Translator’s Note
These three poems form three sections of “Toy Box” / “Caja de juguetes,” a long poem in 15 acts which appears in Karla Marrufo’s book The Sweetness of Shipwrecks / La dulzura de los naufragos (2020), about a young woman in the Yucatán who has lost her best friend, a female classmate who is dead. Marrufo examines the fractured nature of memory, dissociation, and identity through innovative wordplay.
The poems within poems in this sequence are games that contain clues and reveal secrets. One translation challenge of this project is that the second piece directs its compass around the syllables from “kaleidoscope,” an “unpronounceable word” that the young narrator tentatively says aloud. In Spanish, the fragments of the word bring additional meaning to this poem: cal, quicklime or acid; cale, a slap; i, a letter (and perhaps a reference to I in English); dos, two, and copio: I copy. “Kal” contains little discernible meaning in English and inserting “kale” into the poem would have taken the translation further off course. Eventually, I arrived at “kaleid” (to channel the sense of “collide,” that is, the slap) and retained, as loan words, both dos and copio, terms which I thought would convey much of their original meaning in a translation destined primarily for US readers.
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something must constantly die
so the rest can keep living
Jaime García Terrés
I.
some questions land on your forehead like a blow from a
wolf’s paw.
mother said so. and her silence was pure.
some secrets are shared only until you notice your fingers
are splattered with little sepia-colored sins.
mother lathers her hands with mother-of-pearl cream
before bed.
under her nails other questions hide, the filthiest of all. that’s
why mother scrubs them with a brush until the foam goes
red. you must polish off calluses to leave the skin soft.
you’ll learn better that way.
answer no to every question.
mother would be proud.
algo debe morir constantemente
para que lo demás siga viviendo.
Jaime García Terrés
I
hay preguntas que caen en la frente como un zarpazo de
lobo.
mamá me lo decía. y su silencio era limpio.
hay secretos que se cuentan sólo hasta que los dedos se
vean salpicados de pequeñas culpas color sepia.
mamá se frota las manos con cremas de concha
nácar antes de irse a dormir.
bajo las uñas se esconden las otras preguntas, las más
mugrosas. por eso mamá se empeña con el cepillito hasta
hacer roja la espuma. es necesario pulir los callos y dejar
la piel blanda. así se aprende mejor.
decir no a las preguntas.
mamá estaría orgullosa.
II.
mother leaves on time.
on cue, at dawn, we begin our transformation
:
if i were a toy, i would be this unpronounceable word
kal—
a whiplash of sunlight on the school walls,
kaleid—
a collision in the deep bottom of the eardrum when hearing bad words,
the ones we don’t say because of they mean
i—
lov—the latin i says our teacher and repeats it, my hands bound with the rope of my syllables
scribbled again
:
no one understands except the two of us
dos—
in silence, those dark minutes of recess when they stomp on my shadow with their hyena laughter, tearing my bread and jelly to pieces like beast
why
no one even sees you
but they watch numbers add up, sums and symbols greater or lesser than <
how to measure the remaining hours, how to count the days you didn’t do your homework
copio
and copied, my swollen hands and traces of chalk
traces of rage i didn’t understand a thing.
the bell and i both break from the anguish of waiting.
i keep you in my pocket
:
soon we’ll leave to spin circles in the sun.
II
mamá sale a tiempo.
a tiempo al amanecer nos transformamos
:
si yo fuera un juguete sería esa palabra impronunciable,
cal
un azote de sol en los muros de la escuela,
cale
lo profundo al fondo del tímpano en las malas palabras,
las que no decimos porque dicen te qu
i
latina, dice la maestra y repite mis manos amarradas con las sogas de mis sílabas
garabatos otra vez
:
nadie lo entiende salvo tú y yo
dos
en silencio los negros minutos de recreo, en que pisan mi sombra con sus risas de hiena,
despedazan bestias mi pan con mermelada
por qué
nadie te mira
y sí las sumas, los signos mayor que menor que <
cómo se miden las horas que faltan, cómo cuentan cada día tuyo sin hacer la tarea
copio
y mis manos hinchadas y las trazas de tiza
las trazas de ira no entendí nada.
el timbre y yo nos quebramos en la angustia de la espera.
te guardo en mi bolsillo
:
pronto saldremos a dar vueltas bajo el sol.
