“I’d like to be / vast maybe” states Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer (1921-2010) in a poem entitled “Extended Present” (39). One of Uruguay’s most well-loved poets, Berenguer draws upon science, philosophy, art history, and an array of other intellectual traditions while demonstrating a clear political commitment. Above all else, she is known for her wide range of subject matter and styles, from tour de force meditations on mathematical concepts like the Moebius strip to visual poetry to comic aphorisms on aging. Berenguer is indeed vast, and an anthology, Materia Prima (Ugly Duckling Presse 2019), offered readers a sampling of her extensive range. Four years later, one of that anthology’s co-editors, Kristin Dykstra, has given us a precious gift: the first complete translation of one of Berenguer’s collections, The Lady of Elche.
Originally published in 1987, The Lady of Elche is Berenguer’s fourteenth book of poetry. It combines her characteristic intellectual curiosity with a meditation on the harsh political reality that her country had just lived through. A member of the “Generation of ’45,” also known as the “Generación Crítica,” Berenguer came of age in the middle of the twentieth century and reached maturity during the US-backed civilian-military dictatorship that ruled Uruguay from 1973 to 1985. During this time, thousands of Uruguayan civilians were illegally imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and disappeared.
Berenguer’s response to this reality is complex and nuanced. The book’s title refers to a late fifth- or early fourth-century limestone sculpture from Alicante, Spain. Its subtitle, “The vocable is the voyage,” suggests an expansive scope that occurs throughout the text, in which Arizona (which the speaker visits as a tourist) is associated with Thebes: “the same phantoms keep watch in Thebes / or the Petrified Forest” (43). In juxtaposing the image of the ancient Lady of Elche to contemporary movement across vast distances, Berenguer creates a book that is indeed vast in scope, relating specific human experiences to a much larger story.
In a poem whose title is an epigraph from the famed nineteenth century Franco-Uruguayan poet Comte de Lautréamont, “Avec les gémissements graves du Montévidéen” (With the deep groans of the Montevidean”), Berenguer situates the specific wrongdoings of the dictatorship within the universal drama of human cruelty: “I’m Amanda – from Montevideo” she states, locating herself as a daughter, sister, wife, and mother of specific people she names. But then, her specific experience is connected to something larger and indeed much darker: “I’m Amanda / and I move toward Amanda without a destination / stateless / chased by a golden horsefly / through the purple / of an inexorable continuous / murder of Amanda” (23).
In her insightful afterword to the translation, Dykstra speaks of this stateless, murdered “Amanda” not as the poet, but as a “symbolic figure for all the mothers, daughters, wives, homemakers, prophets, enigmas, and explorers evoked by her multiplying self-portraits […] Composite-social Amanda experiences a statelessness and loss of direction that look like the inevitable results of an immense, traumatic breach of the public trust” (111). This disorientation and displacement pervade the text, leaving readers to reckon with the reality of crime and injustice. “I asked about ‘the disappeared,’” Berenguer writes in a long poem called “Entrance to the World.” “People neither identified nor revived by the word / because in my land / riding up the River Plate – great as the sea – / like jellyfish in mourning / like corals of shame and bone / there grows / an oscillating forest of submerged cadavers / feet shackled in cement cubes” (95).
One frequently noted characteristic of Uruguayan culture is its predominant secularism. Unlike its neighbors, Uruguay has no official religion; as of 2021, 44.5% of Uruguayans report no religious affiliation. Known for her love of science and mathematics (she once set out to make a Klein bottle, and she speculated about artificial intelligence decades before the concept entered mainstream discourse), Berenguer’s Lady of Elche, in my reading, stands as a late twentieth-century secular epic. At times, its cadences – both in the original and in Dykstra’s passionate translation – recall the Bible; however, instead of seeking solace in a deity, Berenguer falls in love at age eleven with Simón Bolívar (57), appreciates “geometry’s guileful smile” (59), and honors Leonardo da Vinci, who “taught me / the art of flight” (61).
Perhaps the greatest intertext for this book – with references recurring throughout the text – is Homer’s Odyssey, that tale of an exiled hero longing for a home which may or may not exist. Indeed, the book’s concluding poem, “Entrance to the World,” references Virgil as well as Homer, its speaker struggling to find footing in a world that has disappeared: “My body / was like a tree torn out by the roots / quitting its leaves as it travels / dusk was falling a cyprus green: / a pernicious night spied upon us / and after circling the sleepless lake / we and Odysseus and Aeneas stared at each other / ‘as travelers who meet / in a forest / under the deceptive light of the moon’” (85). Like all great epics, this collection is the story of an individual and of a group of people, a mythic song of “an insect entering / the old labyrinth of memory / and finding at the end / a flower to be born tomorrow” (99).
Berenguer’s words truly come alive in Kristin Dykstra’s thoughtful and masterful translation, which she describes as sometimes choosing “an unexpected register in order to draw out more of the sensory qualities within an English-language landscape: ‘rose’ instead of ‘pink,’ ‘violaceous’ where ‘purple’ might have done” (117). Dykstra’s translation is sonic in its approach, often discovering delightful moments of assonance, consonance and rhyme. We can hear the firmament’s “sapphire snap of jaws” (45) and feel the vertigo that “unfurls in the highest aligned / windows” (49). With this attention to sound, Dykstra’s translation evokes the whirling dance of the original, leading us to marvel at “an olive-skinned Pallas alive and expectant / above that night’s postmodern parapet” (53).
In her afterword to the text, Dykstra argues that The Lady of Elche is “part of an ongoing battle over speech and silence” (110). When several successive governments have sought to erase public memory of the violence and death brought about during the years of dictatorship, Berenguer offers us a text where “Uruguay’s executed and exiled people anchor [her] articulation of a longer memory of human trauma, firmly situated in her locale yet gesturing across global time and space” (111). Thanks to Dykstra’s ongoing efforts – first as co-editor of Materia Prima and now as translator of this book – to amplify Berenguer’s prophetic voice, this articulation of memory has been extended to the third decade of the twenty-first century, a moment when it remains ever so urgently needed.
Berenguer, Amanda. The Lady of Elche. Translated by Kristin Dykstra. Veliz Books, 2023.
Jeannine M. Pitas’s most recent translations are A Sea at Dawn by Silvia Guerra (Eulalia Books 2023) and Memory Rewritten by Mariella Nigro (White Pine Press 2023), both co-translated with Jesse Lee Kercheval. She lives in western Pennsylvania and teaches at Saint Vincent College.
A very fine and interesting review of a writer I want to explore! Thank you Ms. Pita