CAMOUFLAGE and function evocative tone / secret sum
all is succession—timbre—of tumbles and slaps
vast caverns where girls whisper waves of remembrance
phrase field of forces, where color
sheds its name to exist
transitions on a spectrum
[The flow is the quantity of something that passes across a surface. This surface is a country, a century, a poem, a wisp of breath above a flower through a lion’s teeth. The total flow depends on the intensity of the field, the size of the surface it traverses, and its coordinates in space. Language crosses intensity, size, and coordinates. The poem is a wormhole in time: it speaks and it makes from the ruins a ferocious serpent that savages the face of the world.]~
Áurica Speculari (A Fragment)
Rocío Cerón
translated from the Spanish by Dana Delibovi
Listen to an excerpt of the original Spanish read by the poet:
This poem is an excerpt from the collection Áurica Speculari, which originated in Rocío Cerón’s breathtaking album of sonic poetry, Speculari. The poems in the album rise and fall through streams of natural and electronic sound. By listening to Speculari, I discovered that its flow of sound is actually similar to reading a poem in print. While reading, I hear the poem mentally. The sound of the words weaves into and out of sounds in my reading environment—the hum of a fan, a car rushing by, a far-off siren, birdsong.
The title of the collection, Áurica Speculari, points the way. Although the title has no English equivalent and is left untranslated, it connotes “A Study in Gold.” “Áurica” is a Spanish word that means “auric” or “golden,” but the first three letters also suggest our “aural” (sound) experience. In addition, geophysicists propose Aurica as a future supercontinent produced by the movements of earth’s landmasses. “Speculari” derives from the Latin verb speculare, which means “to examine.” I examined Cerón’s poems as aural art and unearthed a golden insight: poetry unites with the vast sonic environment of the surrounding world.
These observations influenced my approach to the translation. Inspired by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), I used English diction and stress to capture the tension, ever-present in Cerón’s work, between the “logical space“ of grammar and the sonic “games” of speech within the wider auditory milieu. Cerón recognizes language as a logical coordinate system, while sensing that poetry, with its game-like “tumbles and slaps,” crosses the barriers of logic. “Camouflage and function,” the first words of the poem published here, hint at how logic may mask the sonorous truth of language. The words also evoke forms of cultural camouflage. These include artistic superimpositions—palimpsest, pentimento, and, germane to Cerón’s work, overdubbing of recordings—and historical ones, such as the superimposition of the Baroque style of the colonizers upon the art of Indigenous people in the Americas.
Early on in my process, I decided to let the oral tradition of Anglo-Saxon prosody inform the translation. Alliteration, caesura, and generous use of synonyms are features of Old English verse. They chime with specific features of Cerón’s poems. More to the point, these features enrich the tone and rhythm in oral (and so, aural) poetry. As such, they complement the vibrant music of Cerón’s sonic poems.
The title of the collection, Áurica Speculari, points the way. Although the title has no English equivalent and is left untranslated, it connotes “A Study in Gold.” “Áurica” is a Spanish word that means “auric” or “golden,” but the first three letters also suggest our “aural” (sound) experience. In addition, geophysicists propose Aurica as a future supercontinent produced by the movements of earth’s landmasses. “Speculari” derives from the Latin verb speculare, which means “to examine.” I examined Cerón’s poems as aural art and unearthed a golden insight: poetry unites with the vast sonic environment of the surrounding world.
These observations influenced my approach to the translation. Inspired by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), I used English diction and stress to capture the tension, ever-present in Cerón’s work, between the “logical space“ of grammar and the sonic “games” of speech within the wider auditory milieu. Cerón recognizes language as a logical coordinate system, while sensing that poetry, with its game-like “tumbles and slaps,” crosses the barriers of logic. “Camouflage and function,” the first words of the poem published here, hint at how logic may mask the sonorous truth of language. The words also evoke forms of cultural camouflage. These include artistic superimpositions—palimpsest, pentimento, and, germane to Cerón’s work, overdubbing of recordings—and historical ones, such as the superimposition of the Baroque style of the colonizers upon the art of Indigenous people in the Americas.
Early on in my process, I decided to let the oral tradition of Anglo-Saxon prosody inform the translation. Alliteration, caesura, and generous use of synonyms are features of Old English verse. They chime with specific features of Cerón’s poems. More to the point, these features enrich the tone and rhythm in oral (and so, aural) poetry. As such, they complement the vibrant music of Cerón’s sonic poems.
Rocío Cerón is a Mexico City-based poet, essayist, and visual sound artist. Cerón is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Nudo vortex/Vortex Knot (Proyecto Literal, 2015), Borealis (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016), Imperio/Empire (Monte Carmelo, 2008), and Diorama (Phoneme Media, 2014; the bilingual edition for which Anna Rosenwong won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry from Rochester University). Her work has been awarded the Gilberto Owen National Poetry Prize and the poet has been part of the National System of Art Creators of Mexico (SNCA) since 2010. Cerón was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 and received the Michael Rothenberg International Poets Grant in the same year. She has released three sound poetry albums, Sonic Bubbles, Miiuni, and Speculari, and her sound, visual, and performance poetry pieces have been exhibited in international venues and museums including the Southbank Centre, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico. Julio Ortega, one of Latin America’s most acclaimed literary critics, chose her as one of the best women poets of her generation.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. She recently published a collection of translations and critical essays, Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila (Monkfish, 2024). Delibovi’s work has appeared in After the Art, Apple Valley Review, Ballast, Ekstasis, Noon, Psaltery & Lyre, Salamander, and many other journals. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, a 2024 Best of the Net nominee, and co-winner of the 2023 Hueston Woods Poetry Contest. Delibovi is Consulting Poetry Editor at the literary e-zine Cable Street.
