In this volume, we bring together five of the most important voices in the poetry written over the last 60 years in Latin America: Cristina Peri Rossi, Uruguay 1941, Piedad Bonnett, Colombia, 1951, Yolanda Pantin, Venezuela, 1954, Carmen Boullosa, Mexico, 1954, and Rossella Di Paolo, Peru, 1960. In 2021, Cristina Peri Rossi was distinguished with the Miguel de Cervantes Award, perhaps the most prestigious recognition in Latin American Literature; Yolanda Pantin received the Federico García Lorca Award, 2020; Piedad Bonnett, the Generación del 27 Poetry Prize, 2016; Carmen Boullosa, Casa de América Prize for American Poetry, 2019; and Rossella Di Paolo, Casa de la Literatura Peruana Award, 2020.

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These poets have been translated into several languages and now at Arrowsmith Press we are pleased to offer a bilingual anthology that brings them together for readers of New England poetry and for English-speaking readers in general. In a single volume they will have a sample of what has been happening in Latin American poetry, see where it is going, how these poets manage to translate their reality or how they use language to express their points of view and daily lives.

Each one of them is a mirror where we have seen ourselves reflected for decades: Uruguayans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Mexicans, Peruvians and our entire region. The eternal themes of poetry - love, death, creation, family, time, times- seen from the points of view of their experiences, dreams, longings and of course, their particular countries, are made unique in every poem in this book. Written by women who have devoted their whole lives to poetry, these poems reveal to us the unique moment when verse is born.

With the work of the poets gathered here, we can affirm that there is a great tradition in Latin American poetry, and great innovation. Poetry in the voice of these poets has grown, they have written and imagined a world that has always given us the hidden keys to what exists and what we are. They have managed to open those doors, to turn the keys. They have spoken with the trees, they have crossed the invisible borders of time so their verses can bring us their feelings and the company of a good poem that we are always grateful for.

My gratitude to Cristina Peri Rossi, Piedad Bonnett, Yolanda Pantin, Carmen Boullosa and Rossella Di Paolo; to their translators, Yvette Siegert, Catherine Hammond and Rowena Hil; to the North American poets who accompany us in this edition, Sophie Cabot Black, Forrest Gander, Shara McCallum, Alexandria Hall, Sally Keith, Lisa Allen and Sara Daniele; to my dear friends, the poets Thomas Helm and Arturo Desimone; and to all those who have helped me and made it possible for us to offer this bilingual edition, which with be published by my family at Arrowsmith Press, in the fabulous Spring of 2022.

I accompany these lines with fragments of conversations I have had with the poets gathered here and hope the reader will appreciate them. And finally, let us read their verses poured into English, remembering the words of Borges, "I believe that the West, and perhaps the planet, will be bilingual. Spanish and English, which complement each other, will be the common speech of humanity."

Cristina Peri Rossi has been a unique and blunt voice of lesbian love in poetry. She is more than an emblem or a cult poet, she is a refuge, a loving room where girls who love other girls have been able to stay, undress, kiss and dance until dawn. Since the 1970s Peri Rossi has been writing unabashedly erotic, rebellious and insolent poetry for our countries. In 2022, the Visor de poesía collection will publish a volume of her complete works, which is already being called the book of the year.

Poetry is a perception, a state of mind. As a subjective perception, as a state of mind, it is not found in the objects themselves; it is found in the projection we make of our way of feeling and looking at an object, person or situation.

Nostalgia seems to me an inexhaustible source of poetry. We want to retain what we lose, and we lose at all times. Right now I am losing what I write: this moment will not be repeated. So maybe, in a few days, I can write a poem that goes something like this: “The afternoon was hot and gray // distant, ancient music played // and I answered Nidia Hernández’s questions//….”
It’s just an example. A poem from my book General Linguistics says: "We write because the things we want to talk about // are not there." Ontologically, nothing is: everything is fugitive. For this reason, there will always be poetry, which pursues the ephemeral as the archer pursues the fleeing bison.

I don't work the poem. Either it flows like a river flows, or it doesn't. I don't work it. I'm impatient with writing and I don't set schedules, I don't correct, I don't go back over the written poem (the same thing happens to me with narrative). I love not knowing what the next verse will say and finding out. If I knew rationally, I wouldn't write it. Only later, I discover that in an unconscious way I knew.

