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1
All Each Other's Miracles - Alchemy (alchemy.ucsd.edu)
 

Translation of an oral transmission between a mother and daughter. Originally narrated by Yanina Koubatski. Translated, from the Palestinian Arabic, by Reem Hazboun Taşyakan Chrisho, my daughter, I’m going to tell you about what happened to me, but this …

1
100 Refutations: Day 68 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Briceida Cuevas Cob was born in Tepakán, Campeche, Mexico. From 1992 to 1994, she was part of the Maya poetry workshop in the Casa de Cultura de Caliní run by Walderman Noh Tzec. Her work has been widely published and anthologized. She has also been the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, and in 2010 she became Artistic Creator in the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

1
Existence – Fadwa Tuqan (fedia.io)
 

In solitary life, I was a lost question;

In the encompassing darkness,

my answer was concealed.

You were a bright new star radiating light from the darkness of the unknown, revealed by fate.

The other stars rotated around you —once, twice — until it came to me, your unique radiance.

Then the bleak blackness broke And in the matching tremors of our two hands I found my missing answer.

Oh you! Oh you intimate, yet distant! Don’t you remember the coalescence Of your spirit in flames? Of my universe with yours? Of the two poets? Despite our great distance, Existence unites us – Existence!

source: https://www.amust.com.au/2017/11/fadwa-tuqan-the-poet-of-palestine/

translated by Michael R Burch

biobibliographical note: Fadwa Tuqan became the Grand Dame of Palestinian letters, and was also known as ‘The Poet of Palestine.’ She is considered to be one of the very best contemporary Arab poets.

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100 Refutations: Day 67 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Sor Tadea de San Joaquín (1750-1827) was a Catholic nun and writer during the Chilean colonial period. She is regarded as the first woman poet of Chile.

1
A Vision – Adonis (www.poetryfoundation.org)
 

Our city fled, And I saw my feet transform Into a river overflowing with blood, Into ships growing distant, expanding, And I saw my drowned shores seducing ... Our city fled, And refusal is a crushed pearl Whose powder anchors my ships, And refusal is a…

2
100 Refutations: Day 66 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Márcia Wayna Kambeba is a member of the Omágua/Kambeba indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon. She has a master’s degree in geography and is a writer, poet, composer, singer, storyteller, photographer, teacher, and lecturer. She is currently working on a project that combines literary and musical compositions to portray the resistance, culture, and identity of indigenous peoples. She lives in Castanhal, Pará in Brazil.

2
The Arabic Poem that Jumped the Fence (cordite.org.au)
 

In 1960, the Syrian Lebanese poet Adonis published his prose poem manifesto and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj published his collection Lan (Won’t) with its seminal introduction theorising for the possibilities of poetry in prose. These are two theoretical cornerstones that launched the prose poem in Arabic. They are the first instances of using the Arabic term qaṣīdat al-nathr (prose poem) and by that announcing the entrance of the phrase into Arabic as a ‘simple abstraction.’

1
100 Refutations: Day 65 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Adela Zamudio (1854-1928) was a highly intellectual Bolivian writer, feminist, and educator. She wrote verses from her adolescence under the nom de plume “Soledad” and lived her entire life in the city of Cochabamba, dedicated completely to education and literature. She was a formidable debater, using her talents often to defend the rights of women in the official debates of her time. According to her biography in the Antología de la Poesía Hispanoamericana (1965), in 1926 she was officially crowned for the government of her country. She is credited with beginning Bolivia's feminist movement and remains one of its most famous poets.

