when the genre is being defined, the boundaries are arbitrary. Other genres could be declared.

I need to read more widely...

So check this out.

With respect to her poetry in particular, critics have often failed to recognize the modernity of its lyric voice on account of its traditional verse patterns. Reflecting a dual attitude of competition and cooperation with her cultural world, Noailles held a similarly double-voiced discourse toward conventional interpretations of woman. Her classification in literary history as a belated French Romantic further obfuscates the significance of her work. While recognizing her predecessors, Noailles was frequently unable to find adequate models in their works for a distinct poetic identity. In seeking new versions of the feminine self, she acknowledged women who were unable to write and, more broadly, she attempted to provide a formerly silent Muse with voice and presence. (Catherine Perry)

She's not quite a romantic... or she's a "late" romantic... but she's not quite a modernista either - like de Ibarbourou, Bernal, Vaz Ferreira, Elisa Monge, Mercedes Matamoros, and so many women poets of the 1890s to the 1920s.

I'll be looking for Perry's book. She has more to say on her brief website on de Noailles:

A discrepancy between form and content, reflecting Noailles' situation at the cusp of the antithetical world views of nineteenth-century Romanticism and twentieth-century Modernism, characterizes her poetry, where dynamic concepts and images strive to dissolve a largely classical structure. By actively engaging with her French literary heritage while finding a source of inspiration in Greek paganism and in Nietzsche's radical thought, Noailles constructed an original poetic world view. Her work is best described as Dionysian--ecstatic, sensual, erotic, playful, sometimes violent, and always marked by a tragic undercurrent which becomes more apparent in her later poetry.

"Dionysian" describes Agustini, de Ibarbourou, Bernal, and Matamoros very well. I would prefer a different name if we are going to declare a new genre... Imagine the articles as we define Maenidic poetics and make brief offhand mention of Ruben Darío - and how he doesn't quite fit the Genre. A pity, really, as his work contained echos of Maenidism, traces which can't help but reflect the prevailing spirit of the time.

***
It occurs to me that I have had a giant epiphany about this, but I'm reinventing the wheel. I did a little poking around and found this excellent bibliography: Gender and Genre. My god! right up top we have "Benstock, S. (1991). Textualizing the feminine. On the limits of genre. University of Okla. Press." Looks perfect! I'm still 15 years behind in academic literary theory. Though I think it might be more like "feminizing the textual" than "textualizing the feminine" - that's what's going on in a lot of the criticism I'm reading. The poets are textualizing the feminine. The critics feminize in order to denigrate and marginalize. *sigh*

Damned with machista praise

From an essay by José Carlos Mariátegui - cited by Daisy Zamora in the intro to her anthology, La mujer nicaragüense en la poesía:

"Los versos de las poetisas generalmente no son versos de mujer. No se siente en ellos sentimiento de hembra. Las poetisas no hablan como mujeres. Son, en su poesía, seres neutros. Son artistas sin sexo. La poesía de la mujer está dominada por un pudor estúpido. Y carece por esta razón de humanidad y de fuerza. Mientras el poeta muestra su "yo", la poetisa esconde y mistifica el suyo. Envuelve su alma, su vida, su verdad, en las grotescas túnicas de lo convencional" (Zamora 22).

"The verses of poetesses generally aren't women's verses. One doesn't sense in them any female feeling. The women poets don't talk like women. They are, in their poetry, neuter beings. They're artists without sex. The poetry of women is dominated by an idiotic modesty. And that's why they lack in humanity and power. While the male poet displays his "I", the poetess hides and mystifies herself. She wraps up her soul, her life, her truth, in the grotesque tunics of the conventional." [translation by Liz Henry]

I don't know the year that Mariátegui wrote this essay, but most likely sometime in the 1920s. It's fascinating to contrast his criticism of women with that of other (male) critics who run off at the mouth about the oversexed women poets who go too far with their passion and who can't seem to write about anything important, anything other than love. I had just been writing about him in conjunction with Magda Portal, María Wiesse, Angela Ramos, Alicia del Prado, and other women who were publishing in Amauta, a Peruvian magazine. He was the only man mentioned in conjunction with these very political, activist women, and I wondered if he had some interesting take on feminism. Well, he sure sounds jerky in that one excerpt, kind of like he wants a free show from these un-neuter women who boldly strip themselves of their tunics...

