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Mentor Text: "Sí, camarada, es hora de jardín" by Pablo Neruda

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Mentor Text: "Sí, camarada, es hora de jardín" by Pablo Neruda

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Sí, camarada, es hora de jardín
y es hora de batalla, cada día
es sucesión de flor o sangre:
nuestro tiempo nos entregó amarrados
a regar los jazmines
o a desangrarnos en una calle oscura:
la virtud o el dolor se repartieron
en zonas frías, en mordientes brasas,
y no había otra cosa que elegir:
los caminos del cielo,
antes tan transitados por los santos,
están poblados por especialistas.

Ya desaparecieron los caballos.

Los héroes van vestidos de batracios,
los espejos viven vacíos
porque la fiesta es siempre en otra parte,
en donde ya no estamos invitados
y hay pelea en las puertas.

Por eso es éste el llamado penúltimo,
el décimo sincero
toque de mi campana:
al jardín, camarada, a la azucena,
al manzano, al clavel intransigente,
a la fragancia de los azahares,
y luego a los deberes de la guerra.

Delgada es nuestra patria
y en su desnudo filo de cuchillo
arde nuestra bandera delicada

Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden
and the hour up in arms, each day
follows from flower or blood:
our time surrenders us to an obligation
to water the jasmines
or bleed to death in a dark street:
virtue or pain blows off
into frozen realms, into hissing embers,
and there never was a choice:
heaven’s roads,
once the by-ways of saints,
are jammed now with experts.

Already the horses have vanished.

Heroes hop around like toads,
mirrors live out emptinesses
because the party is happening somewhere else,
wherever we aren’t invited
and fights frame themselves in doorjambs.

That’s why this is the last call,
the tenth clear
ringing of my bell:
to the garden, comrade, to the pale lily,
to the apple tree, to the intransigent carnation,
to the fragrance of lemon blossoms,
and then to the ultimatums of war.

-from http://readingfanon.blogspot.com/2011/10/right-comrade-its-hour-of-garden.html

Ours is a lank country
and on the naked edge of her knife
our frail flag burns.

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by Pablo Neruda
Right, comrade, it's the hour of the garden

Right, comrade, it's the hour of the garden
and the hour up in arms, each day
follows from flower or blood:
our time surrenders us to an obligation
to water the jasmines
or bleed to death in a dark street:
virtue or pain blows off
into frozen realms, into hissing embers,
and there never was a choice:
heaven's roads,
once the by-ways of saints,
are jammed now with experts.

Already the horses have vanished.

Heroes hop around like toads,
mirrors live out emptinesses
because the party is happening somewhere else,
wherever we aren't invited
and fights frame themselves in doorjambs.

That's why this is the last call,
the tenth clear
ringing of my bell:
to the garden, comrade, to the pale lily,
to the apple tree, to the intransigent carnation,
to the fragrance of lemon blossoms,
and then to the ultimatums of war.

Ours is a lank country
and on the naked edge of her knife
our frail flag burns.

Sí, camarada, es hora de jardín

Sí, camarada, es hora de jardín
y es hora de batalla, cada día
es sucesión de flor o sangre:
nuestro tiempo nos entregó amarrados
a regar los jazmines
o a desangrarnos en una calle oscura:
la virtud o el dolor se repartieron
en zonas frías, en mordientes brasas,
y no había otra cosa que elegir:
los caminos del cielo,
antes tan transitados por los santos,
están poblados por especialistas.

Ya desaparecieron los caballos.

Los héroes van vestidos de batracios,
los espejos viven vacíos
porque la fiesta es siempre en otra parte,
en donde ya no estamos invitados
y hay pelea en las puertas.

Por eso es éste el llamado penúltimo,
el décimo sincero
toque de mi campana:
al jardín, camarada, a la azucena,
al manzano, al clavel intransigente,
a la fragancia de los azahares,
y luego a los deberes de la guerra.

Delgada es nuestra patria
y en su desnudo filo de cuchillo
arde nuestra bandera delicada

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Right, comrade, it's the hour of the garden

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by Pablo Neruda Right, comrade, it's the hour of the garden Right, comrade, it's the hour of the garden and the hour up in arms, each day follows from flower or blood: our time surrenders us to an obligation to water the jasmines or bleed to death in a dark street: virtue or pain blows off into frozen realms, into hissing embers, and there never was a choice: heaven's roads, once the by-ways of saints, are jammed now with experts.

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B. Interpretive
5. Listening actively to spoken English in a range of social and academic contexts
6. Reading closely literary and informational texts and viewing multimedia to determine how meaning is conveyed explicitly and implicitly through language
7. Evaluating how well writers and speakers use language to support ideas and arguments with details or evidence depending on modality, text type, purpose, audience, topic, and content area
8. Analyzing how writers and speakers use vocabulary and other language resources for specific purposes (to explain, persuade, entertain, etc.) depending on modality, text type, purpose, audience, topic, and content area

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"Prayer So My Man Won’t to Cross the Line" by Xunka’ Utz’utz Ni’

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"Prayer So My Man Won’t to Cross the Line" by Xunka’ Utz’utz Ni’

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Take into account, Kajval,
that I am speaking to you.

I bring you smoke.
I offer you flowers.

Take into account, Kajval,
What you are going to give me.

The others have horses.
They have sheep.

They have hens.
Trucks.

Take into account, Kajval,
how much you are going to give me.

I don’t want to work on a plantation.
I don’t want to go to someone else’s house.
I don’t want to work far away.

I don’t want to go to Los Angeles.
I don’t want to work in Florida.

-translated by Amber Past; from Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women

Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women by Ambar PasIncantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women by Ambar Pastt

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Pablo Neruda is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century poets of the Americas. "No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda," observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime. John Leonard in the New York Times declared that Neruda "was, I think, one of the great ones, a Whitman of the South." Among contemporary readers in the United States, he is largely remembered for his odes and love poems.

Born Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, Neruda adopted the pseudonym under which he would become famous while still in his early teens. He grew up in Temuco in the backwoods of southern Chile. Neruda's literary development received assistance from unexpected sources. Among his teachers "was the poet Gabriela Mistral who would be a Nobel laureate years before Neruda," reported Manuel Duran and Margery Safir in Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. "It is almost inconceivable that two such gifted poets should find each other in such an unlikely spot. Mistral recognized the young Neftali's talent and encouraged it by giving the boy books and the support he lacked at home."

By the time he finished high school, Neruda had published in local papers and Santiago magazines, and had won several literary competitions. In 1921 he left southern Chile for Santiago to attend school, with the intention of becoming a French teacher but was an indifferent student. While in Santiago, Neruda completed one of his most critically acclaimed and original works, the cycle of love poems titled Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada-published in English translation as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. This work quickly marked Neruda as an important Chilean poet.

Veinte poemas also brought the author notoriety due to its explicit celebration of sexuality, and, as Robert Clemens remarked in the Saturday Review, "established him at the outset as a frank, sensuous spokesman for love." While other Latin American poets of the time used sexually explicit imagery, Neruda was the first to win popular acceptance for his presentation. Mixing memories of his love affairs with memories of the wilderness of southern Chile, he creates a poetic sequence that not only describes a physical liaison, but also evokes the sense of displacement that Neruda felt in leaving the wilderness for the city. "Traditionally," stated Rene de Costa in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, "love poetry has equated woman with nature. Neruda took this established mode of comparison and raised it to a cosmic level, making woman into a veritable force of the universe."

