Natal Debts
BY MARA PASTOR, TRANSLATED BY MARÍA JOSÉ GIMÉNEZ AND ANNA ROSENWONG
Mara Pastor complicates the debt of a nation through the microscope of her days. Her poems demand that the reader encounter Puerto Rico’s disasters—both political and “natural”—through lived experience. But what is the labor of her days, as poet, mother, lover, puertorriqueñe? The urgency of her work only echoes louder after the recent political uprisings in Puerto Rico. When Pastor writes, “Don’t pay attention if you don’t want to,” we know she means how can one do anything else but pay attention?
María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong’s lithe translations, rooted in conversation and friendship with Pastor, introduce the reader unfamiliar with Puerto Rican literature to one of its most important contemporary poets. Pastor’s poems invite you into her private world not as tourist or voyeur, but calling you to witness the global political situation from an Island long tired of being under other nations’ thumbs.
BEATRIZ MAGADÁN
In a shack in Chacahua,
Beatriz Magadán lives
with her little chicken that listens to hearts.
She cooks seafood
on her woodstove in coconut oil
and talks when the chicken isn’t listening.
She crossed the border in a trunk
with every one of her children.
Over there she was baker, tortillera, house
keeper, mother, grandmother and wife.
One good day, empty-handed, on foot,
she returned to her village on the
Pacific shore. Fear, she said,
is not a mother in a trunk
waiting for them to take one of her children,
fear is not daring to do something else.
A PLATE OF WATER
Every minute far from her
passes in the ease of her voice that rings
like a stone tossed into a lake.
I accept that the stone sinks
to recover my mother’s voice
in grieving your love.
A gift on each cheek,
ribbon of spit and bird calls,
even if the sugar runs out
or I don't have any wheat,
I cannot fathom the faltering flame.
Happiness is one way
we will remember
having danced among vejigantes.
I barely know how to set this love
over a small plate of water
so the ants can’t devour it.
ATRÓN
No more promises, our signs say.
Emmanuel wanted to know if the signs were
protesting suicide.
He asked looking into my eyes.
His father warns me
that Emmanuel talks a lot.
“Don’t pay attention if you don’t want to.”
Emmanuel reads the sign I’m painting syllable by syllable.
Ev-ery-bui-tre-gets-its-pi-ti-rre.
Emmanuel knows a pitirre is a bird of prey.
He’s seen them out in the country when his dad takes him to the river.
And a buitre is a bird that eats dead meat
like the turkey vultures that fly over the highways.
Emmanuel told me that vultures are like Atrón.
“Who's Atrón?” I ask him.
“A blond man who’s gonna build a wall in the ocean
so we can’t get to the United States.”
Emmanuel knows this because he saw it
on TV. Emmanuel asks me
if the buitres are like Atrón.
Emmanuel’s father calls him from the boardwalk.
“Let’s go,” he yells. “Say goodbye.”
He takes off running.
Talks to his dad and comes back.
“My dad says to call me on his phone
if you get together to make more signs.
I want to paint some with you to protest Atrón.”
GRASSHOPPER
When I stripped the sheets,
there was a dead grasshopper.
We were stunned,
looking at its dried, iridescent wings.
Friends were waiting in the living room,
but I wanted to get in bed
in that room full of memories.
When I stripped the sheets,
the dead grasshopper was there,
draped in the desire
of two creatures ready
to desecrate its tomb.
I’VE RETURNED TO THE SHORE TO NEVER SEE THE SEA
Again I walked the arches but that once yearned-for smell
of burning brush
is impossible now. How to explain
that the shortest path was not the curve
and even less the line.
I’m in the unseen in between.
If the cat is fat and that’s well-being
for a cat, the Caribbean suits him.
And that, here, is no small thing.
Almost no one settles here.
So if the cat has emigrated
and he’s fat and happy, that’s a comfort.
The people I came to see leave
when I knock on the door. The cat doesn’t.
The cat stays in the house waiting for me.
ALASKA
What’s left of the sea
is packaged in Alaska
at the cost of our bitten skin.
It’s costly to talk on this island
because every breath of air
lets in a fistful of repellent.
We get word from Alaska
and it’s not avant-garde poems.