3
Nakba – Sheikha Hlewa (fedia.io)
 

My mother is three years younger than Nakba. But she doesn’t believe in great powers. Twice a day she brings God down from his throne then reconciles with him through the mediation of the best recorded Quranic recitations. And she can’t bear meek women. She never once mentioned Nakba. Had Nakba been her neighbor, my mom would’ve shamelessly chided her: “I’m sick of the clothes on my back.” And had Nakba been her older sister, she would’ve courted her with a dish of khubaizeh, but if her sister whined too much, my mom would tell her: “Enough. You’re boring holes in my brain. Maybe we shouldn’t visit for a while?” And had Nakba been an old friend, my mom would tolerate her idiocy until she died, then imprison her in a young picture up on the wall of the departed, a kind of cleansing ritual before she’d sit to watch dubbed Turkish soap operas. And had Nakba been an elderly Jewish woman that my mom had to care for on Sabbath, my mom would teasingly tell her in cute Hebrew: “You hussy, you still got a feel for it, don’t you?” And had Nakba been younger than my mom, she’d spit in her face and say: “Rein in your kids, get’em inside, you drifter.”

—Haifa

source: https://internationaleonline.org/ca/contributions/we-have-been-here-forever-palestinian-poets-write-back/ tr.: Fady Joudah

biobibliographical note: Hlewa is an award winning writer living in Haifa, and little known outside of Palestine. This is often the fate of Palestinian writers writing in Arabic and living within the 1948 borders of the settler state. Like my experience with my own family, the Arab literary scene has been historically cut off from Palestinians who never left the homeland. I first encountered this poem through the translation here by award winning Palestinian-American poet, translator, and medical doctor Fady Joudah. In addition to being a most sensitive Palestinian poet writing in English, Joudah is a committed curator and translator of Palestinian and Syrian poets, and his work has introduced me to many writers that I would consequently begin to read and to follow.

4
Broken Weddings, 2018 – Amer Shomali (unionmagazine.online)
 

In 2017, a thobe or old Palestinian embroidered wedding dress was exhibited for sale in an Israeli auction. The dress, which had clearly never been worn, inspired Amer Shomali by bringing to mind the very short story reputed to have been written by Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn”. Shomali contacted the auction house for more information and was told that the seller was an Israeli who had inherited the dress from his father who had been a member of the Zionist paramilitary group Haganah. He had always claimed to have found the dress in an abandoned Arab houses during the Nakbah in 1948.

3
Word for Faith and Homecoming by Rana Banna — the87press (www.the87press.co.uk)
 

Two poems written during the major uprisings of Palestinian resistance against ongoing Israeli occupation in 2021.

3
100 Refutations: Day 64 | InTranslation (intranslation.brooklynrail.org)
 

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1648-1695), or as she is better known, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was a self-educated poet, philosopher, and composer during the colonial period in Mexico—then called the territory of New Spain. She was fluent in Latin and Nahuatl in addition to her native Spanish. She is considered one of the most important and influential writers of the period, not merely within the Mexican or Hispanic American traditions, but in the entire Spanish-speaking world. She was forced to join a nunnery in her late teens by her own confessor and later lifelong antagonist the Bishop of Puebla. In a letter years later she would recall this, writing, “If you had known I was to write verses you would not have placed me in the convent but arranged my marriage.” The cloistered life afforded her time, access to books, and a cell of her own, and thus it became her most prolific period. The poetry she composed there would make her famous in the world well beyond the convent walls, and allow her to reel the world back into those walls, receiving many visitors and admirers and earning the protection and patronage of the viceroys of De Mancera, the archbishop viceroy Payo Enríquez de Rivera, and the marquises de la Laguna de Camero Viejo. Her work has long been honored by the Mexican government, and her life and works have inspired numerous authors, composers, and filmmakers. Carlos Fuentes once called her "the first great Latin American poet." She died at age 43 of an unknown plague while caring for a sister of her religious order, shortly after writing the now-famous letter to Sor Filotea de la Cruz, the pen name for the Bishop of Puebla.

100 Refutations: Day 61 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

from the article:

Neurosis

You do know that the spirit is an abyss and the heart an ocean: That this is how I can carry within me one infinity, and also the other.

My nerve endings, a living harp, hang from the branches of my frame of forest flesh, letting out a whimper as—across the strings— tiptoes the storm.

