In the early days of the pandemic I became obsessed with a little book called Materia Prima (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) by Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer. Two years later, I’m still returning to it again and again. Berenguer’s poetry, ranging from a classically lyrical style to experimental concrete work, speaks to a certain gruesome dance that defines the intense moments of closure and euphoric freedom of the pandemic era. The poems—particularly her concrete works—contain wells of meaning; they dip into abstraction and yet are completely literal, hung in the spatial galaxy of the page, intimate and infinite, like vessels unto themselves. The English translations, pasted next to the original Spanish, felt like an impossible feat. How, I wondered, was it possible to translate these vessels in which every letter, fluidly molded in Spanish, was essential to their form?
When I interned for UDP in the summer of 2021, I seized the opportunity to chat with one of the translators who had worked on the book, and specifically on these visual poems, Urayoán Noel. Noel is a poet, translator, and professor based in the Bronx, originally from Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. His poem “ode to coffee/oda al cafe,” named after the iconic Juan Luis Guerra song, deconstructs the relationship between English and Spanish, empire and cash crop, moving in and out of the two languages like a defiant and fluid snake. This is emblematic of the warm and brutal intelligence that Urayoán brings to the act of translation: he is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word, and he has a deep love for language and an understanding of all that it celebrates, erases, amplifies, and reveals.
Noa Mendoza (NM): I thought it might be nice to start out talking about a poem that I’m actually going to get a tattoo of soon.
Urayoán Noel (UN): No way, really?
NM: Yes! This graph one, it’s untitled, but it is a pictorial representation of a beach scene, with a jumble of letters underneath.
I’m wondering what your experience was translating this graph, and, more generally, the incomprehensible. The words in the middle that don’t necessarily hold semantic meaning. And also gibberish more generally, if you ever think about that when it comes to translation.
UN: I think I might make a distinction there. I certainly agree that Berenguer’s language isn’t linear. I’m not sure she’s a poet of gibberish. I think of gibberish as a kind of uncontained language. My sense is there’s always this rigor in her work and a constant struggle between freedom and constraint.
I think her work is really done under the shadow of dictatorship. And I think this is true of a lot of experimental writing in Latin America in the seventies. What we might think of as a kind of expressive choice to write in a certain way is really shaped by particular kinds of constraints, including political constraints. I see Berenguer’s take on concrete and visual poetry as very different from the canonical history of concrete poetry in Latin America. And that was one of the things that struck me about it. So yes, there is a kind of energy, the uncontainable nature of the writing, but you have a grid. You have a kind of interplay between structure and freedom. It’s something that I’m interested in in my own work as a poet, and I don’t think it’s something that gets emphasized a lot in U.S./Anglo conversations around the experimental. I think it’s made to seem like a choice to write in a certain way, and we don’t want to let go of the sense of constraint. And it’s something that I tried to capture in my translation.
I should say also that these translations were done really, really quickly, partly because I just had tons of other stuff going on. And partly because I realized they wouldn’t necessarily be improved by taking ten times the time to do it again. It was maybe a week of really intensive work when I did pretty much nothing else. I literally shut myself in and did nothing but be inhabited by those poems, channeling them.
NM: That seems like the only way you could do that with these poems.
UN: I felt like they required this surrender to the work. So yeah, I think there was a tension there in my translation between the creativity, which I think can come across as gibberish, the playfulness, which I think is also a hallmark of my own work, but also me trying to check the playfulness.
NM: Yeah. That was something that I think a lot about in terms of her work—it’s so beautiful and also so terrible, violent, and kind of vicious. I was wondering how that applies to translation, if you see that tension as something that you can piece out in the mode itself?
UN: It’s something that I’ve had to work through a lot. I did this translation of Pablo de Rokha, the Chilean poet, who I think is an important figure in the Latin American avant garde, but just a complicated figure in terms of the masculinism of the work. And so it’s something I had to confront as a translator. De Rokha’s work can be really violent. So to me, that’s a broader question about the avant garde. The avant garde, as a term, is a military formation. So there’s a masculinist violent impulse to the very construct of the avant garde. And I think it’s something that makes Berenguer’s work that much more compelling. She shows the limits of how United-States-based conversations around innovative poetry rely on terms like “the avant garde,” which is strange because you don’t really have a kind of historical avant garde in U.S. poetry in the same way.
NM: Right, it’s a different spirit in the United States.
UN: Yes, and I can’t not think about Berenguer as someone who inherits this really incredible avant-garde tradition but opts for her own way of writing, creating her own universe. I also don’t want to reduce her work to gender. I mean, to me, she’s just a really incredible poetic mind. There are all these wonderful self-reflexive moments in her work more generally. Meta-poetics, poetry writing itself. And that seems to me a move away from a kind of historical avant garde and maybe more toward postmodernism. It’s thinking about what it means to read. What is a text? And I think that part of her work feels very, very, very contemporary.
NM: So you see the violence and sexuality of her work as responding to the masculinist avant garde.
UN: And to dictatorship also. We don’t want to fetishize the historical conditions and the canonical in a way that makes women poets in Latin America seem merely reactive. But I think it is the context that I took seriously when I translated her. And there’s this amazing field of Uruguayan women poets who, thankfully, find a lot of recognition in the past decade.
NM: Yeah, like Marosa di Giorgio. I’m reading one of her books now. It’s wild. So beautiful.
UN: I don’t know how to theorize it, but when I read Berenguer I get that feeling of poetry with a capital P, but then I also get this feeling like écriture [féminine], right, and the kind of Hélène Cixous sense, or even Gertrude Stein.
Rather than kind of imposing an order, thinking about how all the pieces fall together. Respecting the kind of restlessness of the mind and of the language is something that I try to do in this work, largely by thinking about the limits of my own translation practice.