"In Veinte poemas," wrote David P. Gallagher in Modern Latin American Literature, "Neruda journeys across the sea symbolically in search of an ideal port. In 1927, he embarked on a real journey, when he sailed from Buenos Aires for Lisbon, ultimately bound for Rangoon where he had been appointed honorary Chilean consul." Duran and Safir explained that "Chile had a long tradition, like most Latin American countries, of sending her poets abroad as consuls or even, when they became famous, as ambassadors." The poet was not really qualified for such a post and was unprepared for the squalor, poverty, and loneliness to which the position would expose him. "Neruda travelled extensively in the Far East over the next few years," Gallagher continued, "and it was during this period that he wrote his first really splendid book of poems, Residencia en la tierra, a book ultimately published in two parts, in 1933 and 1935." Neruda added a third part, Tercera residencia, in 1947.

Residencia en la tierra, published in English as Residence on Earth, is widely celebrated as containing "some of Neruda's most extraordinary and powerful poetry," according to de Costa. Born of the poet's feelings of alienation, the work reflects a world which is largely chaotic and senseless, and which-in the first two volumes-offers no hope of understanding. De Costa quoted Spanish poet García Lorca as calling Neruda "a poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to insight, closer to blood than to ink. A poet filled with mysterious voices that fortunately he himself does not know how to decipher." With its emphasis on despair and the lack of adequate answers to mankind's problems, Residencia en la tierra in some ways foreshadowed the post-World War II philosophy of existentialism. "Neruda himself came to regard it very harshly," wrote Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books. "It helped people to die rather than to live, he said, and if he had the proper authority to do so he would ban it, and make sure it was never reprinted."

Residencia en la tierra also marked Neruda's emergence as an important international poet. By the time the second volume of the collection was published in 1935 the poet was serving as consul in Spain, where "for the first time," reported Duran and Safir, "he tasted international recognition, at the heart of the Spanish language and tradition. At the same time ... poets like Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernandez, who had become closely involved in radical politics and the Communist movement, helped politicize Neruda." When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Neruda was among the first to espouse the Republican cause with the poem España en el corazon-a gesture that cost him his consular post. He later served in France and Mexico, where his politics caused less anxiety.

Some readers have found it difficult to disassociate Neruda's poetry from his fervent commitment to communism. An added difficulty lies in the fact that Neruda's poetry is very hard to translate; his works available in English represent only a small portion of his total output. Nonetheless,Communism rescued Neruda from the despair he expressed in the first parts of Residencia en la tierra, and led to a change in his approach to poetry. He came to believe "that the work of art and the statement of thought-when these are responsible human actions, rooted in human need-are inseparable from historical and political context," reported Salvatore Bizzarro in Pablo Neruda: All Poets the Poet. "He argued that there are books which are important at a certain moment in history, but once these books have resolved the problems they deal with they carry in them their own oblivion. Neruda felt that the belief that one could write solely for eternity was romantic posturing." This new attitude led the poet in new directions; for many years his work, both poetry and prose, advocated an active role in social change rather than simply describing his feelings, as his earlier oeuvre had done.

This significant shift in Neruda's poetry is recognizable in Tercera residencia, the third and final part of the "Residencia" series. Florence L. Yudin noted in Hispania that the poetry of this volume was overlooked when published and remains neglected due to its overt ideological content. "Viewed as a whole," Yudin wrote, " Tercera residencia illustrates a fluid coherence of innovation with retrospective, creativity with continuity, that would characterize Neruda's entire career." According to de Costa, as quoted by Yudin, "The new posture assumed is that of a radical nonconformist. Terra residencia must, therefore, be considered in this light, from the dual perspective of art and society, poetry and politics."

"Las Furias y las penas," the longest poem of Tercera residencia, embodies the influence of both the Spanish Civil War and the works of Spanish Baroque poet Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas on Neruda. The poem explores the psychic agony of lost love and its accompanying guilt and suffering, conjured in the imagery of savage eroticism, alienation, and loss of self-identity. Neruda's message, according to Yudin, is that "what makes up life's narrative ('cuento') are single, unconnected events, governed by chance, and meaningless ('suceden'). Man is out of control, like someone hallucinating one-night stands in sordid places." Yudin concluded that, "Despite its failed dialectic, 'Las Furias y las penas' sustains a haunting beauty in meaning and tone" and "bears the unmistakable signature of Neruda's originality and achievement."

Neruda's politics had an important impact on his poetry. Clayton Eshleman wrote in the introduction to Cesar Vallejo's Poemas humanos/ Human Poems that "Neruda found in the third book of Residencia the key to becoming the 20th-century South American poet: the revolutionary stance which always changes with the tides of time." Gordon Brotherton, in Latin American Poetry: Origins and Presence, expanded on this idea by noting that "Neruda, so prolific, can be lax, a 'great bad poet' (to use the phrase Juan Ramon Jimenez used to revenge himself on Neruda). And his change of stance 'with the tides of time' may not always be perfectly effected. But ... his dramatic and rhetorical skills, better his ability to speak out of his circumstances, ... was consummate. In his best poetry (of which there is much) he speaks on a scale and with an agility unrivaled in Latin America."

Neruda expanded on his political views in the poem Canto general, which, according to de Costa, is a "lengthy epic on man's struggle for justice in the New World." Although Neruda had begun the poem as early as 1935-when he had intended it to be limited in scope only to Chile-he completed some of the work while serving in the Chilean senate as a representative of the Communist Party. However, party leaders recognized that the poet needed time to work on his opus, and granted him a leave of absence in 1947. Later that year, however, Neruda returned to political activism, writing letters in support of striking workers and criticizing Chilean President Videla. Early in 1948 the Chilean Supreme Court issued an order for his arrest, and Neruda finished the Canto general while hiding from Videla's forces.

" Canto general is the flowering of Neruda's new political stance," Don Bogen asserted in the Nation. "For Neruda food and other pleasures are our birthright-not as gifts from the earth or heaven but as the products of human labor." According to Bogen, Canto general draws its "strength from a commitment to nameless workers-the men of the salt mines, the builders of Macchu Picchu-and the fundamental value of their labor." Commenting on Canto general in Books Abroad, Jaime Alazraki remarked, "Neruda is not merely chronicling historical events. The poet is always present throughout the book not only because he describes those events, interpreting them according to a definite outlook on history, but also because the epic of the continent intertwines with his own epic."

Although, as Bizzarro noted, "In [the Canto general], Neruda was to reflect some of the [Communist] party's basic ideological tenets," the work itself is far more than propaganda. Looking back into American prehistory, the poet examined the land's rich natural heritage and described the long defeat of the native Americans by the Europeans. He concentrated on elements of people's lives common to all people at all times. Nancy Willard wrote in Testimony of the Invisible Man, "Neruda makes it clear that our most intense experience of impermanence is not death but our own isolation among the living. ... If Neruda is intolerant of despair, it is because he wants nothing to sully man's residence on earth."

"In the Canto," explained Duran and Safir, "Neruda reached his peak as a public poet. He produced an ideological work that largely transcended contemporary events and became an epic of an entire continent and its people." According to Alazraki, "By bringing together his own odyssey and the drama of the continent, Neruda has simultaneously given to Canto general the quality of a lyric and an epic poem. The lives of conquistadors, martyrs, heroes, and just plain people recover a refreshing actuality because they become part of the poet's fate, and conversely, the life of the poet gains new depth because in his search one recognizes the continent's struggles. Canto general is, thus, the song of a continent as much as it is Neruda's own song."

