from Deche Bitoope

Natalia Toledo

Untitled

Your wings know how much I missed him, berelele,
you read my hand’s heart like a gypsy.
For days I slept beneath the shade that covered my eyes,
until a boy appeared who took up my heart sickness in his arms
and made me his own on the night’s last star.



Prayer

For my grandmother’s wheelchair,
for my friend Candida’s green mangoes.
For houses made of brick,
their damp vermillion.
For the gray slats of my cradle,
for spiny cacti
growing on the walls.
For the jicalpextles my mother
got from other people’s weddings.
For those days when the sun burnished my hair
And my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.
For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,
their swift migration to our family altar.
For the petate and its map of urine stains,
for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.
For all that I made into a life.
I sing.



Valle de Bravo Convent 1
For Mother Nina
I am seated here,
like the crying fountain in my town,
filled with dry leaves and crow droppings.
Lace headdress, my finest huipil,
church full of whispers and shouts
blood-stained cross with mayflowers.
I am seated here:
on my way to the spring from imprisonment,
tunnel passageway,
bower in darkness.
A black dog stops before me,
I clamber up, pull on his tail, he barks and escapes.
Bells call to come and eat the body of christ,
tonsured women,
kneeling and pale.
They keep crazy girls here and sick ones.
I am eleven and I live with my thirteen sisters.
Music, sweets, games and prayers by rote.
In the name of the father,
of all those fathers who pushed us aside.



Olga

You are the woman who bathed me
on the rim of a basin full of stars and toads,
who shaped my hair in buns upon my neck,
who gave me soft-boiled egg with salt and lime.
My metate nose still holds aromas of rice and cinnamon.
You taught me to love hoops hanging from my ears and skeins of silk,
and healed my wounds
with spiders’ webs.
Two things for sure, mama:
the clouds and your jícara arms brought me to life.



House of Bees

My boat of relics
washed up upon the woven floormat,
bees came to buzz at my house’s mouth,
the door with two panels.
Trees cried sap that covered my hair,
my eyes were cactus drool,
and prickles grew inside my breast
as her breath began its journey.
After the nine days, completely spent,
I traced a constellation in smoke
upon the flowers that covered grandmother’s remains.



Untitled

Hurl grains of purple corn
upon your petate
and know the masa in which they forged your body.
The corn is a face,
a shadow.
We are the ashen tracing that elucidates the earth.

translated from the Zapotec and Spanish by Clare Sullivan and Irma Pineda

Read the original in Zapotec and Spanish

Deche biotoope / El dorso del cangrejo (The Crab’s Hard Shell, 2016) is Natalia Toledo’s first collection of poetry since her award-winning book Guie’ yaase’/ Olivo negro (The Black Flower, 2005). In this book, she returns to the landscape of her childhood where animals predict the future and grandmothers shape masa. Again, she questions Zapotec traditions even as she mourns their disappearance. But in these poems Toledo takes more risks: she exposes her pain and that of her people in images at once elegant and raw. Like the crab, she edges into the past, but the hard shell of experience or cynicism provides only temporary protection to the human vulnerability beneath it.

Toledo translates all her own poetry into Spanish, a necessary practice for indigenous poets since professional translators from indigenous languages are a scarce commodity. I translated these poems to English in close collaboration with Toledo’s friend and fellow poet, Irma Pineda. Pineda’s linguistic and cultural expertise taught me how much an image can change from Zapotec to Spanish and revealed that sometimes a word had been created first in Spanish and back-translated into Zapotec. At times, we translated more directly from the Zapotec and, at others, from the Spanish.

The first poem speaks to a “berelele,” a Zapotec migratory bird (a type of stone-curlew). Since the bird’s rapid call sounds like its name and foretells the rain, Toledo calls it a gypsy. I chose to keep the original name here. In the poem “Olga,” there are no words for “cinnamon” or “earrings” in Zapotec so the poet describes these objects as “sweet bark” and “metal that hangs from women’s ears.” The poem “Lidxi bizu” (“House of Bees”) mourns the death of the poet’s grandmother. The Zapotec language grants inanimate objects human attributes: “my house’s mouth” (“ruaa yóo”) is a door and “trees cried sap.” A pine tar is used to make incense for funerals, but women also use it to perfume their hair. The narrator recalls how weeping women rubbed her own head with the sticky, fragrant substance. Zapotec imagery also fuses the natural and human worlds so I return to the original language’s striking image of pain: “a guichi birooba’ ndaani’ mudu ladxidua’” (“spines grew inside my heart’s cocoon”). Working through Toledo’s poems with Pineda showed me how dynamic the process of literary creation and translation can be.

Natalia Toledo was born in Juchitán, Oaxaca. Her bilingual poetry (Zapotec-Spanish) has been included in numerous journals and anthologies and translated into languages as varied as Nahuatl, Italian, and Punjabi. She has received support from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) and the Oaxaca State Fund for Culture and the Arts (FOESCA). Since 2019, she has been serving as Under Secretary of Cultural Diversity and Literacy for Mexico.

Clare Sullivan is a professor of Spanish at the University of Louisville, teaching poetry and translation. In 2010, she received an NEA Translation Projects grant to translate Natalia Toledo’s poetry. The resulting work, The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (Phoneme Media, 2015), was short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. Her translation of Alejandro Tarrab’s Litane was published by Cardboard House Press in 2017.

Irma Pineda is an author, editor, translator, and educator in Juchitán, Oaxaca. She has published seven books of bilingual Isthmus Zapotec-Spanish poetry. She is the only woman to have been president of Mexico’s national organization of indigenous-language authors (ELIAC) and is a professor at the National Teachers University. She is also currently a member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.