El modesto misterio

For the midterm assignment I will be comparing and analyzing a poem by Pablo Neruda: “Puedo escribir los versos mas tristes,” also known as Poema 20,  to translations by Mark Eisner (“I can write the saddest verses tonight”) and W.S Merwin (“Tonight I can write”).

-Mishelle Farer

Pedro Antonio Franco

Author: Elia Baltazar
Photo by: Pedro Valtierra
“They didn’t hurt him, did they? They didn’t beat him up first, did they?” Ana Virginia, your wife, asks frantically. She wants to know what happened to you. She wants to find comfort at least by thinking that the darkness fell quickly upon your large and robust body that was no longer able to see. Strong as she remembers you, she just wants to imagine that you left complete and without pain. You had already had enough since you were young, when you left San Vicente to enroll in an army that made war in that small country of yours. You became Sergeant with no wounds. Just a finger broken by a bullet. The worst was your fear when you felt your life ending though the blood of others. She did not know you yet, but you were already looking for her. You always told her that as a compliment, when you spoke about San Miguel, where she had grown up and you hanged around. “Why didn’t I meet you before to steal you?” you would tell her laughing. “Really?” She would ask you. A woman who knew the harsh treatment of men appreciated that you did not yell at her, did not hurt her, that you called her Tinita and that you showed her off: “I have found the most beautiful woman in this world,” you would tell one of your six brothers. You were as affectionate with her as with her three children and grandchildren. You loved them as if they were your own and she was grateful for that. She returned your kindness and love by getting up at dawn to heat up your food and atole before seeing you leave to work at that construction job that would break your back. You had already experienced hard working days before. In the fields and as bus dispatcher. At 55, you were well-trained in the necessities of a poor country. However, you had never carried 80 pounds (approximately 36 kilograms) all day, every day. Until you arrived at Maryland, where you met her eight years ago, on the platform of the train you both took to go back home. One station separated you so you decided it was better to take her to live with you. You traveled to El Salvador to get married and then you returned together to the United States. There she said good bye, you had to leave her: your job had been lost in the real estate collapse, you were sick, and with no work permit. That’s why you returned to El Salvador, to get as a citizen, a surgery that would be impossible to get as an immigrant. In El Delirio, the community where you left land and house, your health and the nostalgia returned. You did not want to be by yourself in San Miguel. Also, you were soon going back there together again. In two or three years, you promised. When there would be enough money to buy some animals. You went to Mexico only with the things needed for the days to come and you traveled more than 1500 kilometers until arriving to San Fernando, Tamaulipas: 300 kilometers before the border with the United States, your future ended. One day before your death, a man called Ana Virginia to tell her you would cross the border that night. On the next day, you were found lying on the uneven piece of land that you got in life. A poet whose last name is Dalton could have written for you: “The night comes and destroys everything/ viscose, devastating sea/ nothing forgives the relentless”

Translated by: Alejandra Garcia and Vanessa Fernandez

Yeimi Victoria Castro

Author: Wilbert Torre

Yeimi dreamed of the most anticipated of her parties. She nurtured pink dreams and there was nothing wrong with it: that is life when you are waiting to turn 15. She lived with her grandparents in the farmhouse Las Peñitas del cantón El Rebalse, in the city of Pasaquina, La Unión, El Salvador, a town with a central park that exhibits gardens of geometrical shapes and a cream color parish. Life had the usual complications – money wasn’t enough, split families, mothers and fathers that cross the border to forge their children with a future from afar- but it’s generally gentle. During vacation time everything happened between runaways to the beach and sunsets under the skirts of the Conchagua volcano. The grandparents Cayetano y Victoria took care of everything with the dollars that Yeimi’s mother sent from New York. The day she turned fifteen years old she looked beautiful in her pink dress with blue details. On the house’s table there was a cake and an album for pictures with pink laces. After that party Yaimi continued to dream. She dreamed of princes and quite often they were near her door: she was being hovered by a young man from Nicaragua that melted for her. She also wished to be with her mother. She missed her. Her mother already had plans for her: she would study in a school in New York, then she would work and maybe one day she would get married. It wasn’t a complicated departure. In the town, in addition to the park, the volcano and the beaches, there were also coyotes that announced themselves with labels outside of the homes. On August 10^th Yeimi took of to the United States. She wore a sky-blue t-shirt and blue jeans. The coyote received three thousand dollars up front of the seven thousand in which the deal consisted. The grandparents gave her their blessing. She called them on the phone twice to let them know she was in Guatemala and that everything was ok. They never heard from her again. A few days later all of her dreams disappeared, scared off by monsters, like it happens in bedtime stories. In one of her pockets she carried her birth certificate: her ticket of entry to a city she didn’t know and in which she would continue dreaming. The story of Yeimi shouldn’t have ended this way.

