Wasteland of a Dream: On Translating Paura Rodríguez Leytón

Telling a dream over breakfast, we fumble for metaphors to render into secular language a landscape whose logic resists the rules of its mundane twin. “It was like...” we say. “But not like...” How difficult, in the telling, not to domesticate the dream’s profound strangeness and the lived (however briefly) reality of that strangeness. Translating feels that way to me at times, and especially so when I translate Paura Rodríguez’s poems, with their fiercely original, unsettling imagery, their landscapes poignant with absence, rich with possibility. Often I sense a hint of the post-apocalyptic in them (hence, my choice of the phrase I’ve culled for a title here).  

The four poems appearing in this issue appeared originally in Rodríguez’s 2011 Como monedas viejas sobre la tierra (Like Old Coins on the Ground) and were republished in her 2018 selected poems, Instante claro (Moment of Clarity). One of Bolivia’s most important living poets, Rodríguez returns again and again to themes of time passing, of journeys real and figurative, of how we understand who we are or might be. She is a virtuoso of the moment, of unpacking the significance of an instant through the objects that furnish it and through its precise location in whatever temporality she has conjured. Her perspective, even at its most philosophical, never loses sight of the everyday. The poem “To You I Attribute My Blood’s Torrent” is a case in point. When she writes “The soul tries to remain unscathed,/but there’s a hurricane shaking/even the shoes’ darkest corner,” the weightiness of “the soul” is undercut by the quirky image of the “shoes’ darkest corner.” Rodríguez Leytón makes a similar move in the poem beginning “Together we’ll dust ourselves off” when she asks with a hint of whimsy, “Reordering life:/will it be like laying a tablecloth across the table?” As a translator and poet, I am drawn to Rodriguez’s strange, dreamlike landscapes, to her exacting gaze, which casts an eye equally on shoes and souls, on tablecloths and lives.