Interior Landscape

A sequence of poems in the titular section of Mirta Rosenberg’s Interior Landscape was written when the Argentinian poet, who died in 2019, was rendered immobile by disease in the last years of her life. Still, her poetic “I” roams free, as Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman point out in their translators’ afterword: “This voice dialogues constantly with its body, a body that is forced to remain seated. A tension is generated between the inevitability of the situation—the subject must ‘sit down’—and the willingness of the ‘I’ to go on nonetheless.” But while the speaker sits with her “head / in the clouds,” her words forming “an army / going from here to there,” the “I” wields constrictive authority, ordering the speaker to “Sit down and capitulate.”

Elsewhere, the “I” is sent so far out from the poet’s self that it comes back as an adversary:

The adjectives begin:
a good poetry recital,
great reading, interesting
structure, things
that make you think.
The I goes onto the subjunctive:
that I may become your enemy.

Sit down and let it go.

One section of poems is titled “Conversos,” which, in addition to referring to Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal during the 14th and 15th centuries, the translators also read as wordplay: “‘con’ ‘versos’ sounds like ‘with’ ‘verses,’ or ‘with-verses,’ or perhaps ‘con-versions.’” The section includes Rosenberg’s translations of poems by James Fenton and Kay Ryan, among others, into Spanish. Rosenberg’s poems are then rendered in English by Setton and Waisman, whose versions include some delightful oddities: Fenton’s “I put away some studio glass” becomes “I hide the crystal from the study,” and “You want to say: that can’t be right— / The water is out of scale with the trees. / Run it past me again please,” also by Fenton, becomes “Makes you want to say: hold on, cut, / between the water and the trees proportion has been lost, / play it again, Sam.”

Rosenberg’s book is a collaborative wonder—even her dogs are in conversation:

They sit
at the dinner table, with their dog friends,
and talk about her, they make lists.