Neruda returned to Chile from exile in 1953, and, said Duran and Safir, spent the last 20 years of his life producing "some of the finest love poetry in One Hundred Love Sonnets and parts of Extravagaria and La Barcarola; he produced Nature poetry that continued the movement toward close examination, almost still shots of every aspect of the external world, in the odes of Navegaciones y regresos, in The Stones of Chile, in The Art of Birds, in Una Casa en la arena and in Stones of the Sky. He continued as well his role as public poet in Canción de geste, in parts of Cantos ceremoniales, in the mythical La Espada encendida, and the angry Incitement to Nixonicide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution."

At this time, Neruda's work began to move away from the highly political stance it had taken during the 1930s. Neruda began to try to speak to everyday people simply and clearly, on a level that anyone could understand. He wrote poems on subjects ranging from rain to feet. By examining common, ordinary, everyday things very closely, according to Duran and Safir, Neruda gives us "time to examine a particular plant, a stone, a flower, a bird, an aspect of modern life, at leisure. We look at the object, handle it, turn it around, all the sides are examined with love, care, attention. This is, in many ways, Neruda ... at his best."

In 1971 Neruda reached the peak of his political career when the Chilean Communist party nominated him for president. He withdrew his nomination, however, when he reached an accord with Socialist nominee Salvador Allende. After Allende won the election he reactivated Neruda's diplomatic credentials, appointing the poet ambassador to France. It was while Neruda was serving in Paris that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, in recognition of his oeuvre. Poor health soon forced the poet to resign his post, however, and he returned to Chile, where he died in 1973-only days after a right-wing military coup killed Allende and seized power. Many of his last poems, some published posthumously, indicate his awareness of his death's approach. As Fernando Alegria wrote in Modern Poetry Studies, "What I want to emphasize is something very simple: Neruda was, above all, a love poet and, more than anyone, an unwavering, powerful, joyous, conqueror of death."

Commenting on Passions and Impressions, a posthumous collection of Neruda's prose poems, political and literary essays, lectures, and newspaper articles, Mark Abley wrote in Maclean's, "No matter what occasion provoked these pieces, his rich, tireless voice echoes with inimitable force." As Neruda eschewed literary criticism, many critics found in him a lack of rationalism. According to Neruda, "It was through metaphor, not rational analysis and argument, that the mysteries of the world could be revealed," remarked Stephen Dobyns in the Washington Post. However, Dobyns noted that Passions and Impressions "shows Neruda both at his most metaphorical and his most rational. ... What one comes to realize from these prose pieces is how conscious and astute were Neruda's esthetic choices. In retrospect at least his rejection of the path of the maestro, the critic, the rationalist was carefully calculated." In his speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize, Neruda noted that "there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are."

In 2003, 30 years after Neruda's death, an anthology of 600 of Neruda's poems arranged chronologically was published as The Poetry of Pablo Neruda.The collection draws from 36 different translators, and some of his major works are also presented in their original Spanish. Writing in the New Leader, Phoebe Pettingell pointed out that, although some works were left out because of the difficulty in presenting them properly in English, "an overwhelming body of Neruda's output is here ... and the collection certainly presents a remarkable array of subjects and styles." Reflecting on the life and work of Neruda in the New Yorker, Mark Strand commented, "There is something about Neruda-about the way he glorifies experience, about the spontaneity and directness of his passion-that sets him apart from other poets. It is hard not to be swept away by the urgency of his language, and that's especially so when he seems swept away."

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Pablo Neruda is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century poets of the Americas. "No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda," observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as...

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Author Info: Xunka’ Utz’utz Ni’ and Others

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Author Info: Xunka’ Utz’utz Ni’ and Others

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The following five pages (and page 89) feature work from Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women, forthcoming in October from Cinco Puntos Press. The book is a trade edition of Incantations by Mayan Women, a limited-edition book handmade in 2005 by the women of the Taller Leñateros in Chiapas, Mexico. The Toilers' handmade edition is the first book Mayan people have independently created-from writing, to artwork, to printing and binding-in nearly five hundred years.
Women Dreaming the Book
These Incantations were dreamed by Maya women in the Highlands of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The Tzotzil authors claim their spells and songs were given to them by the ancestors, the First Fathermothers, who keep the Great Book in which all words are written down. Pasakwala Kómes, an unlettered seer from Santiago El Pinar, learned her conjurations by dreaming the Book. Loxa Jimenés Lopes of Epal Ch'en, Chamula, tells of an Anjel, daughter of the Lord of the Caves, who began whispering in her ear and then, in dreams, showed her the Book with all the magic words to be learned. Manwela Kokoroch, from Laguna Petej, Chamula, sings to the Elder Brothers of Writing and Painting, who hold the Book where the names of all the people in the world are written down, along with the dates of their deaths.

Even though few of the authors of this anthology can read, even though the Tzotzil Maya have no libraries nor bookstores near their houses, a wise person is said to have "books in the heart," according to Robert M. Laughlin's translation of a 16th-century Spanish-Tzotzil dictionary.

In Tzotzil, to write and to paint are the same verb ( tz'ib), just as the color yox serves for what English speakers perceive as both blue and green, Antonia Moshán Culej of Huixtán asks: "How is it that Maria Tzu can paint if she can't write?" Weaving is today considered to be a form of script and Tzotzil women can read the verses on their looms.

The ancient Mayan god ltzamná is credited with the invention of writing. His wife is said to have created the universe by painting everything into existence. The Fathermothers gave birth to one of the few civilizations in the world that conceived a way to write down its language. The ancestors of Loxa Jiménes Lopes, María Tzu, and Manwela Kokoroch created the Maya codices, magnificent books written when only Native People inhabited these lands. On stuccoed bark paper pages they painted forecasts of the movements of the heavenly bodies, prophesies, divinations, and spells.

The Maya seem to hold ancient memories of their libraries. Even today, the oral poetry of ritual speech is referred to as tz'ib, "that which is painted or written down." Poetry is called nichimal k'op, "the word in flower." We know of only four pre-Colombian Mayan books that survived the ravages of time and war; many were destroyed by Friar Diego de Landa in the 16th-century, as documented in his Relación de las cosas de Yucatan.

[The Maya] wrote their books on a long sheet of paper doubled in pleats, the whole thing enclosed between two boards that made them very attractive ...

There were many beautiful books, but as they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil, we burnt them all, and this affected [the Maya] deeply, causing them great sorrow and grief.
The Animal Companions of our Dreams
In addition to her soul, each person has an animal companion called a wayhel_, a word grown from the root (_way) of the verbs to sleep and to dream, and associated with shamanism, the portals to the Underworld, communication with the gods and the dead. The wayhelaccompanies its alter ego from the moment it is born and may be a jaguar, a hawk, a hummingbird, a butterfly, a weasel, a caterpillar, or a water snake. Instead of a head, it may have an ax, a machete, a pair of scissors, or even a cast-iron skillet stuck on the end of its neck. Witches may possess several wayhel; whirlwinds, rainbows, lightning bolts, and shooting stars. One of the most powerful forms of wayhel is the Writer, the Scribanó. This kind of wayhel is immortal because even after death she can recreate herself through marks on a piece of paper, or, as Pedro Pitaren explains: "... they invent themselves, writing themselves into existence."

The soul companions live with the Fathermothers in the heart of the mountain, sitting on the 13 levels of bleachers inside the Earth. There the wayhel have radios, jukeboxes, even computers and email.