Last week I translated Magda Portal's poem "Liberación". And check out these lines:

Un día seré libre... Seré libre presiento,
con una gran sonrisa a flor de corazón,
con una gran sonrisa como no tengo hoy.
Y ya no habrá la sombra de mi remordimiento,
el cobarde silencio que merma mi Emoción.
Un día habré logrado la verdad de mi Yo!

One day I'll be free... I'll be free, I know it,
with a huge smile that flowers from the heart,
with a huge smile that I don't have today.
And then I won't have the ghost of my shame,
the coward silence that tamps down Emotion.
Someday I'll have achieved the truth of my Self!
[forgive the translation... a crude first draft.]

Wow! That just can't be a coincidence. It sounds like she wrote it in response to Mariátegui. A little bit of poking around on the web and I found this fascinating essay by him all about Portal's poetry, comparing her to Agustini, Ibarbourou, and others: 7 Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana, from 1928. Mari&ategui has a huge crush!

I find it annoying how he says her work isn't "descended" from any other women -- as if feminist geneologies would demean the work or the poet, and as if she sprung up out of nowhere and as if no other woman anywhere were writing like that. Praise becomes isolation; isolation becomes tokenization. I understand that his motivations were partly nationalist, but from my perspective, I see every introduction to women's work from this era saying "How come this woman poet has no equal, no precursor? Where did she come from? " as having a subtext of assigning freakishness to women writers.

But then, the more I look, the more I find that these women writers often were surrounded by other writing women. They're not left out because they're trivial; they're left out because non-triviality is defined to be male.

Tags: feminism, latin american poetry, literary translation

Anthologizing; standards of selection

I've been working on my anthology project for over a year. It's of poems by Latin American women writers - well, Spanish America - and is focused on work published between 1880 and 1930. My goal is to give a fair representation of what was being published by women in that era. I've done a lot of research! And I could spend years expanding this project; it's fascinating and there is a ton of material. To do this project right, I would need to go spend a couple of months in various big libraries. I'd like to visit the Benson Latin American collection in Austin; I'm familiar with it because I used to work in that library system. I'd like to go to big libraries in Buenos Aires and Uruguay and Cuba and Guatemala, to look at copies of women's magazines and other literary magazines from the turn of the century.

For now, I have quite a lot to work with. I have good work from about 40 or 50 poets, and many more I haven't yet been able to judge. I've translated a smaller core group of 21 poets, made short bios for them, and compiled lists of their work, where I could find that information. Most of these poets are not well known. You have your famous ones in roughly this order:

- Gabriela Mistral (Won the Nobel Prize)
- Delmira Agustini
- Alejandra Storni

I'd say that's it for the "known" writers that you would expect from an academic who is a latin americanist, or is from Latin America. Storni, especially, was hip recently. And a few poets in the U.S. will have read selected translations of Mistral. Usually the dippiest and stupidest of her poems.

Beyond that, people seem to know Juana de Ibarbourou; Salome Ureña, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Correct me if I'm wrong! The other writers are either little-known even to most literary people, or they're known (or known of) by people from their own countries. This is not surprising; academia rewards specialization. People tend to become experts in a particular time, place or "literary movement"; even so narrow as to study a particular writer. The mindset of the ambitious anthologist must be quite different.

I find most of my "unknown" women poets only in anthologies that are country-specific, and often only in old anthologies from 1930. There is a certain sentimentality attached to them, as they might have been poems memorized in grade school for recitation.... again, the poems best known are not the best poems.

So what do I mean by "the best poems"? On some level, I have an absolute artistic standard, a very traditional "golden bookshelf" one, that I'm judging by. It's elitist and snobby. I like density of language and meaning, a "leaping" quality, and intertextuality. I like a surprise. I value poems that are exciting to me as a poet - and value them over poems that might be more exciting to a general audience. This kind of discernment is good to have, but it can also be a liability or an obstacle to interpretive vision and judgement; it can be blatantly classist; it's like wearing blinders. Steeping myself in non-elite traditions gives me other standards to judge by; like with literary genre, you can't judge one sort of thing by the standards of another. In other words, I believe that literary critics, anthologizers, and teachers have to get over that sense, or not be limited by it.

