Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month through Poetry
Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from September 15-October 15. For this year's celebration, we present three poems featured in the upcoming poetry anthology The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present. Edited by the late Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada, his final anthology reaches into the deepest origins of the Americas, north and south, to redefine America and its poetries.
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Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, Brazil, 1963-
Edimilson de Almeida Pereira's poem "Claunga Lungara," translated below from the original Portuguese, speaks about Calunga, an Afro-Brazilian "secret language" spoken throughout Brazil in communites founded by Africans fleeing or recently freed from slavery.
CALUNGA LUNGARA
I am going to put into words
what is not possible.
They are water-words
that dissolve.
I am speaking of Calunga.
It can be large or
small depending
on who crossed it.
Its name changes
according to the tongue.
In some it kills
in others it is ocean.
On it is traveling
someone who has no body.
We are sailors
in a land of pilgrimage.
Calunga goes around at night
studying dreams.
It accompanies captive
marks in the dust.
It brings present fears
family fears.
The oldest does not show
that even he would die.
I put into words
what should not have been spoken.
What one says is not Calunga.
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Jorge Teillier, Chile, 1935-1996
IN ORDER TO TALK WITH THE DEAD (translated from Spanish)
In order to talk with the dead
you have to choose words
that they recognize as easily
as their hands
recognized the fur of their dogs in the dark.
Words clean and calm
as water of the torrent tamed in the wineglass
or chairs the mother puts in order
after the guests have left.
Words that night shelters
as marshes do their ghostly fires.
In order to talk with the dead
you have to know how to wait:
they are fearful
like the first steps of a child.
But if we are patient
one day they will answer us
with a poplar leaf trapped in a broken mirror,
with a flame that suddenly revives in the fireplace,
with a dark return of birds
before the glance of a girl
who waits motionless on the threshold.
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Marosa di Giorgiom, Uruguay, 1932-2004
from THE MOTH (translated from Spanish)
The wasps were extremely delicate. Like angels, many of them fitted on
the head of a pin. All of them resembled young ladies, dancing teachers. I
imitated their murmuring rather well. They circled the apple’s white flowers,
the quince’s ochre flowers, the pomegranate’s hard red roses. Or in
the tiny fountains where my cousins, my sisters and I gazed at them, our
hands on our chins. Compared to them we were giants, monsters. But the
most wondrous thing was the cartons they made; almost in one stroke,
their palaces of thick grey paper appeared, among the leaves, and, inside
them, plates of honey.
Meanwhile, the lizard continued hunting for hen’s eggs, warm tid-bits;
snakes blue as fire crossed the path, curly, delicately crafted carnations,
looking like bowls of fruit and rice, shot up.
The world, all of it, welcoming, magical.
And one face, separated, the only one painted, walked among the leaves,
eyes downcast, red mouth open.
And when it had already gone by it walked past one more time.