III.
i see a beautiful image and close my eyes
:
the mirror turns, revealing the secret of untouchable paradise, my tongue clumsy
as it repeats itself, as it repeats after you, without ever telling you
if you were fierce
if you were furious
if you fled
you would turn around
to remind me
that you live by multiplying
and i need to hurry up with my addition
there are stories about colors
sad, invisible bird
stories of one-eyed giants
only one eye
aphonic
like a blind knot
in this throat that you’ve left me to tend alone
there are so many lines on maps
and water
you don’t know how much
you don’t know how many
rivers
you don’t know
if you could see them
your thirst would be quenched in blue, and you would come paint
with me
in colors stolen from the sand.
but mother draws nearer
comes close to the door
and i
blind cyclops that i am
close my eye
and start drawing
without you
the lines on your hands.
III
bella imagen que miro y cierro los ojos
:
el espejo gira revelando el secreto de un paraíso intocable, la torpeza de mi lengua
cuando se repite, cuando te repite, sin decirte nunca
si tú fiera
si tú furia
si tú fueras
girarías también
para recordarme
que vives multiplicándote
y yo debería apurarme con las sumas
hay historias de colores
ave invisible y triste
hay historias de gigantes con un ojo
un ojo solo
como un mudo
como el nudo ciego
de esta garganta que me dejaste a cuidar
hay muchas líneas en los mapas
y agua
no sabes cuánta
no sabes cuántos
ríos
no lo sabes
si los vieras
tu sed se apagaría de azules y vendrías a pintar
conmigo
los colores robados a la arena.
pero mamá se acerca
cerca la puerta
y yo
cíclope ciego que soy
cierro mi ojo
y me pongo a dibujar
sin ti
las líneas de tus manos.
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Author of eight books, Karla Marrufo‘s work has won prestigious awards including: Mexico’s National Wilberto Cantón Award in Playwriting, the XVI José Díaz Bolio Poetry Prize, and the National Dolores Castro Prize for Women. She also received a fellowship from the Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y al Desarrollo Artístico en Yucatán (the PECDA, or Program for the Expansion and Development of Creativity and the Arts in the Yucatán), which resulted in the publication of her book Mérida lo invisible / Mérida the Invisible (Consejo Editorial de la Secretaría de la Cultura y las Artes de Yucatán). Her recent books of verse include Si Mérida tuviera puentes / If Mérida Had Bridges (a cycle of poems addressing the death of her father, 2021) and La dulzura de los naufragos / The Sweetness of Shipwrecks (2020) in which the original version of these poems from “Toy Box” first appear.
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Allison A. deFreese is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow whose translations of Karla Marrufo’s work appear in Los Angeles Review, New England Review, SAND Journal Berlin‘s 10th Anniversary Issue, Your Impossible Voice, and other publications. She translated Marrufo’s novel Flame Trees in May and a translation of her poetry chapbook The City Within You is forthcoming from Cathexis Northwest Press in 2024.
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Paul Rabinowitz is an author, poet, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People. His works appear in The Sun Magazine, New World Writing, Burningword, Evening Street Press, The Montreal Review, and elsewhere. Rabinowitz was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020 and Mud Season Review in 2022. He is the author of The Clay Urn, Confluence and Limited Light, a book of prose and portrait photography, which stems from his Limited Light photo series, nominated for Best of the Net in 2021. His poems and fiction are the inspiration for 4 award-winning films. His first book of poems is truth, love and the lines in between.
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