one purgatory underneath another purgatory
underneath a third
that leads to a fourth
the city awakes dotted with sparrows
nearsighted crawl from sparrow to sparrow
the last purgatory
of the series sinks into another
no way at all
to light a match, but here comes the shade
of my grandfather
wrapped in onionskin
and rusty keystrokes
of writing underground
phony addresses
names hidden by changes of gender
characters in heroic feats reduced
to abbreviations
here comes Fulvio
to remind me
“don’t navel-gaze”
not navel-gazing
the abyss
disintegrates into morning trains
orange car after orange car
full of warmth
redolent of the quick shower and the hair dryer
organized crush
of solidarity
that—it too—disintegrates in turn
into the streets, frays into stations
disperses into officesmechanical shops
supermarkets
with old clothes
threadbare
there it goes
disperses
and strikes matches that light cigarettes
that light
stove tops that heat
hurried breakfasts at obscene hours
that light the day
made in turn of other days
down in an abyss of nuances unforeseen
See the imprint of a drop of liquid:
a rough ovoid stain
on yellowed paper,
now more than eighty years old,
what
separations,
rainstorms,
leaks
what circumstances gathered here,
determine
the violation of that closing command:
“burn this letter,
don’t keep it
don’t hide papers
erase, annul:
fiat lux?”
And the fiat, in this case, would have meant
to leave no trace.
A gleam implying no choices
more a negation than a beginning.
Meanwhile, the door bolts
croak
the only word they know: who?
And that question locks away
any chance of a meal,
any access to the sun, any pause
before the blow.
Who, they ask, and in all their variety
the verbs and their objects
attached to that pronoun
construct
the bars
the walls
the days of the week
of interrogation:
who told you, who came to you, whom do you see regularly
who gave you these books, who penned
these handwritten
letters.
And years ago, as a child,
in sepia, slowly, you wielded a sharp pen
and the pages
filled slowly and neatly
in preparation.
And now here, in the dungeon, one tooth rotten
almost like a seed that sprouts
that shoots out a warm, fat root of pus
toward your lungs.
Who wrote these letters, whom did you get
them from.
So the fiat
is not same
as the fiat
one is born of light to wipe out everything, a match
struck next to the corner of a letter,
that opens a hole in time, an invisible hole
in the retina
like the books of Alexandria in flame, outside
the field of vision, far
from the hypothesis of light; and the other
fiat that engenders
and expels
its opposites,
the dark, the war,
the soil: a fiat
fertile, embodied
in things,
not in absences.
Mamma,
the days
are quiet
here.
I’ve translated a manual
on making shoes,
I’ll send it with permission
of the most friendly warden of this prison
to sustain you
and my brothers and sisters.
Thank you for the suits
and the nut tart.
Congratulate my cousin
on her marriage.
Calculate then what complements,
what conjunctions, what subordinate clauses,
what accusatives and datives determine
the distance between one fiat and the other.
This letter, for instance,
in the rush before flight
the drops
that confess themselves by-products
of tearjerking films
microscopically burst
like clumsy bubbles,
heavy and full,
burst and fallen
over the crystal-clear-instruction:
burn
your obsession with saving up papers.
But in the cell, months before,
with light entering like a tropical irony,
some parrots drawn on the sky,
on the resonant horizon
of the prison block
the torch
illuminating
the dark dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo
and the interminable soliloquies
of Cellini
to god himself,
now here poured into another tongue.
in another jail—
an echo of that other one
as in a set of
opposed
Venetian mirrors?
In the Maria Zélia Political Prison, 1935
Paula Abramo
translated from the Spanish by Dick Cluster
Listen to the original read by the poet:
FIAT LUX is a collection of poems evoking the poet’s ancestors who were political refugees from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil in the early twentieth century, from Brazil to Bolivia in the 1930s, and then again from Brazil to Mexico in the 1960s. At the same time, it is a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing historical characters to life. These two axes cross in the image of striking a match (her grandmother worked in a match factory making the brand called FIAT LUX, Latin for “let there be light”), which provides the book’s title and runs through the openings of all the poems. “In the Maria Zélia Political Prison” contains one of the longest of these opening sections, and perhaps the most descriptive of the poet’s own surroundings.
