RATTLE is a poetry journal that emails poetry each morning, including a weekly response to a current event. Today, I received a form poem that made me sit up and feel. What follows is the mother’s explanation of where her words were birthed and a link to the poem.
Continue readingIt’s been many years since I took a class from Ursula K. Le Guin and in one of them she talked about the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. She was incensed at how little work of hers was available in English. After all, Mistral was a Nobel laureate, and her work was important. Le Guin had majored in French in college, but over the years she indulged in translation. (I taught a speech from one of essay collections called “Hunger” from a speech she delivered to a fundraiser-luncheon. In it she translated a poem from the Spanish by Pablo Neruda. Students struggled sometimes with Le Guin’s short speech, even to identifying the main idea, which was hunger, as set up immediately by the title.) She determined to study Spanish to do justice to Mistral. Other readers will judge how well she managed to maintain the music and meaning of this poem.
NOTE: On the Poets.org website, the translation is listed before Mistral’s words. I have placed the original Spanish first.
La Contadora (The Teller of Tales)
by Gabriela Mistral
Cuando camino se levantan
todas las cosas de la tierra
y me paran y cuchichean
y es su historia lo que cuentan.
Y las gentes que caminan
en la ruta me la dejan
y la recojo caída
en capullos que son de huella.
Historias corren mi cuerpo
o en mi regazo ronronean.
Tantas son que no dan respiro,
zumban, hierven y abejean.
Sin llamada se me vienen
y contadas tampoco dejan…
Las que bajan por los árboles
se trenzan y se destrenzan,
y me tejen y me envuelvan
hasta que el mar los ahuyenta.
Pero el mar que cuenta siempre
más rendida, más me deja...
Los que están mascando bosque
y los que rompen la piedra,
al dormirse quieren historias.
Mujeres que buscan hijos
perdidos que no regresan,
y las que se creen vivas
y no saben que están muertas,
cada noche piden historias,
y yo me rindo cuenta que cuenta.
A medio camino quedo
entre ríos que no me sueltan,
el corro se va cerrando
y me atrapa en la rueda.
Los ribereños me cuentan
la ahogada sumida en hierbas,
y su mirada cuenta su historia,
y yo las tronco en mis palmas abiertas.
Al pulgar llegan las de animales,
al índice las de mis muertos.
Las de niños, de ser tantas
en las palmas me hormiguean.
Cuando tomaba así mis brazos
el que yo tuve, todas ellas
en regalo de sangre corrieron
mis brazos una noche entera.
Ahora yo, vuelta al Oriente,
se las voy dando porque no recuerdo.
Los viejos las quieren mentidas,
los niños las quieren ciertas.
Todos quieren oír la historia mía
que en mi lengua viva está muerta.
Busco alguna que la recuerde
hoja por hoja, herbra por hebra.
Le presto mi aliento, le doy mi marcha
por si el oírla me la despierta.
Mistral's "The Teller of Tales"
translation by Ursula K. Le Guin
When I’m walking, everything
on earth gets up
and stops me and whispers to me,
and what they tell me is their story.
And the people walking
on the road leave me their stories,
I pick them up where they fell
in cocoons of silken thread.
Stories run through my body
or sit purring in my lap.
So many they take my breath away,
buzzing, boiling, humming.
Uncalled they come to me,
and told, they still won’t leave me.
The ones that come down through the trees
weave and unweave themselves,
and knit me up and wind me round
until the sea drives them away.
But the sea that’s always telling stories,
the wearier I am the more it tells me...
The people who cut trees,
the people who break stones,
want stories before they go to sleep.
Women looking for children
who got lost and don’t come home,
women who think they’re alive
and don’t know they’re dead,
every night they ask for stories,
and I return tale for tale.
In the middle of the road, I stand
between rivers that won’t let me go,
and the circle keeps closing
and I’m caught in the wheel.
The riverside people tell me
of the drowned woman sunk in grasses
and her gaze tells her story,
and I graft the tales into my open hands.
To the thumb come stories of animals,
to the index fingers, stories of my dead.
There are so many tales of children
they swarm on my palms like ants.
When my arms held
the one I had, the stories
all ran as a blood-gift
in my arms, all through the night.
Now, turned to the East,
I’m giving them away because I forget them.
Old folks want them to be lies.
Children want them to be true.
