Far Away Like Cuba
Translated from Wendy Guerra’s Ropa Interior (Underthings) by Esperanza Hope Snyder & Nancy Naomi Carlson
Exposed and foreign among the palm fronds
In a diatribe against the simplest things
Misunderstood and alone a thousand times alone in the middle of that ocean of people
drowning with desires
Far away and stubborn like the woman who longs to run toward your embrace
Naked and separate
My back turned away from your absence
Reclaiming you in your white linen paradise
White flag my love white flag
Running to avoid colliding into you and stumbling on the map of your eyes of my body
Far away like Cuba Without council
Between the waves making me small and silvery
With the wind against my full sails I resist crying
Searching for the naming of a witness a pilgrim a sovereign
A creature inside me defending herself
Far away like Cuba
Free island spilled between your legs
Sifting miracles you don’t expect
The last bastion of absence
Far away like Cuba Nearing your salvation
Brief in the north voluptuous in the south
Asleep without your name Haunted
With the compass set for one pole and wings watchful at your feet
Waiting for you with all my roots of land and light
Without that painful tear of goodbye
Here you have me
Far away like Cuba.
Wendy Guerra is a critically acclaimed Cuban poet and novelist. She has published three collections of poetry, and her works have been translated into thirteen languages. Todos se van (Everyone’s Leaving), a novel, was adapted into a screenplay. In 2016 Guerra published Domingo de Revolución (Revolution Sunday) in Spain, the story of a Cuban author who publishes a book of poems in Europe and is the object of suspicion by both the Cuban government and Cuban dissidents. Of note is that Guerra’s Ropa Interior was also published in Spain, perhaps due to its sensual and steamy content. Indeed, Guerra, who quotes Anais Nїn in an epigraph at the start of this poetry collection, and has translated her work, has been described as “a sort of descendant of Nin.”
Nancy Naomi Carlson has received two literature translation fellowships from the NEA, and her translations have been finalists for the BTBA and the CLMP Firecracker Awards. She is a poet, translator, essayist, and translation editor for On the Seawall, and has authored twelve titles (eight translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019) was named “New & Noteworthy” by the New York Times, and her translation of Mauritian writer Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude was published by Seagull Books in February 2021. Her co-edited anthology, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press), was also published this year, as well as her translation of Congolese Alain Mabanckou’s As Long As Trees Take Root in the Earth (Seagull). An interview of her as a poet-translator appeared in AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle (February, 2021).
Esperanza Hope Snyder is a native of Bogotá, Colombia. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Blackbird and other journals. Former poet laureate of Shepherdstown, West Virginia and Poet in Residence at Shepherd University, she’s assistant director for Bread Loaf in Sicily and co-coordinator of the Lorca Prize. Her poetry book, Esperanza and Hope (Sheep Meadow Press) was published in 2018.