In dreams, the wayhel souls escape like naughty children and run around loose out in the woods. If anything happens to her wayhel, a person will become ill. In these times when men are blasting new roads with dynamite, the earth trembles and the wayhel are afraid and can even die. A bad person may capture a wayhel and sell it to the Lord of the Cave, as happened to poor Maruch Vet. The soul is held captive in the way prisoners of war were held in ancient Mayan times, chained or tied with ropes awaiting sacrifice. The wayhel loses its appetite and becomes ill; its owner also gets sick. The seer offers a black hen to the cave so it will give back the stolen wayhel before her patient dies.

Mother of the Night,
Father of the Night,

Great Star of Venus,
Mother Month, Mother Moon:

Get up! Put on your best clothes.
Let Maruch Vet's body
out of where she's scared to death,
sold to a cave, sold to a mountain.
-Antel Peres Ok'il

Everything on earth has a mother
Everything on earth has a mother. The Mother of Blood is the heart; the Mother of Water is thunder; the Mother of the Hand is the thumb. Mother of Lightning sends the rain; Mother of the Light is a hydroelectric dam.

Mother of Corn is a double ear of corn; you only find one or two in each cornfield. It looks like the body of a woman with long hair. When a Mother of Corn is discovered in the milpa, incense is burnt and ancient Mayan stories are remembered:

Mother of Corn is the daughter of Lightning. Long long ago a man found a snake which had been hurt. The snake asked him to please take her home and he did. She lived with her father in a cave full of snakes. Her father was so grateful that he offered the man whatever he wanted as a reward for saving his daughter. About this time the snakes turned into women and the man was dazzled by their looks. "No, I don't need anything," he said politely.

"Do you have a wife?," asked Lightning. "I could give you one of my daughters."
"That would be good," said the man, and he picked out the prettiest one, who just happened to be the snake he had saved out on the path. He took her for his wife. She was the Mother of Corn and if she harvested just one ear of corn from each corner of the field, it would multiply and her net would be filled with corn. She and her husband would have big fights because he thought she was picking all his corn. But she was just magic. One time when her husband hit her, Mother of Corn wiped the blood from her nose with an ear of corn. This is how the red corn came to be. Where Mother of Corn peed, the first squash vines grew, when she peed again, a chayóte came up.

-Maria Xila

The preceding text is excerpted from an essay by Ambar Past.

-Antel Peres Ok'il is a Chamula potter who creates enormous urns used for serving fermented gruel on the Day of the Dead.

-Maria Xila's husband was a sage. Because her old man often flirted with Ambar Past, Maria Xila laughingly referred to her as "my replacement," but her old man died before she did.

-Rosa López Kómes (artist) from Oxchuc picks coffee beans and is learning to read and write at Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya. Rosa went to the Woodlanders' Workshop to paint, carrying her newborn child in her arms and her big girl, who is two, hanging onto her skirt.

-Sluz Hernández (artist, p. 89), the Virgin Weaver for the Moon of Tenajapa, used to work in a Cantonese restaurant in San Cristóbal; now she teaches back strap weaving.
To the Bearer of Time
Elder Brother of Writing:
Elder Brother of Painting:
I've come with roses, with lilies,
carnations and chamomile.

Lend me your ten masks
so my years within the corral
will grow longer.

My wayhel is suffering in the mountain.
My animal soul has fallen off the hill.
She's at the end of her rope,
at the last link in the chain.
Lend me your ten toes,
your ten fingers
to guide my wayhel back into her tiger cave,
Back into the green cave where my spirit lives.

Lift her up with a cloth that smells of roses.
With a rose, lift me up.
Lay me down in the shade of a vine.

Elder Brother Who Feeds the Souls:
Guardian of the Corral:
Bearer of Time:
Spin around in a circle, turn in a square.
Don't let the tiger out, the jaguar out,
the wolf,
the coyote, the fox, the weasel.

Herd them together, don't let them go,
I've brought you turkey eggs.
I've brought pigeon stones
for the hand and the foot
of She Who Sees from Far Away Through Dreams.

Keep my animal alive for many years
with pine pitch,
tree sap,
rose water,
fir cone, laurel knot,
thirteen essences-of tilil.

Make my days longer with the sweat of your legs,
your hands that glow green as precious jade,
your green, green blood.

Carry me, embrace me
and my tiger, and my jaguar.

This is all I will bother you with
in the name of the flowers.

Let my animal spirit live
many more years
in the pages of the Book,
in its letters, its paintings,
on the whole surface of the Earth.

-Manwela Kokoroch
Prayer So My Man Won't to Cross the Line
Take into account, Kajval,
that I am speaking to you.

I bring you smoke.
I offer you flowers.

Take into account, Kajval,
What you are going to give me.

The others have horses.
They have sheep.

They have hens.
Trucks.

Take into account, Kajval,
how much you are going to give me.

I don't want to work on a plantation.
I don't want to go to someone else's house.
I don't want to work far away.

I don't want to go to Los Angeles.
I don't want to work in Florida.

-Xunka' Utz'utz Ni'

The Xpakinte
The Xpakinté is not really a person,
although she looks like a woman.
She lives in the fog beneath the tall oaks,
under branches hung with lichens and moss.

The Xpakinté appears in the night
when the drunks are stumbling home.
They see the face of their wives
on the Xpakinté.
She wears pretty red pompons in her braids,
just like a wife.

It's late, says the Xpakinté.
Let's go home, honey.

She leads the drunk off down a shortcut.

He follows along blindly until he realizes
he's lost in the thick brush.
The Xpakinté takes off her clothes.
He embraces her.
She turns: into a hollow tree
full of hairy caterpillars that sting like fire.

The Xpakinté is not a person,
but she looks like a woman
when our men are drunk in the woods
near the fog bank
where the oaks grow tall.

-Munda Tostón

-Munda Tostó n is a rezandera or "prayer saver." She has a little stand in the market of San Cristóbal where she sells ski masks to the Zapatistas.
Witchcraft for Attracting a Man
I want him to come with flowers in his heart.
With all his heart,

I want him to talk to my body.
I want his blood to ache for me
when he sees me on the way to the market.

I want his mother to come to my house to ask for me
with her head bowed down
and a jug of booze for my dad.

I want him to come on a new road
so his white clothes won't get dirty.

I don't want him to fall in the mud.
Don't let a bad snake bite him.

Look into his eyes, Kajval.
I'm telling you this to your nose, to your ears:
His name is Xtumin.

I've spoken to your head.
I've spoken to your bones.
I called you with my mouth.

I want to join myself to him.
I want this man to be my other half.

-Xpetra Ernándes

-Xpetra Ernándes is a member of the council of coordinators of the Leñateros Workshop inSan Cristóbal, where the original edition of Incantations was made. Xpetra collaborated in the translation of the spells into Spanish and English and also contributed several of her own. Over the course of the years, Ernándes sought out and encouraged many painters and seers, made masks, and dyed the endpapers of the book black.

-Loxa Jiménes Lopes (artist), weaver and seer from Epal Ch'en, "Many Caves," is a singer and painter. Loxa's 12-year-old granddaughter Laura Pale painted a page to honor the dead.

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Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women by Ambar Past - BOMB Magazine

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The following five pages (and page 89) feature work from Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women, forthcoming in October from Cinco Puntos Press. The book is a trade edition of Incantations by Mayan Women, a limited-edition book handmade in 2005 by the women of the Taller Leñateros in Chiapas, Mexico.

