In this week’s Translation Tuesday, poet Verónica González Arredondo bears witness to the plague of gender violence in Mexico in this excerpt from her forthcoming chapbook, I Am Not That Body. Our narrator speaks from a place beyond the remains of her body, recounting with chilling forensic detail the horrors she has witnessed and endured. From this ghostly viewpoint, the speaker refuses the anonymity, objectification, and cultural silence mandated by Mexican officials and the popular media, leading us to the horrifying and heart-breaking final stanzas where our speaker informs her family—and the reader—the she is not a statistic, or a faded memory, or a voiceless body. This excerpt, sublime in its masterful use of religious imagery, metaphor, and concise, almost staccatoed lines, is a necessary and timely read for understanding the recent wave of protests against femicide in Mexico.
I Am Not That Body
When the night yawns
there are rows of teeth in its mouth
that pierce every bone in the earth
violence of a white handkerchief covers my mouth
I don’t scream
I don’t breathe
all my memories
will lose their tongue
I will become another,
identical to the voice I never recognized
I scream in order to wake up in another dream
but the dream has gone missing
You saw the pool of blood
on the street
in the doorway
as you were out walking—
before the bodies were carried away
they already know
who was responsible—
the call comes in:
We left them lying by the side of the road
and when you get there—
you know what to do.
The quinceañera,
buried in the desert at 15
during a community ceremony—
the women hold hands, remembering
the other girls
who live in a sky
painted pink
by a cross decked in mourning
Santa María Madre, pray for them
and for us,
here no one
is watching, not even God—
on the seventh day
with his crow hands
he plucked out his own eyes
give us peace
The cemetery is surrounded by signs:
no crosses
no flowers
no prayers lying scattered in the trash
the epitaph accompanied
by another daughter of God
unidentified
They baffled my family
with a skull that had no ears,
no nose,
no lips that could say
mother
father
I am not
that body
Translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese
Verónica G. Arredondo (Guanajuato, Mexico) holds a PhD in Arts from the Universidad de Guanajuato and a Master’s in Philosophy from the Universidad de Zacatecas. She has received several prestigious Latin American literary awards, including Mexico’s National Ramón López Velarde Prize in Poetry/Premio Nacional de Poesía “Ramón López Velarde” for her book of poems Ese cuerpo no soy (I Am Not That Body) (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2015) as well as the Dolores Castro Prize/Premio Dolores Castro, an annual prize awarded to a woman writing exceptional and socially conscious work in Spanish, for her book Verde Fuegos de Espíritus (Green Fires of the Spirits) (Ayuntamiento de Aguascalientes, 2014). Voracidad, grito y belleza animal (Voraciousness, Screams and Animal Beauty), a book of essays, was also published by Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in 2014. Verónica González Arredondo’s books of verse have previously been translated into, and published in, French and Portuguese. From 2017-2018 she held a FONCA fellowship for younger artists through the Fondo Nacional para la Culturas y las Artes/National Fund for Arts and Culture.
Allison deFreese has previously translated works by Luis Chitarroni, Carmen Irionda, Amado Nervo, and other Latin American writers. Her writing and literary translations have appeared in sixty magazines and journals, including: The New York Quarterly, The Indiana Review, Southwestern American Literature, Borderlands, Puerto del Sol, Many Mountains Moving, Southword (Munster Literary Centre) and Poetry Kanto (Japan).
*****
Read more translations on the Asymptote blog: