Francesca Gargallo
(Translated by Dana Delibovi)
Confronting culture in the work of translation
Mystery surrounds the poetry translator’s choice of poet. I still cannot completely explain why I chose the poet and feminist scholar Francesca Gargallo. I found some of her writing online and loved it. Why I felt this way lacks a full accounting. All I’ve noticed so far is that translating Gargallo forces a confrontation that I need. Gargallo writes with a full palette of cultures at her mind’s fingertips. I write as a norteamericana—an expert in how to bury the cultures that formed me. When I translate, I confront the things I’ve casketed away. Francesca Gargallo’s poetry is richly layered. It reflects the lived cultural opulence of Mexico, “la región más transparente,” as novelist Carlos Fuentes has described it. Transparency exposes the strata of cultures: prehistoric, Aztec and Zapotec, Spanish colonial, modern cultures of liberation, modern cultures of corruption. In many of her poems, Gargallo sees through her own desires and sorrows and down into the cultures that shape these emotions. |
For example, in “As If We Did Not Exist,” one metaphor for the intimacy between two individuals is the collective culture of the working poor.”
Ours is the walk into poverty of someone who wakes early,
gets out of bed,
then stumbles on without light--
to bear a long night’s work before the lamps go out.
Gargallo also makes ample use of images rife with meaning in the colonized Americas. When she longs for “red fires” and “the comfort of tobacco,” Gargallo’s words reverberate with the sacred practices of Mesoamerican cultures. When she stands on cobblestones looking at the stars, she’s set her feet on colonialism that literally paves over the deeper history of her land (“Where the Cobblestones End, the Last Stars of the Night”). Gargallo also writes very directly about migrants who carry their own cultures, along with the burdens of colonialism, on their journeys.
After I took up her poems and started fiddling with translations, I learned that Gargallo and I both have a background in philosophy. I also found out we share Italian heritage. My family emigrated from Italy to both North and South America between 1910 and 1920. Gargallo emigrated from Italy to Mexico in 1979. Something unconscious seemed to be at work, since I gravitated to the poems before I discovered these parallels.
Did I like her poems because they compelled a reckoning with philosophy? I left that field years ago, and only recently took it up again, in a miasma of hope, bitterness, affection, and vanity. The dominant culture remains almost unchallenged in academic philosophy, but so does the socially awkward microculture of philosophers. Gargallo writes of hurtful words created ex nihilo—the medieval philosophers’ “nothing created out of nothing”—in “Easy Ride Through the Flat City.” With this expression, she teases out the philosopher—rational, yes, but also tactless, blunt, and clumsy.
Did Gargallo’s poems ring with an Italian undertone? I grew up around great-grandparents with heavy Italian accents and a robust culture of gardening, winemaking, and elaborate Catholicism. I keep this concealed, even from myself. I also conceal the intractable cultural dilemma of the Italian immigrant family. One foot in poverty, the other on deck of the Santa Maria. We identify as both the oppressed and the oppressor; and I hear this paradox in Gargallo’s poetry. I also hear it in her feminism: in a 2012 interview, Gargallo recognized her marginalization as a women, but also wrestled with her privilege relative to Mexico’s indigenous women who seek a communitarian feminism. I feel uncomfortable and grateful to have these conflicts exposed.
I grew up in a nation that works tirelessly to hide its indigenous, African, polyglot Eurasian, and dissident cultures. When when I translate Gargallo’s poetry, I have to open myself to the depths of cultural experience that she evokes. I have to envision what she sees and remembers. But I also have to dredge up the cultures sequestered in my own society. I have to sit a while, or maybe even go outdoors and stand on the haunted earth of my St. Louis home. I sense the strata underfoot, the Osage and the Chickasaw, the Spanish and the French, Dred Scott and William Burroughs. Only then am I ready to translate.
Ours is the walk into poverty of someone who wakes early,
gets out of bed,
then stumbles on without light--
to bear a long night’s work before the lamps go out.
Gargallo also makes ample use of images rife with meaning in the colonized Americas. When she longs for “red fires” and “the comfort of tobacco,” Gargallo’s words reverberate with the sacred practices of Mesoamerican cultures. When she stands on cobblestones looking at the stars, she’s set her feet on colonialism that literally paves over the deeper history of her land (“Where the Cobblestones End, the Last Stars of the Night”). Gargallo also writes very directly about migrants who carry their own cultures, along with the burdens of colonialism, on their journeys.
After I took up her poems and started fiddling with translations, I learned that Gargallo and I both have a background in philosophy. I also found out we share Italian heritage. My family emigrated from Italy to both North and South America between 1910 and 1920. Gargallo emigrated from Italy to Mexico in 1979. Something unconscious seemed to be at work, since I gravitated to the poems before I discovered these parallels.
Did I like her poems because they compelled a reckoning with philosophy? I left that field years ago, and only recently took it up again, in a miasma of hope, bitterness, affection, and vanity. The dominant culture remains almost unchallenged in academic philosophy, but so does the socially awkward microculture of philosophers. Gargallo writes of hurtful words created ex nihilo—the medieval philosophers’ “nothing created out of nothing”—in “Easy Ride Through the Flat City.” With this expression, she teases out the philosopher—rational, yes, but also tactless, blunt, and clumsy.
Did Gargallo’s poems ring with an Italian undertone? I grew up around great-grandparents with heavy Italian accents and a robust culture of gardening, winemaking, and elaborate Catholicism. I keep this concealed, even from myself. I also conceal the intractable cultural dilemma of the Italian immigrant family. One foot in poverty, the other on deck of the Santa Maria. We identify as both the oppressed and the oppressor; and I hear this paradox in Gargallo’s poetry. I also hear it in her feminism: in a 2012 interview, Gargallo recognized her marginalization as a women, but also wrestled with her privilege relative to Mexico’s indigenous women who seek a communitarian feminism. I feel uncomfortable and grateful to have these conflicts exposed.
I grew up in a nation that works tirelessly to hide its indigenous, African, polyglot Eurasian, and dissident cultures. When when I translate Gargallo’s poetry, I have to open myself to the depths of cultural experience that she evokes. I have to envision what she sees and remembers. But I also have to dredge up the cultures sequestered in my own society. I have to sit a while, or maybe even go outdoors and stand on the haunted earth of my St. Louis home. I sense the strata underfoot, the Osage and the Chickasaw, the Spanish and the French, Dred Scott and William Burroughs. Only then am I ready to translate.
Fuentes, Carlos. La más transparente. México, D.F., México: Ediciones Cátedra, 2006.
Periódico Desdeabajo. Feminismos desde Abya Yala. Entrevista a Francesca Gargallo. Available at: https://youtu.be/MSCZm5brTh8. |