By LUISA VILLA MERIÑO
Translated from the Colombian Spanish by CIGAN VALENTINE
Poem appears below in English and the original Spanish
Translator’s note:
I originally stumbled upon Luisa Villa Meriño’s works in a class at Amherst College on the history of the Colombian Civil War. I was immediately captivated by a selection of poems we read from her collection Dios fue mejor cuando era tigre (God Was Better When He Was A Tiger) and later by a brief talk Villa Meriño gave over Zoom. What initially drew me to her words was how immersive the reading experience was; these were poems that held me in space unlike any other. Since then, I’ve returned again and again to Villa Meriño’s poetry, which has yet to be published in the US and is seldom translated. Her recent collection, Hijas de las perras negras (Daughters of the Black Bitches), won the Gabriel Celaya International Poetry Prize 2023 in Spain.
The process of translating these poems has been joyous and challenging. Villa Meriño’s regional dialect of Colombian Spanish is colorful and highly unique, and, dare I say, to an extent untranslatable. Throughout this process, I’ve felt the push and pull of how much to translate and how much to let her poetry speak for itself in the original language, since there are so many words and phrases that cannot be translated into English without losing some of the meaning they hold for Villa Meriño. Villa Meriño uses a lot of idioms that are part of her own mythology, which is the beauty of her poetry. For the average American reader, the experience of reading Villa Meriño’s poetry is an ebb and flow of understanding. What I ask of the reader is to let the words wash over them.
The piece below was excerpted from a longer poem, “It Only Served for Divination.” The larger poem begins with a quote from Annie Ernaux: “I will write to avenge my people.” Angrier than previous collections, Villa Meriño’s latest book is all about vengeance and reclamation, mythology and mysticism, and the sacrificial nature of the end times.
Excerpt from “It Only Served for Divination”
No quiero que nadie llame a mi puerta ni ser nada.
Sobre mi pelo plateado vuelan pájaros verdes en un cielo azul.
¿Qué más quiero para vivir y pasar como todo?
-Ismaël Diadié Haïdara
Ismael, I wanted to buy new legs
for my aunt with polio,
to parade through the city market on a carpet
of blood and fish scales;
I wanted to obliterate the trenches of sand and become a teacher
at the occupied school.
I imagined myself without a single possession,
caring for lepers or epileptics,
but I was frightened by the despair of those who saw
their brothers fall into ditches, streams, fires,
and continued with their daily tasks as if nothing had happened:
taking out the trash,
counting hens, fighting roosters,
caging the troupials, planting bananas…
I was frightened of coming and going like a robot
through the hallways of the sanatorium and the poor streets,
carrying, from one side to another,
bottles of urine from the sick.
I could not draw water from the rock.
No one parted the sea for me to cross.
I also tried to spot ocelots in the darkness;
I gave up because I never liked the dark,
because I was not
and will never be an ocelot in the night.
Nowhere did I find the words
to calm the afflicted, not even myself;
I avoided being Lot’s wife
trapped in the present,
that got me nowhere.
I want to return to the place where I began
and recover my salt teeth lost in the snowfall.
I want to sit in a rocking chair
with my lover and gaze
from the porch at the rabbits’ yellow sky.
The dried leaves of my childhood, stashed in pockets for years,
will once again become green and I will adorn my old body with them.
At night I will wait for the owls,
with their news about magic,
and I will ask the nocturnal birds to tell me
what happened in my absence.
I will be
an interminable absence.
I will be
a saint grateful for her gift of uselessness.
No quiero que nadie llame a mi puerta ni ser nada.
Sobre mi pelo plateado vuelan pájaros verdes en un cielo azul.
¿Qué más quiero para vivir y pasar como todo?
-Ismaël Diadié Haïdara
Ismael, quise comprar piernas nuevas
para la tía con poliomielitis,
desfilar en el mercado de la ciudad por una alfombra
con sangre y escamas de pescados;
quise derrumbar las trincheras de arena y ser maestra
de la escuela invadida.
Me imaginé sin posesión alguna,
cuidando leprosos o epilépticos,
pero me asustó la desesperanza de quienes veían
caer a sus hermanos en zanjas, arroyos, fuegos
y seguían como si nada en sus asuntos cotidianos:
sacar la basura,
contar gallinas, poner a pelear gallos,
encerrar turpiales, sembrar plátanos…
Me asusté de ir y venir, autómata,
por los pasillos del sanatorio y las calles pobres,
cargando, de un lado a otro, botellas
con orines de enfermos.
No pude sacar agua de la piedra.
Nadie abrió el mar para que caminara.
Intenté también descubrir gatos pardos en la oscuridad;
renuncié porque nunca me gustó la oscuridad,
porque no fui
ni seré gatopardo en la noche.
En ningún lugar hallé la oración
para calmar a los que sufren, ni siquiera a mí;
evité ser
la mujer de Lot, encerrada en el tiempo presente,
eso no me llevó a ningún lado.
Quiero volver al lugar donde empecé
y recuperar mis dientes de sal perdidos en la nevada.
Quiero sentarme en una mecedora
con mi enamorado y mirar
desde la terraza el amarillo cielo de los conejos.
Las hojas secas de mi infancia, que por años guardé en bolsillos,
volverán a reverdecer, y adornaré con ellas mi cuerpo viejo.
En la noche esperaré a las lechuzas
con sus noticias sobre acontecimientos en la magia,
pediré a los pájaros nocturnos que me hablen
de lo que pasó en mi ausencia.
Seré
ausencia interminable.
Seré
santa agradecida por su don de inutilidad.
Luisa Isabel García Villa Meriño was born in Copey Cesar, Colombia and was raised in the neighborhood of Esmeralda in the southwest of Barranquilla. Those two locations and the Colombian Caribbean have been fundamental in constructing her social and political conscience. Villa Meriño is an Afrocaribbean teacher, activist, artist, and poet who has authored three poetry collections: Hijas de las perras negras (Daughters of the Black Bitches), which won the 6th Gabriel Celaya International Poetry Prize; Tratado sobre las brujas (Treatise on Witches) and Dios fue mejor cuando era tigre (God Was Better When He Was A Tiger). Her work has also been published in various national and international anthologies. Together with Arturo Rivera Vargas, she runs the artist and cultural collective Jaguar y Venada. Villa Meriño lives in Bogota, Colombia.
Cigan Valentine is a senior at Amherst College and an editorial intern for The Common. Her work has been published and/or translated in The Common, The Cairn, and mOthertongue, and is forthcoming from Sieva Magazine. In her free time, she writes essays, short fiction, and poetry, and occasionally posts on her blog “this is going nowhere.”
