Promises of Gold

So many poems in Promises of Gold by José Olivarez play with entertaining contradictions as they explore desire and fulfillment in the speaker’s complicated relationships with countries and cultures, as well as with lovers, friends, and family. Consider “Ode to Tortillas,” in which the speaker claims:

there’s two ways to be a Mexican writer that are true
& tested. you can write about migration
or you can write about migration.

The joke is in the repetition, but the truth is that “migration” extends to so many aspects of the Mexican-American experience that it becomes all-encompassing, as the speaker says in another poem: “I was born mid-migration. I’ve made my home in that motion.” Within “Ode to Tortillas” lives another truism, one that refutes—rather than repeats—itself:

there’s two ways to be a Mexican writer. you can translate
from Spanish. or you can translate to Spanish.
or you can refuse to translate altogether.

By including a Spanish translation of the entire book, Promises of Gold charts another course, transporting language back across the border. In a prefatory note, translator David Ruano characterizes his collaborative translation with Olivarez as “the experiences of a Mexican from Chicago turned into the Spanish of a Mexicano who lives in Mexico.” It’s a fascinating aspect of the collection, which works particularly well since Olivarez peppers his own lyrics with Spanish. In “On the Signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement,” the speaker’s devout mother and her co-workers

[...] pray for their children, rarely
their husbands. they sing the song
their parents sung, & grandparents sung

& great-grandparents sung & great-great
grandparents sung: buscamos dólares
y solo encontramos dolores.

The repetition here is no joke, but a way to reach back across generations and across borders to commiserate with ancestors through an untranslated aphorism: “We seek fortune / and find only pain.”