Four Poems

Eva Tizzani

Kakeche
—with words from the Mapudungun

I’m shuddering in a strange place. The river doesn’t have flowers, doesn’t drag stones, it’s a noble surge covered in black skins. I’m inside this city’s noise, I overflow. When I close my eyes, they shout Gualmapu. I came from afar. I only imagined a ridgeline bathed in snow, which froze my bones as the city embraced me. So far from home, I cried. A man approached. I heard entrequen as I turned to ash and melted into these asphalt streets. Into my ear, a woman whispered –kakeche never, you are ours–.




Intermittence

The city falls over me. It punches my chest.

The goddess María Lionza is cleaved,
Mt. Sorte left queenless.
          Hollow-eyed maiden,
                   a tapir’s gut filled with larvae.

Shattered cities, evicted,
                      drowning in no-return.

Birth.
Escape.
Return.

This city: a cowering goat,
                     intermittent light.
                     Throat filled with stones.
        A shout.
Panting.

                    Country in the name of the father,
         a fistful of crosses in its mouth.




[Dead moths]

Dead moths,
wolves in the garden
of buried men,
the red wings covering my face
turn into a scream.


They name me:
dry land, I am
dead tamarind,
mango rotting in the soil.
The world is a speck
on my body,
noise falling from the tree.
I am that empty sound.




[To burn]

To burn
in all your forests

          [without ash]

on your chest
ignited

Sacred solarium
Angel within me
a bird’s light on my branches

Burn with us across the land
until not even dust is left.

translated from the Spanish by David Brunson

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to “Kakeche” read in the original Spanish by the poet:

I first met Eva Tizzani in 2019 while I was in Santiago on a Sturgis International Fellowship to translate and anthologize the poetry of Venezuelan exiles in Chile. Over the last few years, Venezuela has faced an unprecedented human rights and economic crisis that has led to over five million citizens fleeing the current regime, many of whom have settled in Chile. Tizzani’s work deals with the themes of Venezuelan consciousness in exile. I was immediately drawn to her challenging yet lyrical syntax, as well as her spare use of imagery, which is both surreal and rooted in traditional Venezuelan culture. The biggest challenge for me as the translator of these poems was between the original Spanish syntax and the syntax of the English language. Similarly, these poems draw heavily from Venezuelan, Latin, and Indigenous cultures; I wanted to preserve this balance in a way that would be faithful to the Spanish-language originals but also understandable to readers who are less familiar with these contexts.

Eva Tizzani was born in Coro, Venezuela, in 1995. Her poem “[Dead moths]” came third in the Certamen de Poesía Venezolana Ecos de la Luz contest. Her poems have been published in Jóvenes Creadores, Poémame, L’Accordéon, Espejismos del Trópico, Ácracia pour les porcs, Poesía desde Valencia, Iberoamérica, Letralia, Los Poetas del 5, and Revista Grifo.

David Brunson holds an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas. His poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from Booth, Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Nashville Review, Copper Nickel, The Bitter Oleander, The Literary Review, Los Poetas del 5, and Arc Publications. He is the editor and anthologist of a Spanish-language anthology of Venezuelan migrant poets in Chile titled Una cicatriz donde se escriben despedidas (A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written), forthcoming from Libros del Amanecer in Santiago, Chile.