Trepidaciones

“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.