from In the Name of No One

Rosabetty Muñoz

This one, in the photo, is the same girl who played with her doll all day and at night would cover her so that she wouldn’t be cold or afraid. She refused to throw her away when the doll lost an eye. She continued to resist when she fell on the stove and burnt her rubber arm. And when her hair got matted. And when she ended up with only one leg.

It is the same girl. Displaying no signs of grief, she poses with the remains of the newborn on top of the rags she used to clean the floor.



*

For weeks she begged for the crinkly plaid dress with bright colors, the loose-fitting one. She wore it, sitting in front of the house on a broken cancagua stone stove she covered by stretching the hem of her skirt. Just so, erect and proud, like the heroine of a novel, she waited hours and hours trying out demure looks, with both hands neatly in her lap.

Towards the end of that year, she began to fill out the dress and they confined her to the room with only one window facing the chicken coop. About the same time, a flower began to grow inside the stove, searching for air through an opening in the pipe. It had a frightening look and nauseous odor. That’s why her mother doused it with boiling water.



*

And this one is Bernarda. She read an article in the newspaper about babies dumped in public trash bins and her empty womb suddenly contracted. She went to court to claim the First Child so she could rock its dead body. She named it Aurora, and buried it in holy ground so that she could have a place to leave flowers.

The grave she bought is wide enough to make room for its tiny future siblings.
 




Waters

No one speaks of the hidden rivers.
No one names their waters
or tries to hear their crystal current.
It remains there
the preserve and bottom of another landscape.
Words and water have that secret pact
a zeal for utterance
that covers naked transparency.
A zeal for impossible murmurs.




 
Sorrowful Mysteries

If I hide the blankets under the bed
If I cover the mattress with the bedspread
If I wrap the baby in a towel
If I put it in the backpack
If I put on my uniform
If I leave for school, as usual
If I walk slowly
If no one looks at me
If

In vain I called her in vain
I waited for milk streaming from her breast
a dark impulse seized my will
and I made my way unfurling hollows,
orifices, pores
all open to receive.
From one tunnel to another.
I foresaw the pleasure of licking
but the hands around my neck . . .       

The interior landscape has changed.
Like worn-out flags
the membranes
wave over the recently opened trail.
Pleasure is now braided forever
with the desperate gasp of death.



 

Source

Peering from the window
her eyes form a tributary
that merges with the canals outside.
This gaze muddies
what were crystalline waters.
And fogs the glass
and causes a broken cloud to fall.

Stormy river
that also carries tree trunks and the remains
of decomposing animals.

One moves over the blank page
with a divining rod
until striking the flow, the source.

translated from the Spanish by Elena Barcia

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to the poems read in the original Spanish by the poet:

The poetry of Rosabetty Muñoz depicts life on Chiloé, an island off the southwest coast of Chile, where she was born and still lives. Her poems give us a glimpse of the history and culture unique to the island while tackling universal themes like prostitution, exile, globalization, and the ravages of climate change on a culture that depends on the ocean.

Her eighth book, En nombre de ninguna (In the Name of No One), focuses primarily on the plight of young girls and women in a patriarchal, traditionally religious world, which either censures them or refuses to acknowledge they exist. En nombre de ninguna speaks to us in their name and also in their voices about poverty, abortion, rape, and incest.

Muñoz says that the book was inspired by a headline in her local newspaper announcing the discovery of a dead baby’s body in a trash bag, and the reaction that Bernarda Gallardo, a social worker and friend of Muñoz, had to this event. Gallardo fought in court to rehumanize this discarded infant by adopting it and by giving it a name and burial rights in consecrated ground.

The first half of the book, “Álbum Familiar” (“Family Album”), consists of prose “photographs” that depict a feminine universe steeped in poverty and moral censure, with disturbing scenes of unwanted pregnancies, infanticide, and abortion. It is a world of death and the loss of childhood innocence, described in dramatic vignettes and vivid imagery. The second half of the collection contains verse poems that complement “Family Album.” Here the themes of the first section are recast in language that is highly metaphorical, elliptical, and evocative.

Muñoz’s poems are short and carefully crafted. In addition to compelling imagery, she uses parallel phrases and multiple voices, often combined in a single poem—as in “Sorrowful Mysteries”—to build emotional impact. “I have wanted to write about pain,” she says, “in order to contain it, purify it, elevate it, and transform it into something else.” The challenges in translating her poetry are linked to its linguistic density and the fact that her images often function on an emotional, almost subconscious level. She and I spent hours discussing the images, a process she described as “turning the skirt inside out and examining every stitch and thread of the fabric.” “After writing for over forty years, even when making rational choices,” she wrote me, “I also trust in that blind voice that chooses the words and that I don’t always understand.”

Rosabetty Muñoz is the recipient of multiple prizes, including the Fundación Pablo Neruda's Premio a la Trayectoría in 2000 for her body of work, which includes eleven books of verse and two collections of selected poems. Muñoz is part of Chile’s “ethnocultural movement,” composed of writers who foreground the distinctive cultures of the regions they inhabit—in her case, the island of Chiloé off the southwestern coast of Chile. Muñoz discovered her vocation as a poet while studying at the Austral University of Chile on the mainland, where she joined a group of writers reading Cavafy, Ginsberg, and Vallejo, and discovered new poetic styles and ways of thinking about life and social justice. Her decision to return to her birthplace was rooted in a desire to document the island’s unique history and traditions and to explore the pain inflicted by authoritarianism, gender inequality, climate change, and globalization. Many of her poems incorporate true stories told to her in her classes and poetry workshops.

Elena Barcia is a professional film and literary translator born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She has translated hundreds of movies for all the major Hollywood studios, including the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Matrix series. She has also served as a translation consultant to Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. In 2017, Northwestern University Press published her translation of Miguel de Unamuno’s classic novel Niebla (Fog). Her translation of the prize-winning Chilean poet Malú Urriola’s book Cadáver exquisito (Exquisite Corpse; Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2017) will be published in 2023 by Valparaíso Editions USA, and she is currently preparing a collection of the works of Rosabetty Muñoz, from whose book En nombre de ninguna (In the Name of No One; Ediciones Kultrún, 2008), these poems are taken.