AUTO-DE-FÉ

With unmerciful voices

With Bacchic choir and alleluias

With destroyed palaces whose magnificent ruin we admire

With blank spaces where apparent
sunken ships glide

With a court of tarot princesses
and cardboard swords for the evening games

With the strength of the Old Testament
where apocalyptic sins
are always more intense than the mediocre
infractions of the present

With the faith-drunk heresies
of the Church's rebel sons

With night fantasies filled with premonition

With the omens of dreams
and of clover's leaves

With the dubious look of ocelots in heat

With this subjection to desire
called-- moreover-- altruism
With no simplicity
I love you.

Translated by Sophie Cabot Black and María Negroni.

Invocation

If language
this austere way
of summoning you
amidst cold skyscrapers
and European cities
were
the way
of making love among sounds
or my way
of entering into your hair

Translated by Alexandria Hall

Since she began writing, Piedad Bonnett’s approach to the lyrical scene of her country has not been timid. She has forced open all the doors and remains standing, and everyone awaits her words.

I write a poem, Because I need to express myself like that, in a way that’s different from the colloquial o the merely rational. Because there are things that only poetry can say.

I keep reality Very near it and very far. Because reality is in the origin of every poem, but each word I write transforms it, as much into a reality of language, unique, nontransferable, as into a reality of sense, that takes it out ( or tries to) of the merely anecdotal or innocent triviality.

poetry gives the world A beauty that’s different from everything else in the world and a type of emotion that can only be aroused by language.

When I write, There’s always a trigger: an image, an idea, a feeling. And it comes with a promise of beauty, power, meaning and a desire to achieve all this through writing. Hours or days can go by before I feel ready. Impulse, drive are good words to describe what I have to feel before I sit down to write. The moment I do, I enter a state of deep concentration, because that’s what I need to do to search for the poem. I let my subconscious create the images, I untie the knots of reason, but always connected to my consciousness of the poetry I want to make and my universe of literary references. I believe I write on the border between intuition and knowledge and in a special state of intensity and joy.

KITCHEN

For María Victoria

A kitchen can be the world—
a desert, a place to weep in.
There we were, two mothers talking softly
as if there were children asleep upstairs.

But there were none. Only silence echoing
through walls once filled with music.

We groped for words, drinking tea
while gazing down the past’s unsweetened well—

two mothers on a bridge that united them,
their hands holding on to the emptiness.

Translated by Yvette Siegert

Yolanda Pantin gives us her recent poetry in two books, Bellas Ficciones, published in Caracas by Eclepsidra, and Lo que hace el tiempo, Visor de poesía in Spain.

These poems Lo que hace el tiempo (What Time Does) are touched by the light, I realized that that for me was a revelation, I realized that poetry is born from that touch of light, that a poem has an instant of light which can go away and at that instant when the light no longer touches it, the poem no longer exists, disappears, everything that the light touches exists, and what it stops touching then vanishes. The other important thing is the process of what time does, time from the point of view of an older person, I had just written Bellas ficciones, a book where I decided that as life as a lovely story, as a lie, but lovely, with a real base in truth, in the face of the situation that we Venezuelans have been going through, I decided to make of poetry a story but lovely, that was my answer, and in the same way I took the decision about what time was for me, time putting things in their places, when in reality time was passing in front of us like a hurricane, it was disrupting everything, in these very tough years that we have lived through, not only Venezuelans but everyone in the world, with disasters, epidemics, time sweeping away everything in its destructive whirlwind. I evaded that, I turned away from that idea of time as something degrading, including seeing for example the age of my parents, who are old now, seeing how age weighs on them, they’re different now, I didn’t want to see that, I wanted to see time as something that could give you an acceptance of life that brings death with it, it’s a world I retrieve, about children, pets, very fragile, my very relationship with poetry, what I think poetry is, strange visions I had at that time, and some other things, several others that I can’t think of now, I had already anticipated it in one of my earliest poems: To return to my house where once I was myself, against all reality.

Déjà vu

I dreamed last night that I was writing
and this notebook was my consolation;
I couldn't sleep for going on with it
without knowing what I was recording.

What were you for me, then,
poetry? I couldn't remember it,
even in the dream, always,
on the tip of my tongue.

