Tremblings

Claudina Domingo

For José Francisco Zapata

it persists in the instant and isn’t nostalgia          (split bits of acetate discs) straight hair of astral oil under the new sun          (emerald green) doesn’t resist the wall’s expulsion          three and four windows missing (the others like sugar lace)          rusted see-saws
          (it persists) the dismembering of a day into its impossible hours


you say (undaunted) “the day rose out of dawn like a ruptured rat”          (out of order) nature snatched its due from the city          “it didn’t even give you time to grab your things”        
          you don’t believe your eyes until the perfume of death (or gas) swells up with the days          (later you whisper) “a hundred twenty seconds against the city”          (today you don’t want to know anything of its tremblings)          they piled the dead “on this corner”          they tried to resuscitate them a bit further on          between rebar (beams) light fixtures pipes          they searched for whatever the devourer hadn’t swallowed          “any little screwup and it all comes crashing down on us”          they tripped over the remains of the girl (who woke up under a sky of rubble)


spider web (vestibule) Gran Hotel or clinic          a slide held up by three stones          goldfinch dangling broken from its swing          (wooden rafters) “never again”          (never again) 151-49-30 the ash tree’s wound (open)          the crumbling temple (before the metro disappears deep into the city’s epic entrails)          cluttered jumble (trampled nature)          piling up the wreckage (it isn’t what it seems) fragments of a constellation that will never realign          saying “a city doesn’t pick itself up” (it collapses on its own)          “the act of naming it brings it to life”


pause (rewind)          modernity likes to make you wait          (it knows you savor it like those paper-wrapped sweets filled with pistachios)          as you root through the pirated fayuca for a Pink Floyd cd that still hasn’t shown up (generous) it hands you a day unlike any other          the “it can’t be” that will no doubt become a legend


a fault (the whole city hanging over a fault)          but it’s “un quiebre” not “un equívoco” and they’ve mistranslated          “a break” “a tear” a tug on the city’s Achilles tendon
        fracture and rip (evisceration of bricks and tiles)          learning to live in its cadaver (is necessary)          learning to live with its cadaver’s (cadaver)         electric wires channeling light nowhere          a datsun with chinese holograms (stalled silent for twenty years)          colonia Tránsito entrenched in the wastelands of memory          you left babbling (then returned)          you recount it every time they put this rosary in your hands          (you say) “this is the face of destiny”          the face I put on when I saw that where a house had been there was a ruin swaying from its gargoylish gaffs
                    thursday (rubble) ¿which coroner?          “already at the district precincts”


(they fucked you over) princess ¿or did you fuck yourself over?          you’ll have to wait another couple decades to see the girder fall that only wavered then (it bowed a bit) and elbowed up against a ramp  
          to imagine the ruins          to take stock of the remains of colors posters comic strips          to then thrust yourself as always toward the possibility of the possible          a day will come when you won’t have to wait two years to see the movies          a week (¿a thursday?) perhaps a year will show up and say “I’m here to make it up to you”
          meanwhile (fear) doesn’t leave (it refuses) it constantly peeps its head out and whispers “I’ll be back soon”          (never again) will you trust in its unfilled-cistern heart          (sometimes) you’ll come to a halt with your pulse racing          until you’re sure it’s just a big-rig (passing by)
                              meanwhile ¿why so little faith in the future?

translated from the Spanish by Ryan Greene

 

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to the poem read in the original Spanish by the poet and Geney Beltrán Félix:

“Tremblings” is one of twenty-four poems that appear in Claudina Domingo’s kaleidoscopic book, Tránsito (Tierra Adentro, 2011). In this award-winning collection, Domingo inks her city, Mexico City, onto the page. It is a work that rejects the comfort of smooth narrative in favor of high-resolution, fragmented snapshots. Through the flexibility of Domingo’s splintered syntax, a chorus of voices is allowed to interlace and interrupt one another. In a single poem, there may be phrases drawn from sixteenth-century accounts of colonial genocide, snippets overheard on the metro, quotes from newspaper reports of the 1968 student massacre, and the musings of a present-day narrator making her way through the streets of Mexico’s capital. In a word, Domingo’s Tránsito is a poly-silhouetted urban portrait that links the city together across time.

True to form, “Tremblings” is a poem with visible fractures. It is an archipelago of text divided by spans of blank space and sliced by punctuation marks. Yet, despite all its fissures, “Tremblings” remains tethered, intimate. Through an accretion of images, recollections, and catalogued observations, a collective memory emerges of the 1985 earthquake that brought Mexico City to its knees when Domingo was just a toddler. “Tremblings” captures the (after)shock of that moment and its lingering trauma.

As a translator, my primary challenge was mirroring the poem’s fault lines and ambiguities while honoring the coherence I heard in Domingo’s Spanish. In my English, that meant paying special attention to sound and rhythm. For instance, I often used sonic repetition to interlink separate phrases. This is especially evident in the first lines of the first two stanzas of my translation. In this way, I was able to put some “glue” between Domingo’s shards without sanding down their sharp edges. My hope was for her poetic force to remain potent, unnatural, non-neutral.

Claudina Domingo (b. 1982) is a poet, author, literary critic, and essayist from Mexico City. In 2011, she was named “emerging writer of the year” by the magazine La Tempestad. Her book of poems, Tránsito (Tierra Adentro, 2011), won the 2012 Premio Iberoamericano Bellas Artes de Poesía Carlos Pellicer para Obra Publicada. Her most recent book of poems, Ya sabes que no veo de noche (Ediciones Atrasalante, 2017), won the 2016 Premio Nacional de Literatura Gilberto Owen. Last year, she also published her first collection of short stories, Las enemigas (Editorial Sexto Piso, 2017). Domingo is a three-time recipient of the Jóvenes Creadores grant from Mexico’s Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

Ryan Greene (b. 1994) is a translator, poet, and sometimes bookmaker from Phoenix, Arizona. He has translated work by Ana Belén López, Claudina Domingo, and Giancarlo Huapaya. His translations of selected poems by Ana Belén López are set to appear in rojo si pudiera ser rojo // red if it could be red, a bilingual chapbook forthcoming from Anomalous Press.