She Spares Nothing

The poet Miyó Vestrini was born in France in 1938 and immigrated to Venezuela with her family when she was nine years old. At 18, she became the only woman to join the experimental literary group Apocalipsis, a collective of experimental writers based in Maracaibo, and went on to work as a cultural journalist who directed the arts section of the newspaper El Nacional. She published three books of smart, bitter, joyful poetry before taking her own life in 1991, in Caracas, at age 53.

Her arresting humor glints through even the saddest and angriest of her poems. Addressing God, for instance, she writes, “Suppose, lord, / that you are the big-bang. That no territory escapes your vigilance. / That hot dogs are the subject of your predilections. / That your desire for me is an obscene part / of your personality.” With Grenade in Mouth (2019), an English-language selection of Vestrini’s oeuvre published by Kenning Editions, American poets and co-translators Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig—working closely with Faride Mereb, editor of Letras Muertas Press—have ensured that Vestrini’s singular sensibility shines anew. There’s something almost liturgical in Vestrini’s approach, as though she’s observing last rites for herself and the irrevocably broken but lovable world. Her death-obsessed poetry is an act of defiance in a culture that often seeks to suppress frank discussions of the subject. Vestrini’s thirst for life—for friends, sex, food, comfort, thinking, feeling—radiates brightly and unsentimentally amid audacious morbidity.

I exchanged emails with Boyer, Gillig, and Mereb to talk about Vestrini’s “clear contempt for the hypocrisy of socially responsible restraint,” how translators can be both angels and devils, and how “what we think of as melodrama is often just a mode of feeling.” The following exchange was condensed and edited.

How did you learn about Vestrini’s poetry? What drew you to her?

Anne Boyer: When I was diagnosed with cancer and learned of the cognitive damage that came from chemotherapy, I asked my friend Guillermo Parra for a poet to translate in hopes of keeping my mind sharp during treatment. He gave me a PDF of Vestrini’s collected poems, and when Cassandra [Gillig] came to take care of me, we began to translate [Vestrini’s] work as a way to get through the most painful and difficult days after a chemotherapy round. We had no intention of properly publishing the translations or of being official “translators”—we merely loved the poetry and wanted to bring it into our language so we could fully understand. Each line was a thrill, and it moved us to the next and from poem to poem.

Given how richly connotative and ambiguous individual words—and even entire poems—can be, it seems two heads might be better than one in evaluating options for translation. How did you decide to work together on this project, and what was your method of collaboration? Were you ever at odds?

Cassandra Gillig: We put the translations we made during Anne’s treatment into a free PDF for our friends, and that led us to Faride Mereb, which led to more translating and, eventually, to Patrick Durgin at Kenning Editions.

AB: Cassandra is much better with Spanish than I am, so she kept me from falling too in love with the “bad” translation that sometimes appears like good poetry, balancing the poetry to poetry translation aspect with the necessity of it being translation from language to language, too.

CG: And Anne kept me from obsessing too much with the accuracy and letting the poem move a little differently so it could exist with the same feeling. Working together gave us more imaginative and truer translations than our anxieties about precision and lyricality would have permitted working alone. More than just the two of us translating together, it is also a project that is deeply collaborative overall, and much of it—from editing to the exceptional design to the impetus—emerges from Faride's passion, talent, and drive.

Many hands are wrung over what’s lost in translation, but a great deal can also be gained. What, ideally, is the role of the translator, and what duty do translators have to the work they present?

AB/CG: Translators are angels—pure mediation—when they are at their best and devils—impure mediation—at their worst. But the truth is we think Vestrini, like us, would have found devils charming. We came to know Vestrini through these poems, and when direct translation was impossible, we had to improvise—to fill in the blanks using the bits of ourselves that deeply related to her work. As we mention in our introduction, there is no perfect way to transfer the emotion and sound of Vestrini’s original words—English has its limitations. And the shame we have about being depressed or flawed individuals comes through in these limitations—to declare oneself miserable is perceived as falling into traps of the childish or the melodramatic. But what we think of as melodrama is often just a mode of feeling—feeling that is unconcerned with and unhindered by embarrassment of having any feelings at all. Spanish has a way of expressing this truth that English cannot rival, and this was the most difficult thing to tackle.

You issue a warning in your introduction: “Readers must be careful. In the work of Vestrini, there is no casual or harmless reading.” Why is she such a dangerous poet?

