Dream Pattering Soles
In Dream Pattering Soles, Miguelángel Meza “[d]reams of his ancestors / intertwined, like water in the forest.” Translated into English by Elisa Taber, the 10 poems included in this chapbook come from a longer work originally published in 1985 as Ita ha’eñoso (The Stone Is No Longer Alone / Ya no está sola la piedra).
Creation myths abound in poems like “Void,” where we learn that “[a]ll the dry streams. / […] intertwined, gushed, overflowed, cascaded.” At times, Meza’s lines feel cinematic as he describes nature’s movements in precise and fanciful detail, as when we observe how a “[p]alm wall / sifts moon’s wild honey.” Throughout, the poet’s world pulses with personification:
Fire licks itself
and crackles,
conversing with mist.
This trilingual volume places the Mbya Guaraní original facing its English translation, followed by the same format between Guaraní and Spanish (a collaboration between Meza himself, Carlos Villagra Marsal, and Jacobo Rauskin). Taber’s English translation is intentional about helping the reader into Guaraní concepts by leaving select words untranslated, as in “Language Sprouts” (“Ñe’ẽ reñói”):
Now ñe’ẽ exists.
Mist crackles, converses.
Ñe’ẽ exists.
In “Ñe’ ẽ: An Introduction to Contemporary Guaraní Poetry,” Taber explains that ñe’ẽ literally means “word-soul,” that “word and soul are one word.” While this nuance might not reach a reader, Taber’s choice hints at a deeper meaning, perhaps inexpressible in English, and distinct from the Spanish “el lenguaje.” Similarly, after the facing titles teach us that “Hummingbird” is “Mainumby,” Taber uses “mainumby,” that “fleck of forest,” so that we both learn the word and almost hear it as a name, distinct from the Spanish “colibrí.”
Dream Pattering Soles delights in its own world of celestial ecopoetics, where humble lives are folded into cosmological narratives. “Gone,” a moving elegy for someone who died of “grief, moonshine, and poverty,” concludes: “Truly, the numerous stars / shed more tears.”