Recently, I came across a new word: heridescence, a portmanteau of ‘hereditary’ and ‘iridescence.’ It was coined by the British artist, musician, and technological researcher Mat Dryhurst to describe that strange, almost shimmering quality of children to exhibit traits of one parent, then, as they turn their head, or the light shifts, or some sort of ineffably infinitesimal internal sorting of sinew and fluid occurs, they look like the other. It struck me as a particularly apt way to describe this phenomenon, the constantly shifting glimmering patchwork of different traits settling into different, fleeting equilibria. It struck me, too, as an appropriate word to capture some of the slipperiness of Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas’s recent, excellent, tantalizing translation of Silvia Guerra’s A Sea at Dawn (Eulalia, 2023). I’ll return to this term and how it helps capture some of the exhilaratingly ephemeral and fluid qualities of the work, but first, some words on Guerra.
In the translators’ indispensable afterword, they describe Guerra as “a bridge between the well-known Generation of ’45—known for such poets as Amanda Berenguer, Idea Vilariño, and Ida Vitale—and many of the younger poets keeping Uruguay’s literary scene vibrant today.” However, important as she is to contemporary Uruguayan poetry, and steady as the interest is in the US for Uruguayan poetry in translation, Kercheval and Pitas’s translation of this career-spanning selection of poems marks the first appearance of her work in English. Let me just say that it’s about time. The poems are dense without being claustrophobic, innovative without being gimmicky, and truly, refreshingly strange. Looking at the world after spending time inside this book is like returning from space—your bones a little lighter, your eye shape a bit different because of the effects of artificial gravity and therefore what you see a little warped but also, somehow, truer for having been warped by having been so close to the cosmic. The poem “For Example” (originally titled “Verbigracia,” the commonplace floridity of which in Spanish makes me lament, rarely, the paucity of English expression), starts thusly:
Threads. Invertebrates. Long skeins.
Dark tubers.
Legumes.
Rhizome.
It emerges on the surface. It runs
like a cord, small bulbs
Family is written in lowercase, it’s a weed.
The eye of a Guerra poem is almost always more important than the “I” of the poem, noting natural phenomena as not only jumping off point but coeval consciousness to scaffold the poetic investigation with. We are at ground-level here, where family is a taxonomic, not a sanguinary, phenomenon, and we bob among other filaments that also refine air and water and soil into particular existences.
There isn’t anything reductive about Guerra’s poems, though, even if they often end up reminding human readers that they are but one point of light in a crowded firmament of stars. They resituate human consciousness without downplaying its intricacies, and without presuming human cadences for other consciousnesses. Guerra’s work is driven by a desire to “imagine the world from the standpoint of other beings, [both] living and nonliving.” And right now, in the US poetry ecosystem, she has many fellow travelers who are also striving to conceptualize and practice ways of thinking and being which do not center the human and instead seek to understand our interrelatedness beyond the sapient or mammalian or even sentient. I think of poets writing in and around Object Oriented Ontology, Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, the necropastoral, and ecopoetics. Poets like Arthur Sze, Brenda Hillman, and Forrest Gander come to mind, with their image-driven poems which draw from the various wells of geology, lichenology, hydrology, mythology, and more, to instantiate a new poetics that is of the world and not merely a representation of it.
A more apt set of companions in this work, to my mind, are contemporary Indigenous poets like Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, and, especially, dg nanouk okpik. Among them all, there is an inherent rehabilitation of the relationship between the personal and the natural, in particular the marginally natural. Diaz tells us about the abundance of the desert; Pico blends a chatty New York School sensibility with the stringency of contemporary life on and off the rez; okpik fathoms the oil-slicked strata of the subarctic; and Guerra dramatizes the experience of moss on a smooth rock (“There will be no water / on the lyre. / There will be no aphorism”), or a lagoon (“It Wants and Does Not not/ Want, in that shadow, Everything”). No majestic vistas, rugged outcrops, allegorical sprays of shattered oceans waves of the (predominantly white) Romantics and their epigones here. This is a nature of dailiness, lived within and lived with, its enormity, a thing unto itself and not a way to understand the self.
Of course, all comparisons are useful until they are not. Guerra’s work has a contemplative languor to it, even when it leaps, flea-like, from tight image to towering abstraction. This languor feels of a piece with the work of Gander and Sze, who are similarly interested in how language can rewire the ways we see and the ways we describe our seeing. It’s a languor whose philosophic, almost clinical, pacing is opposed to Diaz’s amatory urgency, Pico’s anxious sidelong glances, and okpik’s flinty sense of threat, informed as their work is by the historical dispossessions wrought on and continuing to be wrought on their culture, their language, their families, and their bodies. At the same time, Guerra’s poems are, like theirs, resolutely grounded—in place, in observation, in concrete reality nested within a matrix of ritualized encounters—even as they are slippery in time and consciousness.