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Mentor Text: Excerpt from "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land" by Aimé Césaire

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Mentor Text: Excerpt from "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land" by Aimé Césaire

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At the end of daybreak burgeoning with frail coves, the hungry
Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dyn-
amited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust
of this town sinisterly stranded.

[...]

At the end of daybreak, on this very fragile earth thickness
exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future—the vol-
canoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe
sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked
at by sea birds—the beach of dreams and the insane awakening.

-from https://www.best-poems.net/aime_cesaire/notebook_of_a_return_to_the_native_land.html

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At the end of daybreak. . .
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it,
I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope.
Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned
toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face
of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a
never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the
monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a
river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever
in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most
arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force
of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed
venereal sun.

At the end of daybreak burgeoning with frail coves, the hungry
Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dyn-
amited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust
of this town sinisterly stranded.

At the end of daybreak, the extreme, deceptive desolate eschar
on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who do not bear witness;
the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in the empty wind
like the screeches of babbling parrots; an aged life mendacious-
ly smiling, its lips opened by vacated agonies; an aged poverty
rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with
tepid pustules,
the awful futility of our raison d'être.

At the end of daybreak, on this very fragile earth thickness
exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future-the vol-
canoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe
sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked
at by sea birds-the beach of dreams and the insane awakening.

At the end of daybreak, this town sprawled-flat, toppled from
its common sense, inert, winded under its geometric weight of
an eternally renewed cross, indocile to its fate, mute, vexed
no matter what, incapable of growing with the juice of this
earth, self-conscious, clipped, reduced, in breach of fauna
and flora.

Last updated August 30, 2011

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notebook of a return to the native land poem

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aimé césaire notebook of a return to the native land

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notebook of a return to the native land by aimé césaire

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At the end of daybreak. . . Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk.

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Mentor Text: "Jungle Kill" by Cecilia Vicuna

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Mentor Text: "Jungle Kill" by Cecilia Vicuna

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I uproot & save

mental venture

I split the dream

of the slow

& neutral

Persist

& breathe

My little flask

Pointy wisp

Pubescent valve

Join

the game

I smoke

& praise you

Hew

& raze you

Jungle

kill

Bulldoze

your sierra

Fire

to ash

I wait

& wait

And you

where are you

Fragrant

lantana

Aim

your voice

In calm

plains

In silence

wild

Erasing

the thirst

The weightless

altar

insults

the blood

Awake

diagonals

Rot

& Stand

Go & go

Flower

gaining

Plant your will!

-translated by Suzanna Jill Levine, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58268/jungle-kill

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Cecilia Vicuna, "Jungle Kill" from Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water. Copyright © 1992 by Cecilia Vicuna. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.

Source: Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water (Graywolf Press, 1992)

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Jungle Kill by Cecilia Vicuña | Poetry Foundation

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Cecilia Vicuna, "Jungle Kill" from Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water. Copyright © 1992 by Cecilia Vicuna. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press. Source: Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water (Graywolf Press, 1992)

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Excerpts from The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, featuring Mayan Women Poets

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Excerpts from The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, featuring Mayan Women Poets

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Here is the first anthology to present a full range of multilingual poetries from Latin America, covering over 500 years of a poetic tradition as varied, robust, and vividly imaginative as any in the world.
Editors Cecilia Vicuï¿½a and Ernesto Livon-Grosman present a fresh and expansive selection of Latin American poetry, from the indigenous responses to the European conquest, through early feminist poetry of the 19th century, the early 20th century "Modernismo" and "Vanguardia" movements, later revolutionary and liberation poetry of the 1960s, right up to the experimental, visual and oral poetries being written and performed today. Here readers will find several types of poetry typically overlooked in major anthologies, such as works written or chanted in their native languages, the vibrant mestizo (mixed) creations derived from the rich matrix of spoken language in Latin America, and even the mysterious verses written in made-up languages. In addition to the giants of Latin American poetry, such as Cï¿½sar Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, and Gabriela Mistral, the editors have included a selection of vital but lesser known poets such as Pablo de Rohka, Blanca Varela, and Cecilia Meireles, as well as previously untranslated works by Simï¿½ n Rodrï¿½guez, Bartolomï¿½ Hidalgo, Oliverio Girondo, Rosa Araneda, and many others. In all, the anthology presents more than 120 poets, many in new translations--by Jerome Rothenberg, W.S. Merwin, and Forrest Gander, and others--specially commissioned for this anthology, and each accompanied by a biographical note. The book features both English and original language versions of the poems, a full bibliography, and an introduction by the editors.
Sure to stand as the definitive anthology for decades to come, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry remaps the territory, offering new ways of looking at a poetry as diverse and complex as Latin America itself.

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The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry

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Here is the first anthology to present a full range of multilingual poetries from Latin America, covering over 500 years of a poetic tradition as varied, robust, and vividly imaginative as any in the world.

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B. Interpretive
5. Listening actively to spoken English in a range of social and academic contexts
6. Reading closely literary and informational texts and viewing multimedia to determine how meaning is conveyed explicitly and implicitly through language
7. Evaluating how well writers and speakers use language to support ideas and arguments with details or evidence depending on modality, text type, purpose, audience, topic, and content area
8. Analyzing how writers and speakers use vocabulary and other language resources for specific purposes (to explain, persuade, entertain, etc.) depending on modality, text type, purpose, audience, topic, and content area

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Locate and apply information about students' current academic status, content Hyphen and standards-related learning needs and goals, assessment data, language proficiency status, and cultural background for both short Hyphen term and long-term instructional planning purposes.

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Plan instruction that promotes a range of communication strategies and activity modes between teacher and student and among students that encourage student participation in learning.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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your eyes were a sea conch in which the heady battle
of your fifteen year old blood sparkled.
Even young they never had any age,
or rather more than all the skyscrapers
five centuries of torturers
of witch burners weighed on them,
five centuries of cheap gin of big cigars
of fat bellies filled with slices of rancid bibles
a five century mouth bitter with dowager sins,
they were five centuries old EMMETT TILL,
five centuries is the ageless age of Cain's stake.
EMMETT TILL I say:
in the heart zero,
of blood not a drop,
and as for yours may it hide my Sun, may it mix with my bread:
-"Hey Chicago Boy
is it still true that you're worth
as much as a white man?"
Spring, he believed in you. Even at the edge of night,
at the edge of the MISSISSIPPI rolling its bars, its barriers,
its tomb-like avalanches between the high banks of racial hatred.
In spring rushing its murmurs into the portholes of eyes.
In spring hound-calling the bovine panic in the savannas of the blood.
In spring slipping the gloves from its fine hands in a burst of shells and
siliquae,
loosener of fear clots, dissolver of the clots of hatred
swollen with age and in the flow of blood streams carrying
the hazardous rubric of stalked beasts.
But They
they were invulnerable, sluggish as they were,
and mounted, massively, on bizarre immemorial billygoats
-"CHICAGO BOY" ...

All gone with the bleating of the racial wind
He listens in the blue bush of veins
to the steady singing of the blood bird,
he anticipates above the banks of sleep
Sun, the rise of your furtive step,
a vehement fish, in the astonishing blue field.

Then night remembered its arm
a vampire's flabby flight suddenly hovering
and BIG MILLAM'S Colt 45
wrote the verdict and the state of the Union in rust letters on the living black
wall:

20 years of zinc
15 years of copper
15 years of oil

and the 180th year of these states
but in the heart unfeeling clockwork
what, nothing, zero
of blood not a drop
in the white heart's tough antiseptic meat?