The cost of a ticket to the 49th state
has no equivalent in palm trees.
Forty-nine palm trees aren’t collateral against
the balance of natal debt.
This riddle bites at us all.
TODAY IS ACID RAIN
We can’t go outside without an umbrella.
We’ll stop going to concerts
and to nurseries.
The IMECA pollution index
reached 172
and we don’t want to take
taxis or buses.
The power has gone out twice.
The future is watching movies,
translating American
poets, perhaps,
writing poems in acid-free
notebooks, in a bunker
full of coffee and weed,
insisting we live in the best
city ever. Let’s bring
all the edible plants
into the house
so they don’t kill us later.
NOTHING LASTS
Water
stagnates again.
Loving me doesn’t.
Mortals do.
Little cage underwater
to see
strange fish
fall back in love.
They sway nothing.
Awake yes.
Dream no.
Mountain yes.
Beach no.
Urchin yes.
Hammock never.
They hide nothing.
They recommend
going to see the reefs
the salt bells
mollusks
the monster
going extinct.
Let the water sway.
Dorsality,
dorsum and flight,
orality,
dorsal salt.
Aloft me.
Flight and flavor.
Aloneness.
Flash
alone.
NATAL DEBT
I’ll say storm.
I’ll say river.
I’ll say tornado.
I’ll say leaf.
I’ll say tree.
I’ll be wet.
I’ll be damp.
I won’t be a bust.
I won’t be a pelican.
Baby I’ll want.
Man I’ll want.
The man’s song I’ll want.
Woman I’ll always be.
Small woman I’ll have.
Small island I’ll have.
I won’t have money.
I’ll have a dream.
I’ll have too much work.
I’ll say salt.
I’ll say papaya.
I’ll say bean and yuca.
Car I’ll have.
Fuel I’ll have.
Washer I’ll have.
Everything's so expensive I’ll say.
Everything’s so pretty I’ll say.
Cats I’ll have.
Cat hair I’ll have.
Mother and father I’ll have.
Mother I’ll be.
Aunt I’ll be.
Wife I’ll be.
Friend I’ll be.
I’ll have little.
I’ll have a rented house.
I’ll have debt.
I’ll say tree.
I’ll say leaf.
I’ll say tornado.
I’ll say river.
I’ll say storm.
*Most of the above poems were published in Spanish in Falsa heladería (False Ice Cream Shop) by Aguadulce Ediciones (2018) in Bayamón, Puerto Rico.
María José Giménez is a poet, translator, and editor whose work has received support from the NEA, the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Breadloaf Translators’ Conference, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Banff International Literary Translators’ Centre. Assistant translation editor of Anomaly and a former board member of the American Literary Translators Association, María José works between English and Spanish, and from the French, and is the translator of Tilting at Mountains by Edurne Pasaban (Mountaineer Books, 2014), Alejandro Saravia’s novel Red, Yellow, Green (Biblioasis, 2016), and the chapbook As Though The Wound Had Heard by Mara Pastor (Cardboard House Press, 2017). Among other awards, María José was recently named 2019 Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts.
Anna Rosenwong is a translator, book editor, and educator. Her translation of Rocio Ceron’s Diorama won the Best Translated Book Award, and her collected translations of Jose Eugenio Sanchez are now available as here the sun’s for real. The translation editor of Anomaly, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her scholarly and creative work has been featured in such venues as World Literature Today, The Kenyon Review, and Modern Poetry Today. More at annarosenwong.com
Mara Pastor (San Juan, 1980) is a Puerto Rican poet and editor. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Connotation Press, Latin American Literature Today and Seedings. She has authored six full-length poetry books in Spanish as well as the bilingual chapbooks As Though the Wound Had Heard, translated by María José Giménez, and Children of Another Hour, translated by Noel Black. Her latest book Falsa heladería (False Ice Cream Shop) was published in 2018 by Aguadulce Ediciones. Her most recent editorial work was the anthology of contemporary Puerto Rican fiction A toda costa, published in 2018 in Mexico City. She lives in Ponce where she teaches literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico and collaborates as a writer with a number of publications and magazines in Puerto Rico and abroad.