All of them want to hear my own story,
which, on my living tongue, is dead.
I’m seeking someone who remembers it
leaf by leaf, thread by thread.
I lend her my breath, I give her my legs,
so that hearing it may waken it for me.
From Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral: Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 2003 Ursula K. Le Guin. Courtesy of University of New Mexico Press. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 27, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets. Pulled from The Academy of American Poets online site.
The Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, also known as Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga (1889-1957), was the first Latin-American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945). Born to a family of teachers, she mentored Pablo Neruda who would also with the Nobel. Unlike him, however, not enough of her work existed in translation to English. (A bi-lingual edition by Doris Dana published in 1971, 272 pages, and some translations by Langston Hughes.) Ursula K. Le Guin studied Spanish in order to change that.
Mistral may be most widely quoted in English for Su Nombre es Hoy (His Name is Today):
We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’ his name is today.
—Wikipedia
When our firstborn boys were tiny, a friend in a community just fifteen miles or so north of us used to call me every morning to ask if we had fog. I would look west to the roll of clouds lying on the horizon over the water and admit we didn’t. have fog Then, between puffs on her cigarette, she would complain about the fog. She lives in the high desert now where it gets hot in summers and icy and snowy in winter but is sunny nearly every day. If I lived there I would surely complain about the heat and cold, but that’s why I chose a climate I enjoy.
We walked north all the way around Hug Point and into the next beach last week. All the wave-swept stone was coated in green, like matching jackets. I would have walked to Arcadia, another half mile, but we’d have had to come home on the highway and there are a couple of dangerous stretches I know too well from when I was running.
I meant to share photos. It was an accomplishment to walk that far on the beach before the end of March.
The seaweed will begin to go once the sun is high enough to burn it during low tide.
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We go out for our morning walk well before dawn most days. We like to be the first on the sand—going out extra early we only meet other walkers on our way home. We inevitably find ourselves beach combing, even when we declare at the beginning that we will not walk so far. We will simply go out and home, and then we are trolling up and down that rocky shore. Everything has been stirred and shifted each morning. We found almost 200 pieces of seaglass in the last week or so. The flat-smooth pebbles and agates we’ve gathered had been taking over the house.
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Continue reading“I think deep down inside children are all the same,” she said. “They want two loving parents and they would prefer a house with a neighborhood they can play in. They want teachers that they can like. I don’t think children have changed that much. It’s the world that has changed.”
—Beverly Cleary
I am forgetting words, but this is nothing new. Proper names have always been a problem for me, a significant handicap when I was teaching 150-200 students a term. Is the girl there in the corner desk Patty or Michelle? I generally tried hard to resist pretending that I knew names. I would warn students on the first day of class of three things: “I talk too fast, so don’t be afraid to raise your hand and ask me to back up—your classmates will thank you; I am naturally a bad speller, though I work to get it right, so if you notice I’ve spelled a word wrong on the board, don’t be afraid to point that out, you won’t hurt my feelings; and I am bad at names and will still be struggling to remember your name halfway through the year. That’s not your fault; it’s all on me.”
I was not exaggerating.
Continue reading“Of course, resilience matters. But given the dearth of practical support, ‘we need to understand that emotional resilience might not be enough,’ said Brian Hughes, a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, who specializes in the psychology of stress and crisis.”—from the In Her Words series of The New York Times, 18 February 2021 by Corinne Purtill
Purtill and Hughes are not talking about writing at all, but genuine hardship. Pandemic, hunger, unpaid bills. All I have to complain of just now is disappointment. A story rejection arrived via email the other day. I’d had hopes for the particular story and for publication in this particular journal, but no. I should be used to this by now. I tried taking it as a matter of course, but I really wanted to crawl under the bed and suck dust bunnies.
But Gary had vacuumed up the dust bunnies.
Continue readingI planned to have a dozen shawls/scarves woven by this past December. But stuck at home, I began weaving and sometimes went on from dawn to darkness. The results are lovely, soft, and variously hued. Not to mention numerous.
Here are a few. They are each about 23″ wide, 65-75″ long plus fringe, and after weaving and fringing, they are washed in cold water with shampoo, hung to dry overnight without blocking, and then labels sewn on. Others like them are owned and worn by both men and women.
Gary and I attended this memorial on 13 June 2018. Listening to Molly Gloss talk about her early work with Ursula made me cry all over again.
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