This Translation Tuesday, enter the oneiric geography of acclaimed Cuban poet Soleida Ríos in a hybridised work that is her own fluid and inventive relationship to genre and tradition. The airport—with all its connotations of citizenship, mobility, and border-making—is given a surreal makeover when the speaker at every unexpected turn is confronted with the presences of Chagall to Sarduy, from an Arching-Eyebrow Woman to (Normal-Brow) woman. Accompanying Kristin Dykstra’s energetic translation is an illuminating tour of Ríos artistic and political inheritances that allows us to see the poet’s workings, but which renders her poem no less strange and powerful.
“Soleida Ríos often explores dreams, as well as realities refracted through dreamlike states. An elusive quality characterizes her work, the spirit of creative cimarronaje. This term refers to the ethos of the fugitive slave, which Ríos has invoked in some descriptions of her writing. Her book Estrías (Grooves) intertwines that spirit with a more recent strand of Cuban history: the internal migration of rural citizens (many of them Afro-descendent), who like Ríos moved from their origins in eastern Cuba to the western capitol, Havana, in the decades after 1959. In the city, finding and keeping a home can be a struggle.
“CABO ROUGE / Kabiosile” depicts psychological navigations of national space and legal language in search of one’s own place. Along the way the narrator registers artistic legacies of Severo Sarduy, Marc Chagall, René Magritte, and Yoruba traditions in Cuba. Here too are figures from local bureaucracy, which might well be described as a culture in its own right. The agent at an airport counter initially seems responsible for enforcing travel regulations, then transforms into a subject struggling to create a place that state officialdom would interpret, legally speaking, as her house. Settings shift, contributing to the sensation of unreality. Perhaps we have fallen into a Chagall painting. But the woman’s refrain foregrounds practical acts of migration: “I left MY COMMUNITY and I moved on to THE COUNTRYSIDE … From the countryside I came HERE.” Other recurrent elements invoke attributes of the orisha Changó, who is associated with the color red and explosive percussion in ritual music. The kabiosile of the title is a verbal salutation to Changó.”
—Kristin Dykstra
CABO ROUGE / Kabiosile
… I’m not reproducing …
I scrawl, lacerate, squeeze, twist,
hammer.
A number.
A smudge.
In the airport (one example), my head filled with such disorder that I’ve forgotten to retrieve my suitcases. Eighteen suitcases.
But since I also forgot to set aside my essential documents, namely: TICKET, BOARDING PASS, BAGGAGE CLAIM stub, among others of subtle distinction, which I can’t remember now … I’m thinking about how I can maneuver, to present myself in transit and request my entirely disproportionate and (I guess) extremely suspicious baggage.
So now I’m at the counter saying, with all the composure of (borrowed voice) I-Came-On-The-Flight-From-Paris….
Arching-Eyebrow Woman looks at me doubtfully …, she turns back to the heap of papers … So I confirm, “The-11:39-From-Paris.”
And immediately I remember, horrified, “the PERMIT, I forgot the PERMIT …”
Nothing subtle about that.
And my wings drop away from me.
Arching-Eyebrow Woman, still doubtful?, asks me, “Your last name is Vives ….?!”
I reply, “That’s right,” unpretentious. Then, remembering that O. works for Cuba’s airline and even if it’s not at the same airport … in the moment, this ME is somebody else.
—Do you know my sister ….?!
The woman doesn’t answer yes or no, but you can tell it’s YES, because she comes out from behind the counter to walk slowly with me, she is guiding me …
We cross through gleaming halls, doubled and tripled glassworks, we cross through doors and more gleaming doors that open only to our sugary passage. We exit the airport’s perimeter (there is a harsh sun, gravel, sandstone, faded grass …), we keep on walking …. They fall behind: the structures, the hive of people, the doggie air fresheners …
Walking we come to a small patch of ground, a rectangle demarcated on three sides by a metal fence and cut off on the last by an enormous wall, topped with makeshift zinc or fiberglass sheets simulating a roof.
Immediately I concentrate my attention on a flower with a weird pinkish or reddish color.
A talisman. A real talisman.
Rouge.
The entire patch, pure dew: grass, earth, weird flower.
—Ahhh …!
The woman, who close up looks thicker to me now, more mature … says, “What I liked best at the Louvre was this Chagall painting.” She said painting. She said painting but she was talking about the flower.
—Of course, of course …, I reply (borrowed voice) —I didn’t remember that this one was by Chagall.
And I begin to look at more length, to remember … My inquiries into memory don’t take me to the Louvre or any other place. They call up a name: Cabo Rouge (?)
A while later, we’re sitting at a table, eating …. She speaks in confidence, she explains explains. But I don’t hear what she says. My indirect gaze goes toward the high wall, whose base is surely wood or concrete or some similar shell, with a consistently rough texture. But centering myself, narrowing my eyes, I think I can see the weird drawing of a shroud, a shroud as wide and long as the wall itself. Rouge. Absolutely. Coffee stains (?) across its entire length, minute details, filigree seeming to hide blood and semen under a dispersed black alloy, earth, orange (diluted annatto?), spicebush …
The Great Vertigo-Shroud wears the number 29.
And … am I capable of having invented this myself, or does its far, lower right side display a date in red (three lines in cone shape) from 1987?
If it were June, the 29th would be most likely. Someday the day and year will no longer be awful, becoming only the mark for my Goodbye to Mother.
And I don’t know why SEVERO whom I never met pops into my mind, but on this occasion he arrives, he moves right in, and he says to me … He almost always says SOMETHING to me that I can’t figure out how to dump into oblivion.