NM: You mentioned limits of translation, which made me think about visual and concrete poetry, how rhythm is just as linked to form as it is to sound. What are the limitations of translating rhythm in this type of poem?
UN: Translating rhythm, for me, is crucial, but it can also be a trap. I’m a Puerto Rican poet, a Caribbean poet, and so it’s always about the rhythm. And you read my own poetry, and it’s very much about musicality and even rhyme to a great extent. And I realized that that’s a gift but it’s also a trap. Because I think you risk overwriting our own sense of musicality for the rhythm.
As a Caribbean person translating a South American poet, thinking also about the different cadences of these different kinds of Spanish that reflect different histories of empire and conquest and migration and diaspora. It’s something that I also often struggle with: thinking, “Okay, how do I think about the rhythms of Berenguer’s writing in a way that I can bring my own musicality, my own ear into the translation, but not have that over-determine the work that she’s doing?”
We talked about concrete poetry—I think those were also process poems, almost serial poems, in a way that feels very seventies. You get the more lyric version at the start, and then you get the intermediate, half-glyphic take on the concrete poem, then you get the full concrete version. And so what is the relationship between those three? It seems clear to me from reading Berenguer that it’s a kind of poetics of difference. So the idea is not that one of these versions can take the place of the other. There’s a lot in Berenguer that’s almost gruesome. The feeling of claustrophobia, and the lyrics are kind of tight and taut to begin with. Then she begins taking stuff out and taking stuff out and taking stuff out. So as opposed to a kind of alternative to writing, which is the way you might think about concrete poetry in the Brazilian sense—it’s made to be put in museums and convey this kind of internationalist modernism—Berenguer’s concrete poetry seems to me intimately tied to the act of writing, and to a writing that stresses its own untranslatability.
NM: My father is Peruvian and my mother’s American, and I grew up speaking Spanish in a very domestic way, kind of just in the home. And so I speak it very non-academically, but I do speak it, almost domestically, I say cafecito not café. I’m curious what your relationship is to Spanish as someone from the Caribbean diaspora.
UN: You have the conciencia, being Puerto Rican, that language is colonial and racialized and classed in all these ways. And I think I bring that to whatever I do. And so I’m really interested in that question of what room there is, right, within imperial language, to do something else. What is the relationship between the way those of us inhabit particularly historically lesser Spanish, right, or racialized English, or both, in the United States? How do we think about the differences?
The languages that we claim, and how we can use those to work against a hegemonic English, hegemonic Spanish, is something I’m interested in exploring in my work. It’s not necessarily something that I see as much in Berenguer, but again, it’s something that I think about, especially as it relates to the baroque, which I’m fascinated by as a kind of Latin American mode. So if you think of the baroque as a language of excess, then you think of the vernacular as being less than. So the Spanish that people speak, this part of Peru is too black or too indigenous or whatever. There’s a tension between the plenitude of a kind of vehicular Spanish, and then the vernacular materiality.
Embodied histories of other kinds of Spanish and how to work through those tensions is something that I often struggle with as a translator and as a poet and as a scholar: writing about Nuyorican poets and thinking about the relationship of their work to standard English and standard Spanish.
NM: What are those embodied histories?
UN: I’ll give you an example. Even someone with my privileges—I did a Ph.D. in Spanish at NYU, so I remember the language coordinator there correcting us because the Puerto Ricans would say, “¿Qué tú quieres?”—What do you want? As opposed to “¿Qué quieres?” or “¿Qué quieres tú?” So something like that is so common to me, it’s not wrong, it’s just the way we speak. So in effect you have to code switch between the language of your intimacy, the language of your community, and the kind of language that you teach.
The varieties of English and Spanish have their own racial logics and creole histories and diasporic counterimaginaries, and I think it’s something we can bring to a lot of the ongoing conversations about de-colonizing translation too. That’s a very generative space, personally, and not always a space that’s emphasized when we have conversations about translation in the US—the role of these vernacular practices in history as they open up different ways of thinking about what translation can and should be.
NM: On a bit of a lighter note, I’m wondering if you prefer translating a friend, someone that you know personally, or someone who is like, una fantasma, someone whose work is kind of like circulating in your brain, but is dead. So someone you can’t really talk to directly. I guess prefer is a weird word there, but what is your relationship to both of those things?
UN: I’m really not interested in a kind of view from nowhere. In everything I do, right, thinking about situatedness and my own clarity and my own privilege, or whatever it might be, I think all of those questions are crucial. So for that reason it matters to me that I feel like I can work collaboratively with the poets I’m translating. And again, even with Winston Gonzales, initially I wasn’t comfortable. I thought it should be a visibly Black person, an Indigenous person, a Central American translator, who’s doing this work. But then I reached out to Winston and we talked and I realized, wow, this work not only, you know, so connects to stuff that I explore in my own work, but just the kind of relationship was there. I want to make sure that I can arrive at the poet from my own situatedness and have those conversations, make sure they’re comfortable, think of the limits of who I am and what I do, and have a little bit of that clarity.
Noa Mendoza is a poet based in Brooklyn. Her work appears in No, Dear Magazine, Fecund Magazine, Vassar Review, and Narratively, among others. She has a chapbook of poetry forthcoming through the Wendy’s Subway fellowship series.
Urayoán Noel is the author of the poetry collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press) and the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press). A former fellow of the Ford Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and CantoMundo, he is currently completing a bilingual edition of the Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha, Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry, for Shearsman Books. Work from his ongoing Wokitokiteki project (wokitokiteki.com) has been published in Fence and Packingtown Review. Originally from Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the South Bronx and teaches at NYU, as well as at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: