Issue 19

Winter 2019

Brief History of My Life

Stella Díaz Varín
Translated by Rebecca Levi
ENGLISH | SPANISH

I command soldiers.

And I’ve told them about the danger

of hiding weapons

in the bags under their eyes.

They don’t agree.

And since they spend all their time arguing,

the battle’s already lost.

 

You can’t depend on anyone anymore.

I can’t be in all things;

that’s why I pay for every drop of blood

spilled in hell.

In winter, I devote myself

to rusting a tombstone or two.

And in spring, I build dikes

destined for shipwrecks.

 

That’s how it is, after all…

The four seasons of the year

don’t consider me, unless I’m working.

 

I thread needles

so that young widows

may close their husbands’ eyes,

and waste my minutes observing

a simple bee

as it enters a lavender flower,

to then split it in two

and watch it move:

head to the south,

abdomen to the cordillera.

 

That’s how it is

that Resurrection Sunday

finds me exhausted,

without the usual smile

that humanizes us,

or so they say.

About the Author

Stella Díaz Varín (1926-2006), was a Chilean poet and member of ‘la Generación del ‘50,” along with novelist José Donoso and poet Enrique Lihn. Chile knew “La Colorina” for her fiery hair and personality rather than the incisiveness of her verse, and she never received the same recognition as her peers during her lifetime. In 2011, her work was collected and published by Cuarto Propio, a Santiago-based press named for Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own. This is the first time Díaz Varín’s poetry is appearing in English. The translated poems are from her 1959 collection, Time, Imaginary Measure, and display Díaz Varín’s transparent, confessional style and her atemporal voice. The narrator speaks as God and the oppressed, sorceress and unhappy wife and indigenous woman. Houses become female bodies, and currents of dark humor, nostalgia, and deep anger run through the poems, like flash floods in a narrow canyon.

About the Translator

Rebecca Levi is a musician, poet, and translator originally from New York City. After years living in Peru and Colombia, she received her MFA in 2018 from Boston University. Her poetry and translations have been published by No Tokens Journal BorderSenses , and Princeton University Press, and are forthcoming at Columbia Journal and Broadstone Books. These translations of Stella Díaz Varín won second place in the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize at Boston University, and Rebecca’s poem about pigs and break-ups, “December 31st,” won third place in the 2018 Mick Imlah Poetry Prize at The Times Literary Supplement . Rebecca’s band is called Debarro, meaning “of mud” and ever-changing, which also describes what she likes about poetry.

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