Issue 19
Winter 2019
When She Came Down from Sea to Earth…
Stella Díaz Varín
Translated by Rebecca Levi
ENGLISH | SPANISH
Ah, winter inverts into noon!
Almost— as if from primal waters.
Onslaught of clover,
four leaves bent to the wind,
dark flowers barking under the eaves.
When someone reaches out a hand,
nothing, not even love, seems demonic anymore.
You know everyone expects something—
an encouraging letter,
a sleepless night.
Worries, too,
are the work of the devil.
And it seems false.
To roll down from the summit in agony,
deliberate rockslide,
and fall into a Protestant pastor’s hut.
In the end
you are as alone
as a lark looking for its chicks.
Nothing indulges you, only the hemlock plant
that everyone cuts back, that lives on
because it has a double heart.
Now
that nothing separates me
from the taste the leaf experiences
when man’s gaze falls on it,
I say goodbye to virtue as I would to an old friend
and exist among evildoers,
among tomb-desecrators;
I am a flesh-and-blood god
for the scarecrows.
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.