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Review by Meagan Evans
The poems in books two and three of Dolores Dorantes’ self-titled project form part of what Dorantes herself calls in the introduction to the volume a “continuous trajectory.” They are more concerned with an “I in motion” than with the “stopping point” of pronouncement. In fact, there are only three periods punctuating this entire volume, all of them in the second book, and all them in section titles. Not one of the poems themselves offers the reader this signal to stop. To breathe. To finish a thought and prepare for another. Instead, the poems are built of phrases linked and held apart by colons, commas, parenthesis, and dashes—carving out and coupling semantic and musical phrases much more permeably and even treacherously than the sentence usually allows:
DE ESE GATILLO PENDE
(oye)
el (me) nunca surcado
territorio
pulsaré un poco
Mira
La parte
(desde ahí)
es donde (en la brillante caverna de la boca
—bajo el rojo—) te cubran las semillas:
eres
—lugar—
serías
un germinado campo interminable
FROM THAT TRIGGER HANGS
(listen)
the (me) never plowed
territory
I’ll thrum somewhat
Look
The portion
(from there)
is where (in the mouth’s brilliant cavern
—beneath the red— ) the seeds cover you:
you are
—place—
you would be
a germinated field interminable
Though these poems bear the name Dolores Dorantes, and though she calls them an “I in motion,” Dorantes resists the temptation to simply aggregate the flotsam and jetsam of personality. These poems are not the record of a self that has passed through language, but of a self in the act of moving through language. These self-interrupting utterances never, and can never, come to rest.
This is not to say, however, that one rushes through them. They carry the reader forward, but not headlong. Carefully. Dorantes says in her introduction that she was driven in these poems to “draw language taut in such a way that meaning alone might be the dominant force.” In practice, this does not mean that the language of the poem becomes transparent, stepping out of the way of extra-linguistic meaning. Instead, the reader becomes aware of language the way the high-wire walker is aware of the tautness of the rope (its twangs and haws) that keeps her from freefalling into the dominating force of gravity. Consider the following lines from Section One of SEXOPUROSEXOVELOZ (PURESEXSWIFTSEX):
HAY UN ANDAMIO súbelo
Cada flexión de tu paso conduce
a la metálica
caliente
soledad
Refulge ahí amor:
bruñe de una palmada la certeza
A mano abierta
expándate
Sé Luz
Sé lámpara
THERE’S A SCAFFOLD climb it
Each flex of your step leads
to metallic
hot
solitude
Shimmer there love:
burnish certainty with one slap
Open-handed
Expand
Be Light
Be lamp
In this poem “you” is commanded upwards into a rarefied air, where certainty can be burnished, and is there told to “Expand.” But is it the expanded “you” that is then told to “Be Light”; or is it light that is then invited to be? The dominant force of meaning for which Dorantes’ language is drawn taut, is not meaning as solution to the problems of language, but as location for them. This meaning is a place where “you” is both asked to “Be lamp” and to expand to become less a self than a place, to become an atmosphere in which lamp is invited and commanded to be.
This expansion of identity into place continues in SEPTIEMBRE (SEPTEMBER), which translator Jen Hofer tells us, in her “Translator’s Note,” was “written at the end of 2001 as a response to questions of mortality and loss on a personal as well as international scale…”. But in SEPTIEMBRE the space of identity, perhaps in response to the inevitable corporality of war, is made more bodily:
Por el calcinado sendero de tu pecho
te busco
ofrezco
mi cabeza:
la cuchilla
de tu respiración
relumbra
Along the calcined path of your chest
I seek you
I offer
my head:
the knife
of your breathing
dazzles
The language of these poems is still deeply interior (the phrase “internally mine” echoes through both books in the collection), but it is a populated interiority, where the “I” and the “you” and “the two halves / of my body” seek each other out, to make love, to make war, and to just make.
Dorantes’ text and Hofer’s translation seem at times to be two halves of one body. This is especially true in SEPTIEMBRE, which was written after Hofer had begun working with Dorantes on the translation of SEXOPUROSEXOVELOZ and was originally titled SEPTIEMBRE para Jen (SEPTEMBER for Jen). The presentation of the text (with the original underlined on each page by the translation printed below it) does not allow the reader of Hofer’s translations, as monolingual editions of translated texts can, to forget that these poems are not poems written in English. Nor does it create the impression of separation that side-by-side editions allow. Instead, the reader, especially the non-Spanish speaking reader, is forced to recognize that Hofer’s English versions cannot exist apart from Dorantes’ Spanish.
Where the English simply cannot contain all of the possibilities of the original syntax or sound, Hofer makes some difficult choices that necessarily limit readings. One example of this is Hofer’s choice to translate the final lines of Section One of SEXOPUROSEXOVELOZ, “al final / de la iluminada calle te dejaría / quedar conmigo”, as “at the end / of the illuminated street I would let you / stay with me”. The Spanish “te dejaría”, especially at the end of the line, can have the double sense of both Hofer’s “I would let you” and “I would leave you”. But, because English will not permit a speaker to simultaneously allow and abandon (unless somehow the archaic sense of “leave” as “to give leave” is made present), the English reader misses the crucial moment of contradiction in the line break between “te dejaría” (I would leave you) and “quedar conmigo” (stay with me).
But the translation of poetry is always haunted by these silenced other readings. Hofer’s “Translator’s Note: May Be I Had to Forget How”, which ends the volume, demonstrates not only her careful awareness of the linguistic risks of translating, but a sense of ethical and political responsibility in the act of translating that is often lacking among American translators.
Ultimately, these poems move. They can be moved through, and moved with. They can be touched, but not held. Their trajectory is toward an inwardness that is knife-edge dangerous, almost airless, and at times, like love, almost unbearable. From part 4 of SEPTIEMBRE:
Busco
la compuerta de acero
para posar mi oído
(oigo
tu corazón
oigo la luz que lo levanta)
Puedo darte
agitada la bruma
de mi respiración
(pero no puedo verte)
pero te escucho
(pero no puedes verme)
I seek
the steel hatch
to rest my ear
(I hear
your heart
I hear the light that lifts it)
I can give you
agitated the mist
of my breathing
(but I can’t see you)
but I hear you
(but you can’t see me)
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