Living on the Airwaves
Translated from Wendy Guerra’s Ropa Interior (Underthings) by Esperanza Hope Snyder & Nancy Naomi Carlson
Music dawns in the tea brimming with ants
My mother cuts the truth with scissors great care
She sharpens her tongue while reporting on what is taboo
They summon me to a café through airway coded messages
There’s a list of friends we’re not allowed to listen to
And I hum them through a dark corridor leading nowhere
Dawn arrives on the airwaves outside it rains or it’s cold
Radio heroes die
They die in the anonymity of their lost voices
An effect
An old-fashioned sinister echo filling me still with dread
A lie on the frequency-modulated air
So many tears and so much pain so much laughter and so much bravado
For the wind to later lift it all away.
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.