Translated by: Alvaro Mojica

Author: Luis Guillermo Hernandez

Photo: Javier Garcia

Carlos lived for his mother and she proudly requited his fondness. The love of a Caribbean mother, living near the beaches of Triunfo de la Cruz, in Tela, Honduras, and the love of a garifuna boy, a handsome black Honduran almost 20 years old with a dream in his eyes. “He wanted to lift his mother, Isadora, out of poverty…give his mother everything. He was the only son, and here he couldn’t do that, that’s why he decided to leave.”Alejandro, his uncle, says that he still seems to be seeing Carlos when he was a cipote of 11, 13 years old: he milked the cows and herded the neighbor’s cattle through the mountains of his village, hugged his mother, took care of his five sisters and ran to the beach to play with the other cipotes garifunas: the new blood of a culture born around 1635 when Spanish ships loaded with African slaves shipwrecked near the island of San Vicente and the first garifunas swam, released to the nearby shores, to later mingle and expand into what today are Honduras, Belize, and Guatemala. Tall as the palm trees of the Atlantic coast, well built, muscular, with a wide smile and fleshy mouth that display dark tones, Carlos had two passions: soccer, in which he played defense as if he were a professional, and music. He was born the year “Sopa de Caracol” by the Honduran group Banda Blanca won the heart of half of Latin America with a dance known as “Punta” garifuna– “Watbuinegui consup, watabuinegui wanaga, si tu quieres bailar sopa de caracol eh!” Perhaps that was why he liked to dance. He would go to a club in the nearby town of Tela, because there they played modern music like pop, reggaetton, and “Punta” which his mother liked to dance, as well. But Carlos could no longer stay in his village; watching his mother strive for money hurt him – the pride of the black male. “It didn’t suit him anymore. You know what it’s like; one week there’s work, the next there’s none. It was Carlos’ first time, leaving Triunfo.” He expected to reach Miami and his uncles, who had the money to pay the smugglers for getting him and his other uncle Junior Basilio Espinoza across. The night of their departure, having thought that they would find a job at a restaurant or even in the orange groves of Florida, Carlos sported a red shirt with a bright golden eagle and Junior a white shirt. They decided that’s how they would dress to enter the paradise of abundant pay. “Perhaps they were told they would arrive that same night and that’s why they wore those clothes…and with those same clothes on, they were killed”. Alejandro, who’s talking, moves the phone away from his mouth and begins to cough: 72 murders together annihilate any throat, any soul, any possible hope of any country. Almost three months after his departure on August 9,2010, Carlos Alejandro has not yet returned to Honduras. Isadora waits impatiently for her son. “Every day, every week they tell her he’s arriving, he’s arriving, and he never arrives.” The love of a Caribbean mother, she’s waiting to take him in her arms, to sing him uragas garifunas that tell the legends Carlos would have liked to hear about his own life. She will retell the love of a loving young man and then she will proudly return his body to the sands of the coast of Triunfo de la Cruz. 

Translated by: Lucy Riera and Cindy Riano

AUTHOR

Guillermo Osorno

 Salvadoran still unidentified

Nobody knows his name. If it matters, but it does not matter. Better I will tell you what I think.  I think he is dead, that’s for sure. I think the hardest part is over. This is also  sure.  Although it was something that he was repeating along the way. He did not know that things could get worse. I think at one point he had to walk barefoot. I think he was mugged at gunpoint on a train before he gets at  Oaxaca. I think his life in El Salvador was not good. I think the  La Mala Salvatrucha killed  his brother or some other relative. I think he went to the  United States to meet with a family member, to see If they wanted  him. I think someone told him on the road that he was kidnapped by police officers and that they have asked for money  his relatives from the United States for money. And then the officers hit that someone, released him and he end up at a shelter,where the two met.I think he did not know what to say. I think he and the other people who died in Tamaulipas were grabbed to ask for money. I think when he had the blindfold, before he was shot, he remembered that he drank water from puddles and begged to eat.

