Tender Complicity

My encounter with Tilsa Otta’s work began with the translations of Honora Spicer and the publishing energy of Giancarlo Huapaya. Cardboard House Press, the Phoenix-based publisher that Huapaya founded in 2014, has since become an important conduit for English-language translations of risky twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American poetry. This body of work eases my own diasporic estrangement from my birthplace of Lima, Peru, giving me access to books curated by a sensibility that feels hemispheric. I mean that, despite regional and temporal particularities, Cardboard House Press’s catalog attests to existing resonances among the Americas even as it lays the scaffolding for a more dialogic, intimate, and intentional hemispheric verse culture yet to come.

In 2023 Cardboard House published a chapbook collecting Spicer’s vibrant translations of poems from two of Otta’s recent Spanish-language books. Extending that energy, in The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024) I’ve created “a playlist” from four of Otta’s poetry collections, gathering work originally published in Spanish between 2004 and 2018. My hope is that this collection helps expand the scaffolding established by Cardboard House and many other small presses committed to translation. My collaboration with Otta is dedicated to that hemispheric verse that will one day exceed the traditions of any one literature, the boundaries of any one nation, and the gatekeepers of any one publishing industry to realize the possibilities of reciprocity without occluding difference, desire without consumption.

Otta was born in Lima in 1982 to sociologist parents. Through her father, she enters a complex lineage that braids her Quechua-speaking indigenous grandmother and her Japanese grandfather. Her education at an alternative school foregrounded her artistic practice, and by age 15 she was reading and writing poetry. Her literary pursuits opened an interior space of reflection and interrogation, habits of mind that would support her burgeoning queerness and eventual search for community outside of Peru’s religiously conservative norms.

Since 2004, when Otta’s debut collection appeared, Peruvian critics have paid attention. Reviews of her recent work (from 2014 and 2018) tend to characterize the arc of her practice as a movement from complex irony toward poems that expand into a mystically affirming mode. These more recent works have their own range, one that can veer confidently from the embodied and raucous to a meditative stillness that sinks into depths at once intensely private and intensely communal.

Otta has characterized her own place in contemporary Peruvian poetry by noting that she feels, “poetically speaking, a bit of an extraterrestrial.” I share that sense of her singularity; her mixture of the cosmic with the erotic, the critical with the fabulist is rare in any national literature. The image of an astral traveler with which she figures herself tracks with the intergalactic themes that have been a constant throughout her work. But the astral and aesthetic arcs along which Otta and her reviewers plot her work have occurred across a particular backdrop.

Otta came of age during Alberto Fujimori’s totalitarian regime, a regime that wrung Peru through a period of forced privatization and social repression that lasted from Fujimori’s disbanding of congress in 1992 to the year 2000, when he fled to Japan to escape prosecution for bribery and corruption. Peru’s troubles are no more its own making than those of any other Latin American republic whose resources are coveted by dominant economies and states. Peru’s totalitarian experience didn’t begin or end with Fujimori. As I write this, Peru is in a new period of destabilization instigated, this time, by congress preemptively ousting a president who was on the verge of disbanding congress. The ensuing protests prompted a police response that has left, by some reports, at least fifty dead and counting.

Amidst cycles of naked power, fantasies of democracy recede. Poetry can respond, as Otta has said in a recent interview, by democratizing the possibility of the sacred for everything and everyone. The poems gathered in this folio travel across a range of tonal and aesthetic heavens, but they ground themselves in the possibility of innocence as an illuminated state beyond received ideas of good and evil. That innocence is never naïve. On the contrary, the light in these poems emanates not from a celestial source but from the poems’ unflinching proximity to life lived through all its modes. Among the arts of relation, proximity is tricky because it’s so precisely technical. How to extend with the reach of one’s appetites? How to hesitate leaving space enough for others’ extensions? How to stay proximate enough that others will have something to extend toward? How to do all of this believing less in the selves that extend and hesitate and more in the weave these gestures make together?

If these questions animate the metaphysics of Otta’s poems, they also frame those poems’ translation. On one hand, certain moments of intense musicality invite the translation to reach for maximal proximity (appropriate for a body of work that affirms the club as a site of liberation). The poem “The hormone of darkness” includes the line “Sobre las alcantarillas con el mohín crítico de bebé en cítricos,” in which the majority of syllables play a steady backing track to the alliterative slaps of the dactyls “crítico” and “cítricos.” The translation answers those dactyls by constellating the trochees “grimace” and “citrus”: “Over the sewers with a chiding grimace of a baby on citrus.” Similarly, in “Definitive animal,” a love poem of norm-busting urgency, “Susurra distancia en un viento al oído / Encarna sustancia de dios en colmillos” becomes “Whisper a distance on the wind in their ear/ In your fangs let a godly gleam inhere.” Inverting the syntax of the couplet’s last line allows me to preserve the end rhyme, though I lose the internal rhymes that bind the couplet’s two lines as viscerally as the tendons of the animal’s jaws. In these instances, the work of translation could extend, following its appetite for all the richness of the original, while allowing room enough for difference to remain part of the composition.

However, the vast majority of the work called for hesitation, for space enough to turn in the tender light of each poem’s first instance. I thought I was reading, for example, a defiant entitlement to pleasure and excess in “The hormone of darkness,” a desire that would compel an almost oppositional stance to the “Pagan gods” who “gave us life” so that one English translation adequate to such a diffident tone would have been to add an ironic instance of the word “thanks”: “Pagan gods / Gave us life, but thanks, we’ll take more.” Otta explained “es que a quien se refiere la voz en el poema es a alguien querido, a quien le dice ‘no nos olvides,’ con complicidad / the voice in the poem addresses itself to a beloved, someone to whom it says ‘don’t forget us,’ with complicity.” Cultivating that tender love and complicity is how Otta practices the art of relational proximity, and it is one of the principal experiences her verse offers.

But if we understand poetry as something that offers experiences, who is this stable and attentive reader poised to receive them? I’ve come to think that Otta creates poetry that doubles down on nothing less than a life force that precedes and exceeds received notions of a stable, self-contained reader and of the literary as such. This might account for the title of her 2018 collection, La vida ya supero la literatura / Life Has Already Surpassed Writing. The books we make and love are necessary archives and portals into deeply personal engagements with the entanglements of language, affect, intelligence, and imagination. But maybe authors like Otta make books that point beyond books; they point, as Otta has said, to the fact that “life and poetry have a relation so intimate that neither the academy, nor the canon, nor literary traditions can regulate its terms and conditions. Everything that registers in life filters down into poetry.” Or, as she writes in her poem “El sol se estacionó / The sun parked”:

Dije todo lo que dije 
tal y como lo sentí 
pero tan distinto 
Ese tiempo fue una serpiente enmarañándose 
                                            sobre mi piel 
Y ya no pude contenerme 
  
  
I said everything I said 
just as I felt it 
but so different 
That time was a snake twisting 
                    over my skin 
And I couldn't contain myself anymore

Farid Matuk 
Tuscon, AZ 
March 2024