I’m Amanda—from Montevideo—daughter of Amanda, cow-eyed contemporary deity blackbird heart with lightning boltswhere the flash that shatters night comes to roost it flaps joy inciting lifedaughter of Rimmel, father fighting cock cruel Cerberus or tender marrow under the feathers almost bearings almost arrowssister of Rimmel, sacrificed and dear dead because the dead from the kingdom of the dead surrounded himI’m Amanda wife of José Pedrosteady as a cedar, lofty potentas the mountainnecessary and distant as the river that gives us drinkwords do not live therewind veils his love, escarped, inaccessibleI’m Amanda mother of Álvaro anxious “ardent” sailboatfruit of the union of that burning treewith my squadron of drifting shipsannounced by a baby swallowwho fell on my legs one February afternoonand lived in my house fluttered by my bed ate insectsand disappeared on the ninth dayI’m Amanda and I move toward Amanda without a destination statelesschased by a golden horseflythrough the purple of an inexorable continuous murder of Amanda
Avec les gémissements graves du Montévidéen
“Avec les gémissements graves du Montévidéen”
LAUTRÉAMONT
Feature Date
- July 2, 2023
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- Translation
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“Avec les gémissements graves du Montévidéen” from THE LADY OF ELCHE: by Amanda Berenguer.
Published by Veliz Books on March 1, 2023.
English Copyright © 2023 by Kristin Dykstra.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Amanda Berenguer (1921 – 2010) was a vital presence in Uruguayan literary life for more than six decades. Berenguer is the most multifaceted, restless poet of the “Generation of 1945,” known around the world for its energetic experimentation. Her first book appeared in Montevideo in 1940, followed by a steady stream of collections recognized for their excellence. Among her awards for La Dama de Elche are a first prize for poetry from the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture, first prize in the competition overseen by the Montevideo City Council, and the national Bartolomé Hidalgo Prize for the second edition of the same collection in 1990. Berenguer’s lifelong dedication to the arts included work with little presses and radioprogramming, as well as collaborations with dancers and musicians. In 2019 Ugly Duckling Presse published Materia Prima, a bilingual, team-translatedanthology introducing highlights from Amanda Berenguer’s poetic career to readers of English. The Lady of Elche, published by Veliz Books in 2023, is the first individual poetry collection by Berenguer to appear in full in English translation.
Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. Her translation of Amanda Berenguer’s collection, The Lady of Elche, appeared in 2023. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Finalist for the National Translation Award. Previously she co-edited a team-translated anthology featuring Berenguer, Materia Prima, named Finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. Among other honors, she has held a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation. Dykstra’s recent writings and interviews appear in a variety of venues, some of which are Astra, Almost Island, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Guernica, Big Other, Latin American Literature Today, The Common, and The Rumpus.
"Amanda Berenguer’s poems from the 1980s collected under the title of The Lady of Elche are, like the unburied sculpture of the title, an enigma of identity, history, and memory constructed through shards of language cutting through time and space. The poetic voice emerges in Montevideo, in Spain, in the Grand Canyon, in New York, in search of self and connection. Berenguer’s images are as jarring and blunt as the 'mandrake moon,' which 'stuck nightmares / and perversion into both sockets of my eyes,' and as haunting and fluid as 'an oscillating forest of submerged cadavers / feet shackled in cement cubes.' Dykstra’s phenomenal translations are works of art themselves, poignantly rendering Berenguer’s shifting registers and movement through the far reaches of modernity into English-language poetry. The 'nervous memory-fish' of Berenguer’s challenge to the would-be censors of the Americas flit through the waters of our shared, violent history, emerging from its depths to demand a reckoning that is seemingly forever displaced."
—Juliet Lynd, scholar of contemporary Latin American literature and culture
"Amanda Berenguer presents the poet’s voyage as a vocable consumption, an entity of substrate listening. Over the course of these pages, in a mounting inevitability of humanity, Berenguer positions the embodied self as a new self—a ravenous becoming towards a breathless forage into the temporal, “a limitless birthing between silence and voice.” Kristin Dykstra’s sensuous translation reveals an essential prophecy of ownership within witness and cadence. The Lady of Elche is a call for us to stop at each precipice as newborn deities, 'spectra of light rays,' to incorporate all we experience into our language, more importantly, to realize that true revolution is inherent within those footsteps."
—Edwin Torres, author of Quanundrum: [i will be your many angled thing]
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