Translated by Ruth Morocho

Unidentified Male Immigrant

Author: Martín Solares

Photo: Nicola Ókin Frioli

For some time now, I dream about a device with lions. There are variations, but is always the same dream. In the latest dream I find myself in a desert land, a sheet suitable for animal survival. The action begins the instant I see myself running with a group of people in a kind of corridor, along which, there are arranged 12 rooms, one for each month of the year and in each one awaits a lion. We can see the lions because the doors are made of a transparent material but solid enough to contain these big animals. There are more people with me, strangers, specially the faces that one may find out into the streets. We are a large group, running in single line like we are going to work.  Every now and then a door opens and a lion comes out to devour someone, causing panic to those around the scene. Then, someone assigns a number to the fallen and we gradually forget his name. The group continues to progress and at the end of the day we come back to where we started. Today it happened to the person in front on me. I hadn’t notice, but the device treats us as if we were an anonymous and stupid herd, destined to die. That’s how the building is made of, a cruel perfection.  The architecture itself is not enough to explain everything. We assume that magic is involved here because something else happens: every time we complete a round we stop using a word. I wouldn’t have believed how fast certain words can be forgotten; how impoverishes us to lose sight of these words. Perhaps that explains why some people have started to scream. Contrary to what other people say, we are not idly. We have tried everything in the sleep’s variants: from escape the situation to lock these beasts. But nobody wants to die, the walls are too high and nobody ever taught us how to stop the lions. Many succumb to despair or reluctance. It is enough to realize that it wasn’t us who designed this, nor we deserve it. Or maybe it was enough that we ignore the existence of lions over the years, for them to be imposed in the place where they are. The device is strong and lasting. Perhaps I’ll get worse. On days like this, nothing that comes from the mind or spirit promises to be able to mitigate the pain. But then, other nights come when we arrive at our homes disappointed and exhausted, and conclude how badly we need a mythology, some legends that talk about those who were imprisoned here before us and their lucky or naive attempts to find their way out.

Honduran immigrant shot in Tapachula, Chiapas.

Translated by: Teresa Cabrera

Don Quixote was a novel published in 1605, since then both the Spanish and English languages have changed and evolved. Reading the original Don Quixote involves heavy use of the Spanish dictionary in order to understand the vocabulary used in the sixteen hundreds.

The translation by John Ormsby: Don Quixote (1885) gave me the feeling of a word by word translation, so precise that it started with “In a village of La Mancha” and included the word “Olla”. The structure of the sentence and the word olla did not make sense grammatically.

The second translation by Samuel Putnam, Don Quixote (1949) was smoother to the eye. However, it still showed features of literal translation in the opening sentence and the age description of the Quixote, his niece and the housekeeper.

John Rutherford and Edith Grossman publish their translations of Don Quixote the same year (2003). John is British and Edith is American so their approach to the translation made them quite different but both easy to read and understand. In my opinion Edith mastered a way to use words that resemble the original word in Spanish, making her work much more appealing.

Daisy Mordan

Migrant yet unidentified

Author: Cynthia Rodriguez

Photo: Edu Ponces

Since the very beginning when you left you never kept your promises. Six years ago, you said you were tired of what you were getting paid here, in the banana’s company you used to do everything you could and the money you made was still not enough. This is why you said you were going to go to work to the United States in order to support me and both of our kids.

We were waiting to hear news from you every day, waiting for you to talk to us, to see how you were, how you arrived… In the mean time I started looking for a job because the savings we had you took it  for the trip.

The first news of you came from a neighbor who had seen you around, near town. The old lady convinced me to go look for you and see if it was really true and yes it was, you neither went to the United States nor were looking for a job to support us like you said you would. When we found you, you were already living with another woman and regardless of how many times we said we forgave you, you still never came back to us. That was the first time you abandoned us.

When you really left to the United States, you came  back to say good bye to the boys and you promised them the same: you promised you will send them money as soon as you get a job, got them all excited saying you will also send someone for them later, but you broke that promise too. When the news of what happened in Mexico arrived, we wanted to believe that you were ok, and then they told us that out of the people they found, you were there too. It hurt me a lot because you know I loved you and because you were the father of my children, and they really loved you, even though, when you lived with us, you used to pound and hit us a lot because you also drank a lot. We do not hold any grudges, even though this woman didn’t even let me be at your funeral nor to receive you at the airport when you were brought in your coffin, I was not even allowed to be in your funeral so only the kids went. I always prayed for you, and I still do, even though you are not here.

Daisy Mordan

Migrant yet unidentified

Author: Cynthia Rodriguez

Photo: Edu Ponces

Since the first time that you left, your promises have never been accomplished. Six years ago, you said you were tired of what you were getting paid here.  At the banana company you used to do everything you could and the money you made was still not enough. Consequently, You decided to migrate into the United States to work and provide to the fullest for our children and me.

We were waiting to hear news from you every day, to talk to you, to know how you were doing, and to find out about your arrival… In the mean time I started looking for a job since you took the few savings we had and spent it on your trip.

The first news of you came from a neighbor who had seen you around, near town. An old lady convinced me to go look for you and see if it was really true and yes it was: You neither went to the United States nor were looking for a job to support us like you said you would. When we found you, you were already living with another woman and regardless of how many times we said we forgave you, you still never came back to us. That was the first time you abandoned us.

When you really left to the United States, you came back to say good-bye to the boys and promised them the same:  That you would send them money as soon as you get a job. Furthermore, they got very excited when they heard that you would send for them later, but you broke that promise too. When the news of what had happened in Mexico arrived, we wanted to believe that you were ok, and then they told us that you were included among the people they found. It hurt me a lot because you know I loved you and because you were the father of my children who also loved you despite we were victims of domestic violence as a result of your drunkenness. We do not bear any grudges although she didn’t even let me be at your funeral nor to receive you at the airport when you were brought in your coffin. Only our children were allowed at the funeral. I always prayed God for your repentment and continue asking him for your blessing even though you are not here and inflicted a lot of suffering to us.