Translation challenges include switching among the poetry’s various modes: narrative, introspective, biographical, at times philosophical, at times making use of cryptic but evocative bits of ancestors’ journals and handed-down lore—such as, in this poem, Paula Abramo's grandfather Fulvio’s distrust of introspection and his strategies for keeping prison interrogators and censors at bay. Also, the poet delights in surprising the reader with enjambments in which the next line playfully undermines the meaning the reader is constructing out of the line before, and these need to be made to work in English word order with equal measures of rhythm, comprehensibility, and surprise.
Translating the whole book has been somewhat like translating a novel, because many poems fill out suggestions about the characters that appeared in earlier ones (the instruction “don’t navel-gaze” will recur, and the grandfather’s prison experience will be seen from a different angle in the next poem). Situations repeat themselves in parallel, like the set of Venetian mirrors with which this poem concludes. Abramo was a classics major in college and is a translator by profession, so it’s natural that the border-crossing and time travel involved in telling the family history are evoked by the use of multiple languages, including bits of Portuguese, Latin, and Greek. Since English is farther from Romance-language roots than Spanish is, I have helped English readers by translating some of these phrases while leaving others—like the fiat of this poem—as they were.
Translation challenges include switching among the poetry’s various modes: narrative, introspective, biographical, at times philosophical, at times making use of cryptic but evocative bits of ancestors’ journals and handed-down lore—such as, in this poem, Paula Abramo's grandfather Fulvio’s distrust of introspection and his strategies for keeping prison interrogators and censors at bay. Also, the poet delights in surprising the reader with enjambments in which the next line playfully undermines the meaning the reader is constructing out of the line before, and these need to be made to work in English word order with equal measures of rhythm, comprehensibility, and surprise.
Translating the whole book has been somewhat like translating a novel, because many poems fill out suggestions about the characters that appeared in earlier ones (the instruction “don’t navel-gaze” will recur, and the grandfather’s prison experience will be seen from a different angle in the next poem). Situations repeat themselves in parallel, like the set of Venetian mirrors with which this poem concludes. Abramo was a classics major in college and is a translator by profession, so it’s natural that the border-crossing and time travel involved in telling the family history are evoked by the use of multiple languages, including bits of Portuguese, Latin, and Greek. Since English is farther from Romance-language roots than Spanish is, I have helped English readers by translating some of these phrases while leaving others—like the fiat of this poem—as they were.
Paula Abramo was born in Mexico City in 1980. Her poetry collection Fiat Lux, from which this poem comes, won the 2013 Premio de Poesías Joaquín Xirau Icaza for the best book by a writer under forty. Her work appears in anthologies of contemporary Mexican and worldwide poetry, both in the original Spanish and in translations to Portuguese, German, and French. Abramo's prolific career as a translator of more than 40 books from Portuguese to Spanish includes works by Angélica Freitas (Brazil) and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Portugal). She co-authored Yo soy la otra: las mujeres y la cultura en México (2017) and the art installation Ropa Sucia (2017), both exposing the causes of the invisibility of Mexican female writers and artists.
Dick Cluster has been translating Spanish-language fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for over twenty years, most recently Gabriela Alemán’s Poso Wells, Carme Chaparro’s I Am Not a Monster, and his edited anthology Kill the Ámpaya!: Best Latin American Baseball Fiction. He also writes history and fiction, including The History of Havana (co-authored with Rafael Hernández) and a crime novel series. He won the Northern California Book Award for fiction translation and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA literary translation prize. Cluster has served as a mentor and teacher at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, the Yiddish Book Center, and the Mills College graduate translation program
