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.