Secret Energy
1
You gave birth to me. I bore wings.
The blood of the dead was kept
in the trough.
It was Entroido, Carnival. I believed in the open sincerity of accordions.
There’s snow, so much snow in the fields and in the language I speak,
inside the political stomach of cows.
2
You gave birth to me striking softly
in the difficult percussion of my body.
The theatrical walls of the wellsprings burst
in the crystal of night.
I took flight.
3
You had four children, and forty years.
You gave birth in the kitchen of a dirt-floored house.
My blood was a knot in your domed belly.
4
You danced, and brought in the harvest.
I had whooping cough and
was expiring in your arms.
5
“I’ve two godmothers. Two meadows. Two pasts. Two trains. I’m two women, two sisters, two neighbour ladies, two wee boats.”
6
“There at that baptism, in 1972, was my godmother Marisol who wanted to name me for a tiny Virgin revered in that dark, chilly, lovely church. Also there /present and absent / were my godmother Virtudes and godfather Antonio. They lived in Germany, in the emigration of flowers. Virtudes’s eyes are wide-open blue camellias. Antonio was a decent and elegant man from Hermida. Though he’s dead, he keeps giving me gifts.”
Night is memory . . .
7
Mother camouflaged. Nest for birds.
Cuddle. Linguistic embraces.
I went hunting for birds.
8
I love you, with my mute fingers.
With butterflies of air I make you tatted lace.
With the blind power of my sad eyes
I rehearse a work of theatre for you.
With my love I make you
a forest.
I learn to listen to clouds, to work earth and to read heaven, in your lap.
9
“You gave birth to me, and your man looked on in silence, bursting with happiness and trees. I brought electric shadows.”
10
You screamed,
ate sops,
sipped Sanson fortified wine.
11
From your body mine was born,
as if you were sharing
the mystery of magpies.
12
You had no dreams
because village women don’t dream.
The economic backwardness of Galicia
was a form of artistic avant-garde.
from Camouflage
Lupe Gómez
translated from the Galician by Erín Moure
Gómez uses a deft minimalism and condensation of vocables, making possible an enunciation of story in the poems with just a few juxtaposed images, sounds, and spacings, utterly uncluttered. Hers is a poetry that ignites both fact and affect in a tender and tenacious salute to the riots that shore us up as beings in memory: our culture, nation, language, and the light that glows from each, illuminating us to one another. Her work has always been feminist; it has always affirmed the female body in all the difficulties it encounters in living in the world, doesn’t shy away. Her Camouflage is a gorgeous book-long work of grief and mourning, in tune with the ways of the ancient Kaddish and other prayers in that it serves too as a way to praise life. The challenge in translating Lupe Gómez is to retain the lightness, the feel of words in the mouth and their echoes and relation, the gentle movement, all without overcharging the text in English.
Lupe Gómez (b. 1972) is a Galician poet, dramatist, children’s writer, fiction writer, and journalist born in the village of Fisteus in A Coruña province of Galicia in northern Spain. She has published fourteen books, and her work has been translated into English and Spanish, among other languages. She is a meticulous commentator on village memory and on the lives of women, young, old, in family, alone. Camuflaxe (Camouflage), her newest book of poetry (Chan de Pólvora, 2017), is a gentle and loving elegy for her mother and for the rural village life into which she was born but which no longer exists as it did even in the seventies.
Erín Moure recently released a collection of poems, The Elements (House of Anansi Press, 2019), “a book of Dad.” In it, poems about and for Moure’s late father—accepting his dementia as a real way of thinking “world” and “self” in a struggle against invasive powers—are braced alongside poems invoking the struggle of Galician peasants against the invasion of the armies of Napoleon. It is a book about tenderness, and about The Good, in the face of destructions. “The Face of the Quartzes” is her sixth translation from the work of Galician poet Chus Pato. In spring 2020, she published two new translations: a sequence from Juan Gelman’s Argentinian “translations” of the English poet John Wendell, Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism (Eulalia Books) and, from the rich mountain Galician of Uxío Novoneyra, The Uplands, Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz Books). Forthcoming in fall 2020 are: a translation of Quebec poet Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (Book*hug), and Toots fait la Shiva, avenue Minto (Le Noroît, tr. Colette St-Hilaire), the French version of her memoir Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star Books, 2017). A forty-year retrospective, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University Press.
