This poem sets the scene for Atlas estelar, my book-length cycle of poems about the United States’ southern desert region, border policy, migration, the dehumanization of migrants, and the inevitable reciprocal dehumanization of their oppressors. The book’s text overlays an invisible map, an atlas featuring 226 stars, each representing a single migrant death in 2021 in Arizona, the only state for which there is such a record. This excerpt corresponds to the southeastern quadrant of the map produced by the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants.
My friend Farhad Pirbal, a Kurdish poet who writes in Arabic as well as his native tongue, once retorted, when asked how he chooses which to write in, that he couldn’t choose whether he pissed in Kurdish or Arabic. Likewise, I did not choose to write this poem in Spanish, a language I have spoken, written poems in, and loved since my childhood in Mexico. Rather, así emergió, without my consciously choosing it, perhaps because Spanish has been the medium of much of my thought about and engagement with issues of migration and borders, as well as my examination of my own complicity in the larger systems that enable the blatant cruelty and spectacular exceptionalism of the northern border nation where—by no choice of my own—I was born.
I did not intend to self-translate “Escenografía etimológica,” but I did accompany my submission with a quick, unpolished gloss. When the editors responded to ask if they could publish both, I agreed, provided I could rework the English-language version. That process proved more challenging and intimate than I expected. My practice as a literary translator surges, at least in part, from my desire to inhabit the incredibly generative, fluid space between languages. At its best, I believe translation can resist rigid binaries and challenge prescriptivist notions of perfect equivalence. Translating myself demands an honest assessment of just how deeply enculturated those ideas are in me, as well as the integration of my multiple identities and their manifestation in each of the languages I inhabit.
Poet, translator, and filmmaker Shook was raised in Mexico City. They earned a BA at the University of Oklahoma and an MSt at Oxford University. In their debut collection, Our Obsidian Tongues (2013), Shook explores the violence and hunger of everyday life, steeping their poems in lush imagery and sensory detail.
In 2013, they founded the nonprofit publishing house Phoneme Media, since editing…