Self-Portrait

Moon and Mind

Tina Escaja

Helen Chadwick, Self-Portrait, 1991
Cibachrome transparency, glass, aluminum, electrical apparatus


I hold the cerebral cortex.
Electrical sequences naming me
generate my
presence,
possibly something I don't take in or resolve,
the mere functions
my hands attempt to inscribe,
to render the occult as culture,
discerning myself
in organ-tubercle, angular quadrant, reproductive quadrant,
essence and machine,
the incision executed through devotion
and hogwash.

To make you present in the hippocampus, the amygdala, the ability to name,
                                                                                    or aphasia.
Me and your gravitational circumference.
Believing myself incapable
of the precise measure, the obsolete encounter with my existence
and my fate.
Pulling it off or not,
chemical options at auction,
alterations, fissures
in my asymmetrical self.

In my hands,
plastic and evasive as dream,
lost in galaxies of circuitry and fluctuation that dictate
billions of nerve cells,
my consciousness.

In my hands
the machine, no soul or mirage or oasis to save me,

moon and mind.


translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra

Read the original in Spanish

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Tina Escaja was born in Spain and now lives in the United States. She is a writer of fiction, drama, and poetry. In 2003 she won the Dulce María Loynaz Prize for Caída Libre. Escaja is also a digital artist and scholar. Many of her works transcend the book format and involve multimedia, incorporating video, interactive technology, and jazz; these have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Spain, Mexico, and the US. Her digital artifacts include the series VeloCity (2000-2002), Código de barras (2007), the interactive novel Pinzas de metal (2003), and a performance piece with sheep Negro en ovejas (2011). Images and text from Negro en ovejas appear in Mandorla. Escaja's latest print publication, Respiración mecánica, was published in 2014 with translations in Euskera, Catalan, and Galician. Escaja's newest multimedia project involves the poetic prototyping of robots. One stage is featured at Jacket2 and the project is a focal point for her fall 2015 residency at Generator makerspace in Burlington, Vermont. She is a professor of Latin American and Spanish literature at the University of Vermont. A selection from literary and digital projects can be found at her website.

Kristin Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, a collection by Reina María Rodríguez that will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Her translation of Cubanology, a book of days by Omar Pérez, is forthcoming from Station Hill Press. Previously, her translations of books by Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Angel Escobar, and Marcelo Morales were published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014 and 2016, each with her critical introduction. Dykstra is guest editor of a dossier dedicated to Flores in the Chicago Review 61.3. With Kent Johnson, she is co-editor of Materia Prima, an anthology dedicated to Amanda Berenguer (Uruguay) forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.