Deep in the wood I dreamed
I was a stag or a horse
and galloped looking for answers.

In the dream I found a notebook,
and it began with the first letters:

a,
e,
i,

Translated by Rowena Hill

Carmen Boullosa, an earthy Mexican voice high who is highly conscious of her country’s place in our imaginations. One of the most prestigious poets of Mexico and our region, her "Quo Vadis" is not just any poem, it is a question she has asked on behalf of all of Latin America, a question whose answer we are anxiously waiting for.

The country has become an obsession for me. I never imagined that would happen - I supposed Mexico was something certain, a fact that didn’t need to be noticed. But now that’s not so. It throbs with fragility. It is there, as before, but with the chest of an invalid, coughing, asthma. Violence has been an interruption in its breathing.

Modern Mexico - the one that has existed since Colonial times - has always known that it isn’t the center of the planet, that the Earth is round and Mexico doesn’t cover all of it. It sees itself as a point of view: a vantage point for others. But not now: the country is reduced to its own wound. For this reason, it acquires universal dimensions: it’s as if the world - the voice produced by a common language - suddenly saw itself without a mouth. Language is interrupted. The poet needs to name the original word, the motherland, to avoid getting lost.

The most painful thing for me about "The sleepless homeland" is that when there’s a need to talk about a Homeland, then my land, my cradle, my Mexico, all evaporate. Because if the "homeland" is natural, it doesn’t need to be named. Anxious because of his anxiety, the poet paradoxically sacrifices his homeland when he names it.

QUO VADIS

How far have you fallen, sleepless Motherland, as the star in the story,
as the drunk who crashes into the light pole.

Your mass, denser, more austere, stronger,
more real,

can compress itself to fit inside a thimble, or onto the border of that blouse.

Where you came from, there is no doubt. But where are you going?

In the smoke of a war between everyone in which no one
participates
except mercenaries.
—flying bullets have no allegiance,
they are on the federal payroll, or state, or this boss or the other etcetera…
Rapid-fire salaries—
you escape us, Mother in flight.

(Your breath from honey
to machinegun bursts for hire.)
(Your breath of garlic and chocolate and diverse chiles.)

Your breath toward the grinding stone,
molcajete and garlic and honey and chiles and pepper and cinnamon.

Your breath toward the sacrificial stone, to blood,
to the heart still beating alive.)

Translated by Catherine Hammond

Rossella Di Paolo

If I write a poem it’s like I’m in the middle of my words, my fears and dreams— in the middle of a reality that belongs to us all but that is also mine alone.

Poetry travels with me, yes, but it also makes me stumble over things I might have handled better. I wish it would give me common sense, but I think it prefers not to.

Poetry has always been with us. Poets or not, we have always needed words to tell us what is happening to us and happening around us. Poetry gives shape (language and music) to the chaos that we all are and because of that we feel less perplexed, less alone. Poetry solves nothing but it accompanies us on our paths.

I think poetry knows me well, so in this way I don’t have to show it much. With respect to these times and my country, I ask that beauty, goodness and intelligence be recognized— they exist despite the dirt, corruption and stubbornness of each day. I would also ask poetry to stay with me all the time, and I mean, all the time.

Leave if You Can II

I live in the house of poetry.
I ascend her stairs slowly
and leap back down.
I sit in the chair of poetry,
sleep in her bed, eat from her plate.
Poetry has windows
through which mornings and afternoons
fall, and how well she suspends a teardrop
how well she blows until I tumble / With this
I mean to say that
one basket brings
both wounds and bandages.
I love poetry so much that sometimes I think
I don’t love her / She looks at me,
inclines her head and keeps knitting
poetry.
As always, I’ll be the bigger person.
But how to say it / How to tell her
I want to leave / honestly I want to
fry my asparagus…
I see her coming near
with her bottle of oil
and crazed skillet.
I see her,
her little bundle of asparagus
slipping out her sleeve.
Ah her freshness / her chaotic glint
and the way she approaches with relentless meter.
I surrender / I surrender always because I live
in the house of poetry / because I ascend
the stairs of poetry
and also because
I come back down.

Translated by Lisa Allen Ortiz & Sara Daniele Rivera

Five Important Female Latin American Poets