100 Refutations: Day 60 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

from the article:

Excerpt from Relaciones, or Anales

Here is the water and the hill, here the altar of jade, Amaquemecan—Chalco in the place of renown in the place that is example, near the fields of reeds, at the edge of the forest, in the nearness of snow, where they say Poyauhtlan,

[…]

in the garden of flowers, in the garden of mists, where lives the white quail, where curls the snake, near the dwelling of tigers, in Tamoanchan, in the place of our beginning, where flowers rise… Here they came to settle the lords Chichimecas, the priests, the princes…

100 Refutations: Day 59 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

from the article:

Defeated

We can give up.

It matters not to surrender in silence, if the drums of vengeance echo from afar.

Sign of the Times

Nouns, pronouns, articles… prefixes of the quotidian, suffixes of the allowed. Verbs to regulate conduct and adjectives to qualify injustice.

Nouns, pronouns, articles… exact forms, easy to invert.

The letter, occasionally freed, rebels. And adds, but, also divides.

The word is cursed. It is the sign of the times.

100 Refutations: Day 57 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

from the article:

For Haiti

Oh, my poor island, victim of hopeless hopes, On the other side of the ocean, tempest and wind, I think of your misfortune and hold for you, within my soul, A dream for happier things. All the while they slander you,

Your daughter in the shade of an absent sun From the great sea where a red sky bursts in laughter, Guiding you to the other side of tempest and wind, This memory as deep as the shadow of your verse.

100 Refutations: Day 56 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

from the article:

We Came to Dream

Thus spoke Tochihuitzin, Thus spoke Coyolchiuhqui: ****Perhaps we left the dream ****we only came to dream, ****it is not true, it is not true, ****that we came to live upon the earth. ****Like a weed is spring ****in our being. ****Our heart bears, makes sprout ****flowers from our flesh. ****Some part their petals, ****then wither. Thus spoke Tochihuitzin.

100 Refutations: Day 54 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

from the article:

In Waters of Darkness

Breaking ship and shore it plunges deep. Giving of itself what the self is unable to give. Shipwrecked heart: you unleash storm clouds and you drag drown bleakly the High Heavens.

Cihuateteo¹

Her body’s indigo flakes away but red remains the cinnabar of her headdress, mineral wax on her eyelids, a serpent coiled around her waist, a resin brazier, her half-open lips …desire still remains.

¹Nahuatl word meaning “Divine Women.” In Aztec mythology, the souls of women who died in childbirth became these spirits who accompanied the setting sun.

100 Refutations: Day 53 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

from the article:

Footprints

Like the wind stirring up what has been lost… I return to look for them to no avail: dismembered, they left with the echo of the world Misplaced, abandoned, bewitched to the beat of “New York, New York” Scattered leaves, pigeon droppings they let their owner loose to raindrops Meanwhile, the ocean drinks up my groove, my recollections, splashing the shifting of memory: “Blowing in the wind” Bob Dylan is singing.

100 Refutations: Day 52 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

from the article:

The Creation of the Uinal [Excerpt]

This is the song of how the Uinal was created before the world was created, before dawn. […] Before the first awakening of the first world, the Uinal was born. Then, he began to walk, all on his own, in the company of his maternal grandmother, of his maternal aunt, of his sister-in-law. And the women said, “What shall we say, when we come upon tracks on the road?” In this way, they spoke, before man existed. While they walked along together. Then they arrived there, at the East, and found tracks upon the road. “Who has tread here?” they asked themselves. “We shall measure these tracks with our own feet,” they added. And they measured God’s footsteps, which is why they called the count of the world’s cycle Lahca 12 Oc (the day: young sun, son and nephew of moon). The measurement was taken when they’d gathered their feet precisely so, and then they left, from the East.

100 Refutations: Day 51 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

from the article:

Song of Silence

A carnival passes through me violently. My ears barely digest what was heard in the slow machine shop where words are chewed on. My gums bleed mutely colored thus from pure voraciousness— it’s like death in the wastelands of immense spring.

Beyond the flower of your perfume, there’s the wasp and its rough stinger. My cry of pain and calm, the same one that leaks thickly from my eyes, imitates the voice of the crickets.

Friend, you should learn now that the cricket doesn’t die singing. Never.

Inside it lives a wound without remedy that opens in your womb a cut born from within that rips to shreds the entrails.

