Natural History

The late Peruvian poet José Watanabe’s reflections roam like searchlights in Natural History, translated by Michelle Har Kim. The collection includes pen-and-ink drawings by Eduardo Tokeshi from the original 1994 Spanish-language volume, which add a wonderfully disquieting layer to the work; a sketch before the “Interior Museum” section shows a soft, dark shadow hovering within the skull and spine of a hunched body.

Light is often an active agent in poems like “Cemetery,” where “fingers of light descend, biblical,” while “light seeps into the tombs to touch the foreheads of the dead / to tell them yes.” Watanabe illustrates how poetic attention breathes life into quotidian scenes and allows observations to unfurl into portraits laden with gratitude and deeper resonances. Ekphrastic poems engage works by Goya and George Segal, imagining a scene of statues by Segal “like tiny animals imprisoned in a clear acrylic paperweight.” 

Watanabe’s light not only illuminates but takes on different forms, so that in “Knees,” we learn that “the light is breathable,” and that colts “raise their necks / to breathe the light.” In the same poem, light redirects a speaker’s focus so that he observes his own body more deeply while contemplating a desired state of more robust health: 

And I see my knees, the crux of my toughest
      bones, as the light
burnishes them, feigns their power, decants their
crags
of the durable body I never had […]

Kim’s translations manage to preserve the imaginative leaps in the original, often avoiding quieter, easier verb choices to help bring Watanabe’s observations to life in English. The Spanish “corre,” used by Watanabe to describe the movement of a lizard, is rendered in English as “scampers,” and Kim opts for “strutted” to depict a cat passing by (“pasó”), before landing on its “phosphorescent stare.” At every turn, Natural History reveals the power of perspective and prods the reader to take in the surreal details of their surroundings, as in these lines from “In the Dry Riverbed”:

I walk stepping on rocks buried into the silt
and peering in puddles where tiny grey fish survive
and nibble at my face’s reflection.