To the North / Al norte

Originally published in Spanish in 2012, this bilingual edition of To the North / Al norte, translated by Mexican American poet Javier O. Huerta, marks the Nicaraguan poet León Salvatierra’s English-language debut. In addition to poems that document the speaker’s arduous journey through Central America, the book features seven prose pieces that provide autobiographical context, including both statements of fact (“At UC Berkeley, I completed my bachelor’s degree in comparative literature in English and Spanish.”), and existential insights (“‘fraud’ embodies the feeling of falsehood around me since my birth—my name, my age, and my undocumented life”).

The expansiveness of the prose contrasts with the concision of Salvatierra’s lineated verse, which treats the external and internal worlds of the speaker as fluid domains. One poem draws in the speaker’s treacherous surroundings, until the craggy landscape strips him of his humanity as the Suchiate River (which divides Ciudad Tecun Uman in Guatemala from Ciudad Hidalgo in Chiapas, Mexico) consumes his vision:

Rocks have treated me like a rock
Rough grass has burned my feet with rough edges
I have suffered the current of Tecun Uman
And have been delivered to its banks of mangroves
I have traveled in cold water, in the dew’s tremor
And my eyes became wet in the darkness

Water returns in “Attempt,” as one moment among many that the speaker wishes to remember:

The first time I played and smiled
That time I dreamt, that I saw my face
in the water, the blood on my face
The first time I was afraid to jump
And my feet got wet

The persistent passive tense is a reminder of how the speaker has been transformed by forces largely outside of his control. By combining prose and poetry, and blurring the boundaries between genres and nations, Salvatierra manages to assert individual agency and wrest control of his own story.