The forest. To say the forest. To suggest some music.To carve the breeze.To see a landscape. See it raining. Without rain but with raining.With that raining that I always conjure when slowly, softly,filled to the brim with tiny traces of an air that’s weightless,I say to myself I’ll see it rain. I say it again, beside the window,that it’s going to rain. That I’m going to see it rain.To put forth the idea of rain before. The downpour plantsall its doubts.To pour oneself on the raining. Allow oneself to rain.To see raining. To say I see it’s raining.Until the raining.Until the rain.Until then.Until. Bosquejo del LloverEl bosque. Decir el bosque. Proponer una música.Tallar la brisa.Ver un paisaje. Ver llover. Sin lluvia, pero con llover.Con ese llover que siempre ocurre cuando lenta, suave,tan hecha de minúsculos trozos de un aire que no pesa,me digo que veo llover. Me lo repito, junto a la ventana,que va a llover. Que voy a ver llover.Avanzar la idea de la lluvia antes de que. El aguacero siembretodas sus dudas.Lloverse sobre el llover. Dejarse llover.Ver llover. Decir que veo llover.Hasta que llueva.Hasta que lluvia.Hasta que.Hasta.
Raining, Outlined
Feature Date
- March 29, 2024
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- Translation
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“Raining, Outlined” from OJO EN CELO/EYE IN HEAT © 2024 Margarita Pintado Burgos.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.
English copyright © 2024 by Alejandra Quintana Arocho.
All rights reserved.
Margarita Pintado Burgos holds a PhD in Spanish from Emory University. The author of Ficción de venado (2012), Una muchacha que se parece a mí (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña Award, 2016), and Simultánea, la marea (2022), Pintado is also a Mellon Foundation Letras Boricuas Fellow and a full professor of language and literature at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She co-directs the poetry website Distrópika.
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Alejandra Quintana Arocho is a writer and literary translator. They hold a BA in comparative literature and society from Columbia University and are pursuing graduate studies at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar. Alejandra has interned at The Paris Review, and they cotranslated into English a centennial bilingual edition of Gabriela Mistral’s first book of poems, Desolación (Sundial House, 2024). They won the 2023 Ambroggio Prize given by the Academy of American Poets for their translation of Margarita Pintado Burgos’s Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat (University of Arizona Press, 2024).
“The phrase ‘eye in heat’ can have a few different meanings. It can refer to a state of intense sexual desire, but it can also refer to a heightened awareness and excitement. Here, the phrase is used to describe the speaker’s state of mind as they try to make sense of the world around them. The speaker is both attracted to and repelled by the world. The poems here capture the poet’s intense desire to find meaning in this paradox. This can be a dangerous state, as they are trying to make sense of something both beautiful and terrifying. Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat captures the poet’s vulnerability and their willingness to take risks in order to find a place in the world.”
—Achy Obejas, author of Boomerang / Bumerán
“Margarita Pintado’s poetry believes in miracles. Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat turns us on. Without noticing, we are taken where life unfolds. Even what interrupts the poem becomes the poem. We are lucky to have such an honest voice that knows how to make beauty with the shape pain bestows on us—the best kind of beauty—and that makes such an arduous exercise of testimony, that of restoring faith to the world with the song of a bird, knowing that language is the true place of events.”
—Mara Pastor, author of Deuda Natal, 2020 Ambroggio Prize winner
“In Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat, the poet reminds us that our collective feelings of fear and love and joy and heartbreak unite us. We are in this together, sometimes weak, sometimes strong, sometimes lost, sometimes found, always longing: ‘The sublime wanders among us / with the same rigor as misfortune.’ Margarita Pintado Burgos’s poetry in this latest bilingual collection is brilliant, and the translations from Spanish to English spot on. Ojo en celo is a must-read for all who go searching and for all who’ve lost and loved.”
—Michael Klam, executive editor of San Diego Poetry Annual (SDPA) and Editor-in-Chief of the bilingual edition of SPDA: Imagine
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