Francis Ponge had a similar groundedness in his poems, though they focused on specific objects (a door, a shrimp, a piece of meat, a cigarette). His commitment, though, to the object—using the poem to really engage it and not use it as an opportunity to talk about the self or some other subject that would turn the object into a metaphor instead of itself, feels important to bring up in the context of Guerra’s poems. She does this throughout A Sea at Dawn, with objects, creatures, consciousnesses, the silence the aspirated j leaves inside Spanish words, and in remaining as close as possible to the subject, Guerra devises a purpose-built grammar, on the levels of line, sentence, and poetic structure, each time so that no poem can tell you what the next will do, structurally. Thematically, yes, but otherwise, it feels like watching a time lapse of water respond and shape a landscape as it runs into and across and under the various strata therein. This is similar to okpik’s work, in its abjuration of narrative progression, vocal development, confessional expatiation, contiguous predictable leaping, and yields a disjunctive syntax based more on the loopy, patient, cursive rhythms of nature than on the time-obsessed metrically anchored pacing of poets.
To give a sense of the particular grammar of a Guerra poem, take “Anima Mundi,” from 2001’s Nothing from No One:
Like a border, to embroider this pattern. Every day
a little, a little more drizzle assembles the branch, the Nest
lattices over the thread that extends, doesn’t suture.
But no, it comes from outside. From inside comes a convoluting
Weft. You must understand that it floods that it slams the walls
that hold. You must understand that it groans that it breaks
that it is heroic to make of the soul a brimming brocade
and dismiss the rest Like Oblivion
Like distance, between the possible and the essential.
This poem offers us some of Guerra’s standbys: an ‘it’ with no clear antecedent; an in media res beginning; the motif of weaving, suturing, lattices; non-standard capitalization and punctuation; and deftly unorthodox, rhythmic, organic, grammar. You’ll notice too that this poem has a slippery point-of-view, mostly third person with a little second thrown in. But no first. In a book of 240 pages of translations with facing originals, I count just four poems with a centralizing “I”—in Outside the Story: A Fictional Biography of Lautréamont (the Frech poète maudite who spent the first thirteen years of his life in Montevideo), one in Astral Replicants, and in two poems at the end of Pulse, after, perhaps tellingly, an ekphrastic poem that interrogates John Everett Millais’s portrait of the drowned Ophelia.
Guerra could not be less interested in the confessional. There are glimmers of the personal here and there, with occasional, later references to a mother, to thwarted motherhood, to stultifying gender-based biological essentialism, but they are never the focus or precipitating occasion for a poem. The personal, and more specifically the “I,” serves instead as an opportunity for Guerra to offer a carousel of foundational images (“Image is my Heart,” her Lautréamont says) as she does in Outside the Story, like Terence Malick when he’s juxtaposing saturated, soft-focus, striking images so that narrative, that most human of inventions, is a suggestion but not a binding force.
Guerra’s “I” makes some unforgettable statements. A sampling: “I have animals inside, damp animals that beat intricately to the weaving of my stage, the warp of this weave moves with my veins, from them, from me, I can’t leave”; “I tried to pull that ball and chain from my hand to stretch the branch / to make a song that might shake the enormous silence”; “The hole in the center is made by the wind. Neither you nor I / can stop the annihilation, neither you nor I.” Holes and weaves and this sense of annihilation are important motifs through her work. It’s worth noting that Guerra’s annihilation doesn’t possess the unequivocally negative connotation we associate with it. It refers more to the scattering of atoms that occurs after death, an inevitable phenomenon which puts the fluctuating matrices of matter back into the world to be recomposed into some different network lit up buy electricity and hunger.
It’s worth saying more about this leitmotif of weaves and lattices. Not only does it offer some helpful (and self-referential) connective tissue throughout the book, but it also represents the apotheosis of Guerra’s abiding interest in apprehension, in terms of sensory, intellectual, and linguistic knowing. In “Anima Mundi” above and elsewhere throughout the book, sutures, which tie things tightly together, are invoked to be rejected; conversely, weaves, with their use of gaps as well as connections, their flexibility and porosity, are held up as models for thinking, being, doing. This brings us, finally, back to the concept of heridescence I started with, which is, I think, a nice way of communicating this idea of flickering swiftly between one possibility and another, catching and releasing, being material and being hole-y, if not actually somehow doing both simultaneously, as if in quantum superposition.