In your womb live unfathomable fears. And a cut that bleeds profusely. Every cricket, like me, dies screaming!

Asé

I am a tree with a thick trunk. My root is strong, knotty, originating, tarry like the night.

Blood, the ejé animals to be sacrificed who run warily, the powerful womb of my orixás.

Each of them gives us to eat a potent granule of what I am with a dark faith.

A blot in the writing of the god whose eyes are sweetly blue.

My faith is black, and my soul blackens the earth in the orixá’s bray that escapes from my mouth.

I am a black tree that escapes from the gnarled root. I am a deep river, calm and silty. I am the arrow and its reach before the scream. And also the fire, the salt in the waters, the tempest and the iron inside the arms.

And I still contend in hours of dull sun at the crossroads.

Translator’s note: From the Yoruba word, axé or ase means vital power. As an interjection within the religion of candomblé, asé may mean “May the gods will it to be so.” Lastly, asé may refer to the house of worship in candomblé, populated by a pantheon of nature-based divinities, the orixás.

Tiffany Higgins is a writer and translator. Her books include The Apparition at Fort Bragg (2016), an Iron Horse Literary Review contest winner, and And Aeneas Stares into Her Helmet (2009), which won the Carolina Wren Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Ghost Fishing, and elsewhere. She translated Tail of the Whale (Toad Press, 2016) by Brazilian poet Alice Sant’Anna, and she’s currently translating the work of other Brazilian writers, including Itamar Vieira Junior and Lívia Natália. Her article “Brazil’s Munduruku Mark Out Their Territory When the Government Won’t” is forthcoming in Granta’s online magazine.

100 Refutations: Day 50 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

from the article:

The Magnets of the Abyss

I could fall!…I could fall!…

On the shores of this star I could take such a step that I don’t touch the ground…

I could fall!…I could fall!…

When, in the mystic dance I throw roses to the sea… almost never, almost never can the painful tide shelter my roses.

…The anguished waves flee unable to take me with them.

I slip on roses toward the sky…

I fall into the abyss. I long for it.

Ah, yes!…I can fall now.

I slip on roses…they magnetize me the peaceful stars that wish to shelter me. ………………………………… But I tear off my petals… unable to stop myself.

I know: my pained stem is left tangled in waves of oblivion’s waters.

That’s why, the intangible star awaits me still, and I slip like a cascade of roses by its ineffable lights.

But suffering earth feels the vanquished shore beneath my divine step…

I could fall!…I could fall!…

Ah, yes! The grief-stricken earth not even with its tragic wound can hold me.

I slip on roses…on roses…

100 Refutations: Day 49 | InTranslation in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

from the article:

Daybreak

I shall rest my heavy fist upon the table And you shall, like shadows, return to silence. And night shall be within you, Around you, when my stare births lightning,

Pedestals shall fall When I sing my sovereign song When I raise my finger to the sun.

Your citadels were built upon my flesh; But if this were to bruise my skin, The agony could only stretch my will taut like the string Of a bow.

I am, still, the volcano that shall greet With beautiful and dangerous music The end of the heavy nightmare And the call of Relief.

Do you know?

It will be enough to move my body And rest my heavy fist upon the table For you, toward silence and night, To return

Like shadows.

Not Just Passing: In Honor of Heba Abu Nada - Mizna in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

from the article:

Not Just Passing

Yesterday, a star said

to the little light in my heart,

We are not just transients

passing.

Do not die. Beneath this glow

some wanderers go on

walking.

You were first created out of love,

so carry nothing but love

to those who are trembling.

One day, all gardens sprouted

from our names, from what remained

of hearts yearning.

And since it came of age, this ancient language

has taught us how to heal others

with our longing,

how to be a heavenly scent

to relax their tightening lungs: a welcome sigh,

a gasp of oxygen.

Softly, we pass over wounds,

like purposeful gauze, a hint of relief,

an aspirin.

O little light in me, don’t die,

even if all the galaxies of the world

close in.

O little light in me, say:

Enter my heart in peace.

All of you, come in!

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