Insectivores
Dear readers! I’m sorry to have been slacking off on the blog these days. I am extra ashamed because you know who hasn’t been slacking off is, my secret benefactor, the one who keeps mailing me volumes of poetry. The latest arrival is Firefly under the Tongue, by Coral Bracho. There is a foreword by translator Forrest Gander who, in Providence in 1994, gave a Dia de los Muertos dinner—”a disastrous event since for some inexplicable reason I decided to serve an ‘authentic’ Mexican meal”—attended by the writer Carlos Fuentes who, when conversation turned to Coral Bracho, proceeded to sketch Bracho’s portrait on a napkin, undissuaded by the fact that he had never met Bracho or even, apparently, seen her photograph. What I find particularly remarkable about Fuentes’s Coral Imaginaria, is her resemblance to Disney’s Pochahontas, only with a Kahlo-esque unibrow.
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If you are curious about what Coral Bracho really looks like, you can see her picture (and bio) here.
She has translated Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome into Spanish (you know, their crazy rap about the wasp and the orchid)!
When I first saw the title of this book, Firefly under the Tongue, I was skeptical. “Pretty words and fine phrases!” I grumbled to myself. But when I actually read the title poem, “Firefly under the Tongue,” I saw how wrong I had been:
| I love you from the sharp tang of fermentation; in the blissful pulp. Newborn insects, blue. In the unsullied juice, glazed and ductile… …the acid juice bland [ice], the salt marsh, the delicate sap [cabbala], the nectar of the firefly. |
Te amo desde el sabor inquieto de la fermentacion; en la pulpa festiva. Insectos frescos, azules. En el zumo reciente, vidriado y ductile… … el ácido zumo blando [hielo], el marisma, la savia tierna [cábala], el néctar de la luciérnaga. |
Truly, Bracho writes about eating fireflies with the kind of “critical authority” that raises her verses above mere phrasemaking. I mean, I think she has really eaten some fireflies.
The other thing I was struck by in these poems is how much better they sound in Spanish. (It made me feel sorry for Forrest Gander… what a hard job, even not counting the part where it’s the Day of the Dead in Providence and you have to cook Mexican food for Carlos Fuentes.)
“The delicate sap [cabbala], the nectar/ of the firefly”… in English, to me, that kind of goes out the other ear, leaving only a vague impression of girliness. But in Spanish—“la savia tierna [cábala], el néctar/ de la luciérnaga”—it has some zing. Who knew that Cabbala and firefly practically rhyme in Spanish?
Thanks, unknown benefactor! Truly you cast a long, benevolent shadow into the life of this obscure writer.
(That is a still from an anime adaptation of Daddy Long Legs/ Watashi no Ashinaga Ojisan.)
Tags: animals, comparative literature, d-list, poetry, translation