Guerra’s poetry, as Kercheval and Pitas note, with “its complexity, its concreteness of image and abstraction of thought, and its convention-defying syntax, capitalization and punctuation,” is “notoriously” difficult to translate. The feature, though, that juts out in particular as difficult if not impossible to translate into a smooth approximation is Guerra’s insistence on the polysemousness of words, and to generally compose poems with no subject pronoun whatsoever. This grammatical choice, enabled by, respectively, language’s evolved slipperiness and Spanish’s verb conjugations to suggest their subjects without naming them, allows Guerra to keep things “deliberately open-ended.” Though it must have been frustrating to no end for the translators, this insistence on open-endedness makes for excitingly fluid experiences of the poems, because when a poem has no stable subject, the focus is shifted from the identity of the speaker or listener, and instead to something like what Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” and what Guerra calls, in a section of the long final poem, “All Beginnings” “The vibration / of sap, yearning, pure.” It’s as if Guerra is reminding us that being is more verb than subject, more flux than fixedness.
This sense of encounter with a linguistic event that truly conveys the temporality of its subject is thrilling, and worth the price of admission alone. It feels, too, of a piece with the true achievement of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, i.e. the “subtlety, variety, and often surprising wit of the transitions from one tale to another” per Bernard Knox, or the fact that it is “rooted in the indistinct borderlands between diverse worlds,” as Italo Calvino puts it. It feels of a piece, too, with Anne Carson’s Stesichoros who “und[id] the latches” of adjectives from nouns and “released being,” as well as with Rick Barot’s assertion that “the test of how well a thing is made // is to look at the places where its part come together— / joints, seams, corners, folds.” Language here is being pushed to better depict its relationship to the world it describes, and this can then reconfigure the way we think about how we connect to the world outside our own bodies and thoughts. Considering the daily more evident consequences for how our historical exploitation of land and people are now tangible—wildfires, polar vortices, failing powergrids, etc.—a reckoning like this is long overdue, and it seems to me that Guerra has developed a particular poetic innovation to better conceptualize this necessary encounter.
The process of translation forecloses, though, some of the heridescent qualities of the poems, which is partially inevitable. The translators’ solution, for instance, for Guerra’s insistent absence of subject pronoun is often inserting “It” where the verb implies a third-person singular subject, as in “Below, a Lagoon,” which starts “Tangential to the rest of the shape / it bends, Zigzagging in the foam / that leaves it green.” This solution retains the ambiguity though it dampens it, too, so that the “it,” the entity and its un-sketched-in outline is foregrounded, instead of its movements, its features, its uncapturable motility. Elsewhere, they weren’t able to retain, for instance, the double meaning of ‘falanges’ (in Spanish both phalanxes and phalanges) though Guerra insisted the original “evoked both meanings.” So it goes. This is, of course, not an inherent failing but an enduring invitation to other writers, poets, translators, programmers, to tackle the same text with different methods. I do find myself wondering, though, what methods the translators might have developed and employed which could have embodied an approach to language and apprehension of a similar radicality to the original. Printing broadsides with holographic text so that each option appears depending on the angle from which you view it? Publishing accompanying texts online with hypertexts to different instantiations based on specific networks of translation choices? Of course, the limits imposed by capitalism, supply chain concerns, and other constricting hyperobjects mean that if this were a real approach, it would be more like art than printed translation, but reading poems like Guerra’s, I feel permitted to push the boundaries a bit more, if only in idle theorizing, than before.
In any case, we have the poems now, and Pitas and Kercheval have rendered them in a muscular, fluid, striking English which retains the exciting disjunctiveness of the original. Both translators have attested to this being the most difficult translation task of their careers, and they deserve enormous gratitude for their labor, and for making it possible for Guerra to reach more readers. After all, the more readers, the more consciousnesses swirling around the durable nub of her poems, which contemplate the oddity of being with a crisp freshness that some translator may bring later to her work again. “It will return” she writes in the early poem “Of Duration I Will Die, Chosen” (one of the four poems in which an I guides us). “It will return, this finely stretched matter, to its heavy / gray complexity. It will return in crystalline cubes of doubt.” What luck to know these cubes are coming, to be ready to hold them, and hold them to the world so we might see it without our selves so stubbornly in the way.
Guerra, Silvia. A Sea at Dawn. Translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas. Eulalia Books, 2023.
Conor Bracken is the author of The Enemy of My Enemy is Me (Diode Editions, 2021), as well as the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019) and Jean D’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His poems and translations have appeared (or will soon) in places like Copper Nickel, Image, New England Review, the New Yorker, and Ploughshares, and have earned support from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, the Frost Place, Inprint, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.