It Must Be a Misunderstanding
It Must Be a Misunderstanding, by Mexican poet Coral Bracho, translated by Forrest Gander, is dedicated to Bracho’s late mother, whose illness and death, from complications due to Alzheimer’s disease, is the subject of the collection. To describe her mother’s progressive unmooring from language and time, Bracho uses an elemental vocabulary of images—boats, a queen, birds, plants, music—as she draws the reader into a state of disorientation, guided by dream logic and sometimes fear. Bracho’s approach, and Gander’s lucid, sonorous translation, are both in evidence in a section from the poignantly titled, “Like a disease whose threshold no one can cross, she says.” In the quote below, the mother’s confusion is enacted in the abandoned first sentence. In the third sentence, when an unidentified person comments, the reader is left slightly bewildered. The final leap of the stanza is a haunting image of forgetting (little by little, then all at once)—a single bird, followed by a swarm:
She approaches me wanting to tell me
that I. And then she stops telling me.
You never know the story, someone explains.
One sparrow, and suddenly they all descend
swarming the root of everything.
In a later poem, another bird appears, in this case, unrecognizable to the poems’ subject, because, due to her loss of language, she’s also lost cognitive connections between the things of the world:
That bird,
dropping down to peck the asphalt
so close to her foot, is something
she’s never encountered before.
There’s nothing to compare it with;
nothing that links it to that cat,
nothing it shares
with that bush.
They’re all unanticipated tenants;
convincing presences
in a space that, for the moment,
we share with them. […]
One of the final poems, titled “Observations,” exemplifies the nuance and humanity in the work, as Bracho records her own thoughts after her mother can no longer speak, and the memory of a question from her mother turns her “observation” back upon herself:
How does she think? How does she link the diffuse, wobbly
trajectories that lead here? And you?—she asked me once—
How do you come
to know?