Statue of Lafacadio Hearn

Undoubtedly it is absurd to hail this thrust in mid-ocean
still standing vertically amidst the clawings of the wind
whose heart triggers with each beat
a true liana delirium. Great sentence from a sensual eart
so stuttered on the mornes! "And who, who wants," I heard
a voice with no sarcasm roar, "to partake
of the Soul of Man? Of the Spirit
of Combat? Of the Essence by virtue of which who falls falls
to stand again? Of the Leader Of Hearts? Of the Harrower
of Hell?" Then then my auger sight pressed on
and the vision laid its eggs relentlessly:

Ye clambered up the palm tree
Nanie-Rosette was eating on a boulder
the devil was flying about
anointed with snake grease
with the oil of departed souls
a god in the town was dancing wearing an ox head
auburn rums were flowing from throat to throat
in the ajoupas anise was being mixed with orgeat
at the crossroads tobacco-colored men
squatted at dice
and dispatched dreams along their fingers
in the shade in pockets long razors were sleeping

auburn rums were flowing from throat to throat
but no one no one made a formidable response
and offered his mucous membrane to the bites of wasps

O strange questioner
to you I hand my supernumerary jug
to the black verb memorizing
Me me me
as for you I knew your patience was created
from the command post of a corsair dismasted by the storm and licked by
orchids

... On the State of the Union

I imagine this message in Congress on the state of the Union:
situation tragic,

left underground only 75 years of iron
50 years of cobalt
but 55 years worth of sulfur and 20 of bauxite
in the heart what?
Nothing, zero,
mine without ore,
cavern in which nothing prowls,
of blood not a drop left.

Clouds, jump the tracks with a blowtorch! Rain violent girl unravel your shreds! Sea wound settle in with a hiss! All funnels and volcanoes adrift! Stampede mad gods! Blow your brains out! Let the fields be ripped apart by the trident and the pearl fishermen be catapulted to the very sky! A thought. What? The fire that is no longer squandered. What is possible tearing in its sumptuous chest everything slow in becoming.
Night. What? The entire matter which weighs and exhausts itself to become space. The password. What? To pass the world through a sieve and the lack of solidarity in each subterfuge.
Times of lightning, times of lightning, placid beasts, frenzied beasts, plodding beasts, at my call by nostrils and foamings you used to run out of the stables of the sky

and there were marvelous multicolored
prairies of every trot and every
shade of bay which grew for the desire of these fiery beasts
young and brushed by coco plums
under the tender skin of water forever dazzling

It is Myself, Terror, It is Myself

Stranded dried up dreams flush with the muzzles of rivers create
formidable piles of mute bones
the too swift hopes crawl scrupulously
like tamed snakes
one does not leave one never leaves
as for me I have halted, faithful, on the island
standing like Prester John slightly sideways to the sea
and sculptured at snout level by waves and bird droppings
things things it is to you that I give
my crazed violent face ripped open in the whirlpool's depths
my face tender with fragile coves where lymphs are warming
it is myself terror it is myself
the brother of this volcano which certain without saying a word
ruminates an indefinable something that is sure
and passage as well for birds of the wind
which often stop to sleep for a season
it is thyself sweetness it is thyself
run through by the eternal sword
and the entire day advancing
branded with the red-hot iron of foundered things
and of recollected sun
Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith.

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Five Poems by Aimé Césaire - BOMB Magazine

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your eyes were a sea conch in which the heady battleof your fifteen year old blood sparkled.Even young they never had any age,or rather more than all the skyscrapersfive centuries of torturersof witch burners weighed on them,five centuries of cheap gin of big cigarsof fat bellies filled with slices of rancid biblesa five century mouth bitter with dowager sins,they were five centuries old EMMETT TILL,five centuries is the ageless age of Cain's stake.

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The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry opens with an image from the Maya Codex. The figure of a female scribe, her head bowed to her writing task, commands the field of the first page. Undeciphered glyphs float before her bent head. She heralds the mysterious transmissions that all poetries in translation augur. Beyond signaling the acts of translation that make up the anthology, the female scribe locates the origins of Latin American poetries in pre-Columbian writing systems. Reproduced in smaller detail above and below her, the image of the scribal god Pawahtún is taken from a vase in the codex style. The vase serves as a reminder of the Spanish conquerors who read diabolical intent into the unfamiliar forms of Maya writing and set out to destroy these sacred books, largely succeeding.[ 1]

Several of the anthology's core concerns are indexed in the centered image of the female scribe: the representation of female and indigenous voices and subjects, the legacy of pre-Columbian writing systems in modern and contemporary Latin American poetries, and the exploration of the interplay between writing and drawing as forms of visual poetics. Maya glyph writing is an indeterminate system which, according to one of the anthology's editors, is "designed to encourage word play," as "the system contains tendencies but not absolute rules" (xxxi, n12). To begin the book with this image also suggests a reading strategy for what follows: one delights in the open-ended relationship between image and text, source and translation.

A multilingual anthology featuring more than 120 poets and many poems that have not previously been translated into English, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry is an essential resource for any English-language reader interested in broadening or deepening her knowledge of Latin American poetries.[ 2] Alongside the traditionally canonized male poets writing in Spanish and Portuguese, editors Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman present the voices and writings of poets who have often been excluded - despite their innovative compositions - from the canons of Latin American poetry: namely, the poor, the indigenous, and women. This unique selection advances a richer and more diverse mapping of the poetic territory than has previously been offered in any single edition of Latin American poetry in English.

Spanning more than 500 years of poetry, the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry introduces English-language readers to a poetics born of mestizaje.[ 3] The bulk of the anthology (more than 400 of its 500-plus pages) is dedicated to twentieth-century poetry, indicating the artistic flourishing that followed independence (as variously achieved throughout the region in the nineteenth century) and the diversity of voices that independence unleashed, whether or not these poets were officially recognized in their lifetimes. Of the pre-twentieth-century poets represented in the anthology, more than a third are anonymous, and write in non-European languages and/or in combined drawing and writing systems. This selection of predecessors prepares us for the attention that visual poetics, oral poetry, and indigenous forms receive in the twentieth-century selections. Of the most recent works, nearly half of the selections come from oral poets or indigenous poets composing in their native languages.

In their broad conception of Latin American poetries, editors Vicuña and Livon-Grosman refuse to entrench the separation of indigenous-derived oral poetries and European-influenced text-based production that dominates most Latin American poetry anthologies. Their selections are based on a rejection of modernity's erasure of the indigenous. In this way, the anthology functions to recover the indigenous poetic traditions at the heart of Latin American experimentation, rewriting the singular focus on European-derived models without denying their importance. The aim of the anthology is clearly to introduce an English-language readership to these mixed traditions: "Latin America has a complex and prolific poetic tradition that is little known outside its geographic and linguistic boundaries" (xvii). Thus, indigenous poetic practices and languages, from pre-Columbian times to the present, are integrated with the presentation of poetry written in Spanish and Portuguese.

At an event celebrating 500 years of Latin American poetry at Poets House in New York in late fall 2009, Vicuña described the anthology as a "journey into the heart and soul of the forgotten." Following a brief video presentation of visual poetry,[ 4] local poets and translators performed highlights from the book, presenting female, indigenous, and anonymous voices alongside the male modernists more familiar to a US audience. Sound artist LaTasha Nevada Diggs performed an anonymous Inca song translated into Quechua ,and Rodrigo Toscano read from the work of Cesar Vallejo and Vicente Huidobro. Bob Holman recited contemporary Guarani poetry and Anne Waldman performed poetry by Rosa Araneda, a nineteenth-century Chilean peasant whose once-popular works are now largely forgotten.