Author: Saul Hernandez

Photo: Eniac Martinez

Cantalicio Barahona Vargas was born in San Antonio de Cortes in the north of Honduras near Guatemala. Part of his life was spent in San Pedro Sula with his first wife and four daughters. La ciudad de los zorzales, a song composed and sung by the Honduran Polache, emphasizes the poverty, violence, and crime its citizens have to live with; the same city where the maquiladoras are part of the landscape but it ‘is not there, inert and definitive’ as writer Christina Rivera Garza stated in her blog: landscapes can shift and change. Cantalicio worked as a welder and driver, and judging the photo he also worked at a public security corporation. Later, when work had dried up like an arid and desert terrain, Cantalicio realized that immigration was a strategy for employment and improvement to his quality of life; therefore, he traveled to the United States.

For seven years, he lived intermittently between the United States and his native Honduras. In both places he had family. Del otro lado, his nephew Victor Manuel Escobar Pineda lived with his wife and five children. More than once, despite the terrible conditions on the road, Cantalicio crossed the south of Mexico without major setbacks. Cantalicio was a quiet man, and neither his family nor friends thought this would happen to him. On August 22, 2010, at the age of 55, his life took another turn: he was killed along with 71 other immigrants. Among them was Cantalicio’s nephew, Victor Manuel, 36 years old, who worked –supposedly illegally– somewhere in Houston, Texas.

A person close to Cantalicio said, in one of our telephone conversations, that he did not believe this project would come to anything. Perhaps this is true since he isn’t wrong: this text, brief and concise, will not bring Cantalicio back to life. It will only serve to expose and repeat, perhaps above all, the words that with such dignity and courage, Luz María Dávila said when her children along with other students were massacred in the war–a drug war– that Felipe Calderón began without asking anyone. Words that were echoed in the writing of Cristina Rivera Garza: “You are not my friend, this/is the hand I do not give you […]/Mr. President/[…] I give you/my back//my thirst, I give you my unknown shivers, my remorseful tenderness, my resplendent birds, my deaths.”

When Cantalicio returned to San Pedro Sula, his mother Rumualda Barahona, said through tears, bent with sadness, and with the heaviness of her 86 years in each word: “my son, you are home.” And perhaps, in tears and the silent behind them, Rumualda only demanded – or demands, better said – one thing: justice or at least, a glimpse of it.

Mayra Izabel Cifuentes Pineda

By: Laura Toribio

Translated by: Ana Recio & Cesar Parra

Only 26 hours. No more than 26 were left when you called your mother for the last time. Almost nothing, Mayra, after the 14 days of travel since you left your land, Guatemala, en route to the United States. Those hours were nothing since you had already been living for 24 years in a village of La Gomera in the city of Esquintla, in misery and without options. Seeing your dad break his back cutting fruit in a farm for a few cents, barely enough to provide enough food for you and your six brothers.

They were only beans. What were 26 hours? Since it cost you a month to make the most difficult decision for a mother: abandoning your child. You had to do it, you Gustavo, your five year old little one. But you had no choice, I know, your mother confessed that to me, you didn’t want him to have your luck: dropping out of the fourth grade with only the option of living in a room made of aluminum that wasn’t his to own, it was rented.

Caramel skinned with sleepy eyes, nappy haired and short. I know you yearned for a dignified life for you and yours, and they know it too. And you made that very clear on that fourth day in August when you marched out: you promised your son a bike and a robot; your dad that you’d send him money so he didn’t have to work any longer; to yourself, that you’d save so you could build a house for your mom and your brothers.

You had yet to find out that you were going to work in New Jersey, where you’d arrive to meet with your uncle and cousin, but you’d already decided you weren’t going to be away from your son for more than two years. You left him in your moms care, and asked him to look after her as well. And you left in search of what Guatemala simply denied you of: opportunity.

She also wished she was with her mother; she missed her. Her mother had plans for her: she would go to school in New York, then work and maybe some day get married. A simple deal. Besides a park, a volcano and beaches, the town also had coyotes that announced their presence outside the houses.

On August 10th Yeimi headed to the U.S She was wearing a turquoise shirt and jeans. The coyote got three thousand dollars in advance, out of the seven thousand in total of the agreement. The grandparents gave their blessings. She spoke to them twice over the phone to let them know she was in Guatemala, and that everything was OK. They didn’t hear from her again. A few days later their dreams were crushed, by monsters just like in fairytales.

She carried her birth certificate in one of her pockets: her ticket to a city she did not know and where her dream would carry on. Yeimi’s story needed not to end this way.