On another level, I want to find "what's interesting to people now" including anything that I think will be unexpected. If I see (and I do) that "latin american women's writing" is being marketed in the U.S. as having a certain kind of eroticism, then I want to find poems that are metaphysical and abstract. When I read prefaces to other anthologies that say that women mostly write love poetry that's overly sentimental and twee, and that men's poetry is more important because it's political, then I want to find some political poems by women. Whenever I make up my mind to look for something that I've read doesn't exist, frankly, I've found it! That is very satisfying to my notions of feminism.

Overt feminist content often interests me in a poem, so while Adela Zamudio's "Nacer Hombre" doesn't make my snooty elitist filter, it is boldly feminist. It has also been an extremely famous poem for over 100 years. That alone gives it historical interest. And when I show it to people, they tend to respond with surprise and pleasure that such a poem was written at all in 1887:

Cuánto trabajo ella pasa
Por corregir la torpeza
De su esposo, y en la casa,
( Permitidme que me asombre).
Tan inepto como fatuo,
Sigue él siendo la cabeza,
Porque es hombre!

Actually, these sentiments were not so rare as people think. It is a sad symptom of the state of history, and of feminist history, that it should be so surprising.

I look for works that are representative of a particular kind of writing. Here's a perfect example: Emma Vargas Flórez de Arguelles, born in 1885 in Colombia. I found a few of her poems in an old anthology of Colombian women poets. She never published a book, but had poetry in magazines and newspapers and was part of a family of poets. That's all I know about her. If I could go to Colombia, or if I spent a week digging, I'm sure I'd find more about her life and more of her work. The poem I am including in the anthology is called "Manos femeniles." It's totally barfy. I'll give you some of my English translation:

Professional hands that instead of a needle
take up the pen, driven by longing,
and instead of embroidery, shape verses;
you're the busy secretaries of the soul,
that in happy times, peaceful, create
harmonious verses from honey and vinegar.

It gets worse. Lilies, mothers, children, Christ, butterflies, shy maidens, fragility, embroidery, stars, pearls, honor, and "holy obedience" all make cameo appearances and one is slightly tempted to think of the word "doggerel". But then I think back to Longfellow and Tennyson, who are just as barfy and doggerel-prone and yet who are still judged to be "good" though out of fashion. If they were women they would disappear into the mists. How unfair! And Emma Vargas actually fits the stereotype of "women's verses" that make people roll their eyes. Shouldn't we actually take a long hard look at such poems before we judge them?

Indeed when I look deeper at "Manos femeniles", it's got something going on. I realize now, from reading a lot of poems like this, that there's something similar to the U.S. women's temperance movement going on; that Vargas is part of the feminism that thought of women as essentially holy and better than men; the famous "angel in the house". The poem addresses famous men directly, challenging them to think of women poets as interpreters of a sort of fragile women's dream-world, as if women are more directly in touch with the land of fantasy and imagination than men can be. In a modernist aesthetic, this is like saying that men can't be good poets! They're too sullied by gross impurity of the world and of just being men, apparently. Men sin a lot, and have battles and make a lot of noise. Women care for the wounded and for children, and are Christlike, while also sort of magically channelling poet-energy from the stars, from flowers, jewels, and from, you know... modernist fairyland. Then she winds up the poem with a rousing call to sisterly action:

Women of America, sisters of dreams,
for new songs, our hands together all
shall weave a laurel wreath,
and - united - we'll add from our gardens
fresh violets, exotic jasmine,
leafy lilies, red carnation!

You have to admit that's kind of cool! And while by my absolutist golden-bookshelf standards, I would sneer at it if it were written last year and read at a poetry slam, when I picture it in the context of its time, it's interestingly radical.

This is getting to be a very long post. I will continue tomorrow.