Michelle Gil-Montero shared her own stunning translation of Maria Mercedes Carranza's poem "La Patria" (Homeland), which opens, "This house with its thick colonial walls / and nineteenth-century patio with azaleas / has been collapsing for centuries" (470). The anthology's biographical note for Carranza explains that she "was born in Bogotá, Colombia, where she also took her own life, haunted by 'country pain' - the torrent of violence and death of the undeclared civil war of her country" (470). Vicuña's revelation that Carranza was a friend of hers made her editorial vision of a poetics of resistance register more intimately for those of us present in the room. The diverse selection of readings that evening is indicative of Vicuña's interest in theorizing a "mestizo poetics" that undoes the binary between European-influenced modernist verse and more traditional or "native" poetics, as she explains in the pages of her immensely engaging and provocative introduction to the anthology.

According to Vicuña, the term "mestizo poetics" is a "loaded phrase" that describes "works that emerged from the clash of cultures in Latin America" (xix). Much like the performance scholars featured in Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Tr ansnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance, who aim to "move [away] from a Eurocentric to a transnational conception of the avant-garde," Vicuña's editorial work "recognizes that the sites of artistic innovation associated with the avant-garde tend to be sites of unacknowledged cultural hybridity and negotiation."[ 5] She cites, for example, Brazilian concrete poetry as "a modern manifestation of indigenous tradition," comparing it to the playfulness of the Maya glyph writing system (xxv). She acknowledges that concrete poets in Brazil were in dialogue with European poets and that the concrete movement developed internationally in the 1950s, but also reminds us of the "forgotten forbearers" of these visual poets (xxv).

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry offers an unparalleled selection of Latin American vernacular, visual, and oral poetics that upsets our expectations of what such an anthology can do. Not only are many of the poets here rarely canonized, but even for those we expect to find in such an anthology, a series of new translations draws attention to previously ignored or understudied aspects of the work. The seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz provides an interesting case. An excerpt from her major work "Primero Sueño" (First Dream) and her sonnets are represented in translations by Samuel Beckett. These are followed by a poem in the voices of a "black man" and "an Indian" translated by Jerome Rothenberg and Cecilia Vicuña. Written in a mix of vernacular Spanish and Nahuatl, this excerpt from Sor Juana's series of villancicos is startling in its chanting rhythms - " tumba la-lá-la tumba la-léy-ley" -and bold diction - " Huel ni machicahuac / I am not talk smart / not teco qui mati / mine am hero heart" (33-35).

Similarly, the selection of Pablo Neruda's poems does not reproduce work from The Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair or the fanciful odes to everyday objects or the later love sonnets that English-language readers are most familiar with, but puts forward three darkly surrealist works. A posthumously published poem entitled "Right, Comrade, It's the Hour of the Garden" ("Sí, camarada, es hora de jardín") ends: "Ours is a lank country / and on the naked edge of her knife / our frail flag burns" (translated by Forrest Gander, 238). The biographical note for Neruda reminds us that the Chilean poet "died in Santiago a few days after the military coup of September 11, 1973" (234). If nothing else, this final poem and note retrieve Neruda from his reputation as a universal lyricist and situate him within his own historical context.

An excerpt from the collective poem amereida, composed by an anonymous group of Chilean poets and architects in 1965,brings poetry off the page. The introductory note tells us that the poem inspired a series of "travesías" or "poetic journeys modeled after the early practices of André Breton and the surrealists but carried out with the expressed purpose of discovering the 'interior sea,' the largely unoccupied territory at the center of South America" (362). These journeys incorporated poetry performances and ephemeral art installations, recalling Vicuña's introductory comments about performance "works that interact specifically with place in a way that echoes the indigenous practices" (xxvii). A series of photographs accompanies this poem and suggests ritual interactions with dramatic landscapes. The poem itself queries a concept of discovery that occludes what is already present and gestures instead toward more occult forms of knowing: "we must clear the path - / and what may be spoken of / here / is a vast sea, a mare magnum / but hidden / because, though visible, / mostly ignored / the names -" (translated by Simon Pettet and Cecilia Vicuña, 364). Typographically, the words of the poem reach across the field of the page, creating an architecture of possibility that inspired the installations that followed in its wake.

Best known as a poet and visual artist, Vicuña links the midcentury move toward performance in Latin America not only to trends in the United States and Europe, but also to indigenous traditions. Exiled from her native Chile during the Pinochet years, Vicuña draws on Andean forms such as the quipu in her own work, negating boundaries between orality and writing, indigenous and Western forms. The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry includes two photographs of her "metaphors in space," one of which ("The earth listening to us," Con cón, Chile, 1966) is an ephemeral installation on a coastal beach in central Chile in which the poet engages in a dialogue with her physical surroundings, making use of the natural debris found there, drawing spirals in the sand and propping feathers and sticks into sculptural forms (478). Committed to the promotion of Chile's indigenous cultures, Vicuña has previously edited an anthology of Mapuche poetry, and is the cocreator of OYSI, a new online resource facilitating the transmission of indigenous forms of knowledge.

In addition to this commitment to indigenous languages, forms, and practices, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry also spotlights Latin American contributions to international modernism, especially in its representation of the innovative visual poetics of Mexican poet José Juan Tablada and Uruguayan poet Joaquín Torres García. Tablada was "a major contributor to the international symbolist movement" who "popularized caligrammes (picture-poems) and brought the haiku structure from Japan to Mexico" (101). In "Impresión de la Habana" (Havana Impressions), a sensuous yet ominously historical description of alighting upon Havana's shores composes the text that forms a picture of the same with a lighthouse, palm tree, cliffs, waves, and seagulls: description aligns with design, so that the poetic line referring to seagulls, for example, outlines a winged formation in the sky. Both this poem and Tablada's "Ideogram Lantern" are presented in Spanish, with the English translation below echoing but not replicating the visual layout of the original.

Similarly, the visual poetry of Joaquín Torres García is reproduced in Spanish with the English translation subordinated. These examples suggest the resistance of visual poetry to translation - an intransigent density resists being carried over because of the arbitrary ways in which meanings, shapes, and sounds line up in any language. While Torres García lived in Spain for much of his adult life, he returned to Uruguay at the ripe age of sixty and invented "his own theory of constructive universalism - an art inspired by the pre-Columbian traditions of the Americas" (107). The interaction of text and drawing in his work resonates with pre-Columbian writing systems, while its disjunctive syntax and informal speech registers as distinctly modern.

Violeta Parra, another major twentieth-century Chilean poet, typifies the anthology's recognition of popular or folk forms of poetry. Here, she is positioned among other Latin American poets who valorize the culture of the rural poor. Parra, whose brother Nicanor is famous for his anti-poetry,[ 6] writes in décimas, an improvisational oral form that requires leaps of wit and humor. Another innovator of popular forms, Brazilian poet Apolônio Alves dos Santos, wrote and sold cordel poetry, which he would string between posts in market places. These hanging poems were ballad-like narratives accompanied by illustrations. Later adopted by urban poets, the cordel continues to be practiced in Brazil today, according to the editors.