Now, as on another occasion, he delivers:
I scrawl
lacerate
squeeze
twist
hammer … And he delivers a number.
But I don’t know why I think now its frankness means that T. is the one who said those words … After having discovered the wall (?), of course, after erecting its immense blotched canvas.
T., says SEVERO, the representative of representation.
The (Normal-Brow) woman talking and talking, without connecting. And then I hear:
—I left my community and I moved on to the countryside …
Community … (!)
Countryside … (?)
I hear her say it, I keep on hearing her:
—From the countryside I came Here.
Here: this transept (her trench?), with the well-simulated roof of zinc or fiberglass sheets, whose wall (now visible to the eye) half defines the place with the table where we’re sitting, the place where, it seems, she is living.
The woman, her face blurry or whitewashed, enveloped in gauze or something else not discernable, has initiated an unexpected movement, displacing me. Then my gaze turns to the flower and it’s not there. How is that possible …? and it turns in bewilderment to the Shroud … which is a rocky mountain, summit and … (horror! fascination!), there they are, going past at the speed of wind, at the speed of light, Magritte’s four bloody doves, beaks pointed toward the earth, in a deadly square.
Sacrifice …?
A SACRIFICE?
I scrawl
lacerate
squeeze
twist
hammer …
How could I tell the tale of my return to a state known as normal, where my senses might show me what really exists, and that infinite connectivity among neurons, which populate and make of my brain an organ for understanding, confirmed exactly as ….?
As if we hadn’t shifted dimensions, the (Recent-Awakening Smile) woman returns to her sandwiches and says, looking at me in complete passivity, but as if extending an invitation or request to me:
—I left MY COMMUNITY and I moved on to THE COUNTRYSIDE … From the countryside I came HERE.
Stockpiling all of my practical knowledge, I gather that she must be referring to a strategy. The strategy she deployed to raise half a roof over this transept (which allows her – let’s think outside the law – to claim in case of Assessment, Inspection, and eventual Eviction that THIS is a house because something is there, there between the sky and the person …). In order to get (better said, to conceive of) her patch in its place (it’s here! it’s here again!, what Evil-Thing here is hiding, occluding or stealing my perceptions if not my imagination?) … it is here, yes, it is all dew, the weird pinkish or reddish flower that she called a painting by Chagall.
My muteness must have been induced. I can’t make myself give anything at all to this (Real …? Apparition with Recent-Awakening Smile …?) woman who evidently, as you can see, is asking for so little.
I hear (do I put this in her mouth?) or she causes me to hear: “… Obsession, 1943. Marc Chagall: Vitebsk, 1887 – Saint Paul de Vince, 1985.”
I watch her come (cause her to come?) out of the aisle on the margin, the total BEING of the (Covered in Green, half man half woman) woman, a candelabra with 3 candles in her hand …. and, suspended on the breeze, another version of her, who initiates a prolonged dream (is she sleeping …, am I causing her to sleep?).
In the background I see the blackblack house and the black boy and the black horse and the black cart, all inside it, all in the black of the house, abandoned to their fate?
Outside, on land, a great Bird who any moment now will open the Book … On the breeze, sketches: people people people (sketched obsession?).
I look at her: the slow walking, the candle flames, yes and no, contorted, fading. The (Green Man) woman moves at her new pace, slowly, toward the cross-shaped grave that her hand (or mine?) already traced over the length of her garden patch. Everything
else
Est
Rouge.
Kabiosile… !
January 1997 and 15 of April, 2010
Translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra
Soleida Ríos was born in 1950 in eastern Cuba, known as the island’s more rural side. She grew up in the ferment of the early revolutionary years and began writing poems in the early 1970s. In retrospect Ríos describes her aesthetic formation as largely autodidactic and conceives of literature as a series of poetic actions. Cuba’s mountainous east, associated with African diasporic cultures and their links to a broader Caribbean history, recurs throughout her work. At the same time Ríos draws from the cosmopolitan tone associated with western Cuba: she has lived in Havana since the 1980s. For more than thirty years Ríos has been creating a Dream Archive, leading to the publication of El libro de los sueños (1999) and Antes del mediodía. Memoria del sueño (2011). She is also the author of many trans-genre books, some borrowing the concept of dream in other ways, including El libro roto, El texto sucio, Libro cero, Secadero, Escritos al revés (winner of the Cuban Critics’ Prize), Estrías (winner of the 2013 Nicolás Guillén Poetry Prize), A wa nilé, and El retrato ovalado (an experimental collaboration created with 34 other women writers at the instigation of Ríos; it borrows the title of a story by Edgar Allan Poe focused on the portrait of a young woman). One book by Ríos appears in English translation: The Dirty Text, tr. Barbara Jamison and Olivia Lott, from Kenning Editions, 2018. The group-authored El retrato ovalado was translated to English by Margaret Randall and published by Wings Press, also in 2018.
Kristin Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Finalist for the National Translation Award. Other excerpts in her translation from Soleida Ríos’s book, Estrías, are published or forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Diagram, and El Nieuwe Acá. Previously Dykstra translated many books, including works by Rodríguez, Angel Escobar, Marcelo Morales, Tina Escaja, and others; and with Kent Johnson, she co-edited Materia Prima, a team-translated anthology introducing Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer to readers of English (Ugly Duckling, 2019). Selections from Dykstra’s own current poetry manuscript appear with Lana Turner, Seedings, Almost Island, Clade Song, The Hopper, La Noria and El Nieuwe Acá (both tr. to Spanish by Escaja), and Acrobata (tr. to Portuguese by Floriano Martins).
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