AB/CG: She is dangerous because she is a very good poet writing about “bad” things—heartbreak, banality, and the desire to die—with no prophylactic of sentimentality and with a clear contempt for the hypocrisy of socially responsible restraint. She spares nothing, not even herself. It is easy to fall in love with this mode of being. It is always dangerous to read the work of someone who is neither self-aggrandizing nor in pursuit of glamour. Vestrini presents a flawed life lived—and lived well. We hope these poems are a salve for those who move through the world with similar pain.

You write that “the thanatophilia of these poems is erotic, unashamed, and indulged in with sometimes gleeful candor. If there is one thing about life to love without reservation, posits her work, it is that life is allowed the mercy of an end.” How does she make such an arguably dark affinity shine so brightly on the page?

AB/CG: We wish we knew how she made such a grim thing as wanting to die into great art because then we would be better poets. But what we do know is that with Vestrini, there’s no glorification of death—it is very matter of fact. And that, in a way, glimmers. For some, suicidal desire is a desire to live better—in a better world—to exist beyond all this suffering we endure while alive in the world as it is now. To write toward one’s own end is to write with a level of agency that is not granted to us in other realms. This power radiates, too.

Although Vestrini writes, “Confess it: reading poetry is a boring duty most of the time,” her poetry is anything but. In fact, when Cassandra sent me my copy, she wrote, “I really hope you enjoy the book. Enjoy’s a funny word here but you know.” I do know because the book is incredibly enjoyable, which seems perhaps paradoxical given how bleak much of the material is. What is it about Vestrini’s poetry that makes it funny and fun?

AB/CG: Humor is a dexterous coping mechanism. You can either unload all your pain with complete seriousness, leaving your listener stilted and wordless, or you can make light of your situation, which comes with its own set of instructions—laugh, relate, tell me the world is a mess and you feel it too. To be humorous in a moment of suffering is to build a bridge, to refuse the isolation that so often keeps us suffering. Vestrini’s humor translates really well because it is rooted in a lot of universal experiences. She is a master of observation. She knows what is funny about life because she has studied its every detail in her hunt for hiding places—moments of joy to escape the madness. She’s also, frankly, an expert in smooth, sick burns, like if somebody nonchalantly mentions that you’ve got no daring in your “thin chicken lips,” you don’t come back from that!

The ephemera you chose to publish with the translations include a reproduction of a piece titled “Civilization rests on translation,” which appeared in the magazine Criticarte in December 1985, and a joyful black-and-white photograph of Vestrini and her friend La Negra, circa 1970–1975, in which they grapple happily in a kitchen with a bottle of wine. Why did you incorporate these artifacts?

Faride Mereb: I found the facsimile from Criticarte with Diana Moncada [a fellow Venezuelan poet and journalist who wrote the preface to Al Filo, a collection of literary interviews by Vestrini that came out in 2015] while we were doing research for Letras Muertas Press’s second book on Vestrini’s journalism career. We didn’t end up using this material, so I published it digitally. In all of my projects on Vestrini, there were very few photographs to work with. I had to look through La Negra’s personal archive and convince her to publish the photo with the wine since it was very intimate but did a great job of portraying their friendship. They were next-door neighbors for a long time, so they constantly shared meals, wine, coffee, etc. Vestrini didn’t have a positive image of herself and chose not to take a lot of photos. We hope that together all these things get readers closer to understanding all the sides of Vestrini.

For Vestrini’s author image, you use a picture of her in sunglasses lying on a beach. I appreciate how contemporary and vital she looks.

FM: This photo was part of another book Vestrini made about Salvador Garmendia, La Negra’s husband. That book included portraits of both of them, and this image caught my eye because Vestrini looked so fearless and confident. So unusual. And that book was never reprinted or translated, and the original photograph was never given back to her or her family, so I had to make that reproduction from the printed book. That’s why it has a different quality—a different finish and texture, which I love. It evokes the archival process.

The sense one has upon finishing this book is “I’d like to read more.” Is there more? Do you think you’ll continue translating her work?

CG: There is more! Vestrini has many more poems and books of nonfiction too. We hope one day it will all be available, but our collaborative efforts are on hiatus now. I have started to translate a contemporary of Vestrini, Lydda Franco Farías, and hope to translate more Venezuelan poets. We are both lifelong translators because we are moved through the world by our curiosity.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you about this project that would be your dream question?

AB/CG: Our dream question is maybe more of a dream answer, which is that someone would tell us how to get Vestrini’s poems into the hands of everyone who needs them as soon as possible. Maybe this interview will help.