This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you two poems by Haitian-Dominican poet and revolutionary fighter Jacques Viau Renaud. In “Man Awakens,” our speaker pledges his lifeblood to resurrecting hope (an “assassinated seed”), urging his compatriots to appreciate the majesty of their homeland in the face of socioeconomic injustice. In “We Take Refuge,” the seed metaphor becomes even more corporeal, as the roots of love embed themselves in peoples’ hearts despite their “mutilated lives”—the speaker now pledges not only his blood, but his voice. Written during the rise of another U.S.-backed dictatorship (the Dominican Republic was still recovering from the terror of the Trujillo Era), Viau Renaud’s verse channels the natural beauty of his country to inspire resistance. Ariel Francisco’s superb translations sublimates the visceral and sometimes violent imagery of these poems into an enduring love in the speaker’s voice, a testament to Viau Renaud’s gifts as a poet who celebrated his homeland’s fragile democracy and honored those who defended it.
MAN AWAKENS
Man awakens sewing the assassinated seed
hope curdling in a cry.
Light escapes his hands.
The washer’s stream throws its loud laughter
rinsing in the trees
tightening the earth
possessing it
leaving the internal seed in the roots;
injecting his spirited youth
unearthing the buried love
all the tightened silences in the streets of my homeland
razed by hunger
assaulted by thieves
led towards the banks in fragments
where pieces of shit in disguise
monopolize the lilies and bread.
Man of my homeland
wanderer
traveller
fatigued vertebrae of the Antilles
here I give my hand to serve as a bridge
between our cries
for you to rest your head
place your heart on the sores
and listen silently
how it dawns
how the birds squawk
how the river of lavender sings
fighting
opening a furrow
to pour our blood
and maybe,
who knows, our lives.
Man of every street
of dawn
towering heaps of failures
statue of my homeland
sculpted from the deep roots of night.
Take my hand
and we’ll listen together
how the river of lavender awakens to sing
and the broken shouts announce the light.
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WE TAKE REFUGE
We take refuge in the wounded word’s shadow
flowing from your sore like a healing sap.
We made from ourselves this mutilated life
and learned to move the earth
searching for the roots of love.
Evening arrived slowly.
While cicadas prelude the coming night
tiny stars extinguish in the grass
illuminating your arrival.
Only hearts that cling to the earth
stand over silence,
are nourished from fatigue
and speak following the wind
of your arriving life.
Through the streets wandered our gone gaze.
Some trembling heart sensed us,
we fled from the life offered us
from those hands and eyes and words
without leaving any footprints.
Nocturnal silk spinners obscure our memories;
they want nothing else from us but our voices:
Man, here is your trail.
Women, here is the mirror possessing your face.
Courageous youth, poor child,
you left no life on this earth.
It doesn’t matter,
I declare myself your son
and in your name I’ll raise my voice
and in my name you guard the silence
I will prolong your shout and your stare
you won’t be forgotten,
because in your name I will be crying,
smiling
until my blood flows from the wounded word
that will adopt your name.
We take refuge in the distracted shadows of trees
and from them
we run towards this mutilated life,
we moved the earth
and found the roots of love
ingrained deeply in the hearts of our dead.
Translated from the Spanish by Ariel Francisco
Ariel Francisco is the author of A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets, The New York City Ballet, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
Jacques Viau Renaud (1941—1965) was born in Haiti and raised in the Dominican Republic following his father’s exile in 1948. During the Dominican Revolution of 1965, he joined the rebel forces in support of ousted president Juan Bosch, fighting against the US backed dictatorship. He was killed in battle at the age of twenty-three.
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