"that borrowed form is already gone/I don't speak."

-- Dolores Dorantes, tr. Jen Hofer, upon whose (Hofer's) knitted spirogyra/amoeba kit I bid at an auction and won; I now wear the longer experimental biological specimen around my neck, which is so wrong, though I've received many compliments. It's a graduated pink.

My late morning report is that I wrote to Jen Hofer last night and asked her to respond to the line of Dolores Dorantes that she had translated, in Septiembre; to draw a ruined thread from "I don't speak" to the day. She replied:

"Dear Bhanu --

This question is more difficult for me, at this moment, than you might know. I keep wondering -- now in the context of Haiti -- why poetry matters, why poetry matters. Why do we do this? Why this? And why this now? And then again, how can a more humane response to a situation like Haiti's (more humane meaning -- do not assign an imperialist torturer to be the head of a relief effort (I'm referring to Bush here, in case that's not clear)) be developed without poetry, without the particular understanding and illumination and compassion that art-making can awaken?

Perhaps it is simply disappointment at my own uselessness that plagues me. Certainly (if not entirely) it is that.

In any case, you probably noticed that I highlighted the line you asked about in my translator's note to the book (p. 114 is the specific reference) -- so I'd direct you there, first of all. And then beyond that, I'd say this.

We live in borrowed forms. Our bodies, borrowed forms, are transitory (in constant flux, never the same as themselves no matter how familiar they may seem) and temporary. We will inherently disappear, are disappearing. In Dolores's poem sequence, the borrowed form that was the body of a beloved person is gone. In the presence of this absence, in the non-presence this you now is, I don't speak. I cannot speak. As I utter (textually) this poem, I declare my non-speaking.

And we live in borrowed forms. We inhabit constructs attached to bodies, to genders, to racial markers, to what are called nationalities. These forms are borrowed, not lent to us because we asked for them but imposed at the entrance: veils or shrouds or skins we cannot remove, though it is possible, thankfully, to move around within them. That borrowed form has already gone -- has shape-shifted into some other form or formula -- and I don't speak. It is not "I" who speaks, but something borrowed that speaks for me, through me, in me.

Perhaps it is life that is "a deeper death" -- life in this borrowed form, life unspeakable, within you and without you. In this death, "we walk."

I'm not sure I am able to speak of Dolores's work as separate from my own. Of course I can recognize that the two are distinct in many ways (for one thing I love Dolores's work unequivocally, and equivocate about everything having to do with my own), but my poetics and ethics have been so deeply informed by my practice as a translator, and my exploration of what it is to be a poet and an activist has been so inflected by my textual and actual conversations with Dolores, that I'm not sure I can separate what I think about her work from what I think about my work, in terms of poetics and forms (borrowed and otherwise) and speaking. Perhaps this is appropriate, insofar as poetics is a relational art -- it is what happens in the space between what you make and what I make, in that intermingling.

I can speak to my understanding of Dolores's work, but I cannot speak for Dolores's work. If you want to ask Dolores any questions directly, please feel free to use me as intermediary/translator at any point -- just cc me your questions or comments to her and I'll translate them, and her answers to you, if you need me to.

Love,

Jen

P.S. If you find any of these sentences useful, you may use them in any way you wish."