While Violeta Parra brought oral improvisational forms to the page, the opposite process is recorded in the works of poet and healer María Sabina, whose words were transcribed in the 1970s. An excerpt from Sabina's visionary work Vida ( Life) begins, "I am wise even from within the womb of my mother. I am the woman of the winds, of the water, of the paths, because I am known in heaven, because I am a doctor woman" (178). Though an oral autobiography, here María Sabina speaks in many voices, and their bold claims are echoed in the oral poetries of contemporary Tzotzil poets.

The last pages of the anthology offer selections from four female Mayan oral poets recorded and transcribed in Tzotzil, then translated into Spanish and English by Ámbar Past. With titles like "Prayer So My Man Won't Have to Cross the Line" and "Pexi Kola Magic," by Xunka' Utz'utz' Ni' and Loxa Jiménes Lópes, respectively, these poems allude to the unevenness of the free market system that directly links the poets to the anthology's readers, even though the poems themselves must travel across multiple acts of transcription and translation. Both poems are addressed to the gods: one is a plea to not be forced to cross the Mexico-US border for work, and the other is a prayer that the poet's soft drinks will sell.

The major drawback of this anthology is that only the English translations are presented in lineated form while the original versions of the poems are presented in blocks of texts with single and double slash marks to indicate line breaks and stanza breaks, making going back and forth between the originals and translations quite cumbersome.[ 7] The substantial number of multilingual translations from an indigenous language first into Spanish and then into English presents a formatting challenge that bilingual anthologies can avoid with a simple side-by-side presentation. However, traditional side-by-side presentation would come at the cost of significantly reducing the number of contributors due to spatial concerns. Because this anthology has the potential to arouse many readers' interests in new and unfamiliar poets (whose principal works are recommended for further reading in the biographical notes), the less-than-ideal formatting seems the lesser evil precisely because it allows for a greater range of exposure.

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry is an essential resource for US teachers and students of poetry as we move away from the study of an isolated American poetry and toward the teaching of a more inclusive poetry of the Americas. The relative isolation in which the poetries of the United States and Latin America have traditionally been studied no longer fits our contemporary moment of intensified intrahemispheric cultural contact. Indeed, this isolationist model can be seen as a relic of Cold War mappings as much as an effect of language differences. The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry serves as a compass for those of us interested in remapping the hemisphere to reflect our actual connections and relations in and across languages. An anonymous female Maya scribe offers to carry us over into this multitemporal, multigeographical zone - that is, when we're ready to heed her glyphs.

1. The content of these books, in which the Maya recorded their histories and myths, has largely survived through reproductions on murals and vases predating the conquest.

2. The subtitle of "a bilingual anthology" is simply inaccurate. In addition to the English translations of Spanish and Portuguese, there are poems translated from Quechua, Guarani, Mapudungun, Nahuatl, and several Maya languages, including Yucatec, K'iche', and Tzotzil. To be fair, however, the book jacket acknowledges that this "is the first anthology to present a full range of multilingual poetries from Latin America."

3. Mestizaje here broadly refers to the mixing of European and indigenous cultures that occurred as a consequence of colonization in the Americas.

4. The video surveyed Painted Ideas, an exhibit curated by Vicuña that featured visual poetry from the anthology (see http://www.ceciliadetorres.com/paintedideas/paintedideas_ex.html).

5. See James M. Harding and John Rouse's introduction to Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 2.

6. Also included in the anthology, Nicanor Parra's anti-poetry mobilizes colloquial forms of speech.

7. The exceptions to the rule are certain visual poems; as I mention above, visual poems necessitate the opposite approach, where the translation appears beneath the image as a block of text.

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The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry opens with an image from the Maya Codex. The figure of a female scribe, her head bowed to her writing task, commands the field of the first page. Undeciphered glyphs float before her bent head. She heralds the mysterious transmissions that all poetries in translation augur.

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Ballots & Bullets | School of Politics & International Relations, University of Nottingham

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Au bout du petit matin...

At the brink of dawn...

So begins Aimé Césaire's wonderful 1939 Cahier d'un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, described by Andre Breton as 'nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. Césaire, writer and politician, was born in 1913 in Martinique and died in 2008. He was one of the founders of Negritude, the international black consciousness movement that challenged colonialism and racial inferiority. Césaire served as mayor of the Martinique capital and was a deputy in France's National Assembly almost continuously for five decades. Césaire has been described as ' perhaps the greatest poet of the anti-colonial movement '.

For those like me whose school French is now diabolical there is a Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard's inspired translation in Bloodaxe publishers' French-English bilingual edition.

Long summer days are the best for reading Césaire's Notebook. But Césaire's poem is no soft, complacent, honeyed read, for all its evocative lyricism:

Au bout du petit matin...
Va-t-en, lui disais-je, gueule de flic....

At the brink of dawn...
Get lost I said you cop face....

Césaire's poem demands we shake off our lethargy and confront the disaster of European colonialism:

Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d'anêses freles les Antilles qui on faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole...

At the brink of dawn budding with frail creeks, the hungry West Indies, the West Indies pockpitted with smallpox...

Césaire, as one of the leaders of the Negritude movement, seeks to awaken the revolutionary power of language. Words matter to Césaire:

Des mots? Quand nous manions des quartiers de monde, quand nour épousons des continents en délire, quand nous forçons de fumantes portes, des mots, ah oui, des mots! Mais des mots de sang frais, des mots qui sont des raz-de-marée et des érésipèles et des paludismes et et des laves et des feux de brousse...

Words? As we handle quarters of the world, as we marry delirious continents, as we break down steaming doors, words, oh yes, words! But words of fresh blood, words which are tidal waves and erysipelas and malarias and lavas and bush-fires...

Poetic experimentation - fusing the idioms of Césaire's birthplace and literary French, coining new words, conjuring surrealist images, and reversing traditional metaphors - envisages new ways of speaking and being. White becomes the colour of evil, of death, of the white snow that imprisons Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the 1790s' Haitian slave revolt against the French colonial power where 'negritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity':

Au bout du petit matin, cette ville plate - étalée...
Elle rampe sur les main sans jamais aucune envie de vriller
le ciel d'une stature de protestation...

At the brink of dawn, this flat town - staked out,
It crawls on its hands with never any impulse to pierce the sky
with a posture of protest...

Césaire's poem was heralded by Breton as renewing the French language and renewing the exhausted war-torn European culture against 'the general abdication of the spirit'. As such Cesaire was not only the poet of the anti-colonial movement, but a poet offering humanity an inspired vision after the barbarity of world war.

For while the poem is entitled a Notebook of a Return, Césaire's poem is no celebration of return to the past, but a humanist aspiration for the future:

car il n'est point vrai que l'œuvre de l'homme est finie
que nous n'avons rien á faire au monde
qu'il suffit que nous nous mettions au pas du monde
mais l'œuvre de l'homme vient seulement de commencer...

for it is not true that man's work is completed
that we have nothing to do in the world
that we parasite the world
that all we need is to walk in step with the world
but man's work has only begun...

Césaire's Notebook has attracted detailed commentaries. But it is best simply to immerse oneself in the poem. So swim this summer in Césaire's purging words and 'rediscover the secret of great communications'.
Vanessa Pupavac is author of Language Rights: From Free Speech to Linguistic Governance, which includes a discussion of Césaire on Negritude and anti-colonial ideas.

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Aimé Césaire and the revolutionary power of language

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Au bout du petit matin... At the brink of dawn... So begins Aimé Césaire's wonderful 1939 Cahier d'un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, described by Andre Breton as 'nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time'.

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Obituary: Martinican politician, intellectual and poet who was a founding father of the négritude movement