What you’ve read above is a lie. That is, the poems were real; but the translations don’t accurately reflect each other. This is always the case with Elisa Chavez’s “Miss Translated” poems and it’s why I believe she’s one of the most exciting modern poets working today.
Because what she does is honestly extraordinary.
I have no idea which one comes first or what her process is. But what she shares with the world is a poem, in English, side by side with a translation in Spanish. Only the Spanish is wrong. Or, well, the Spanish is right; the English is wrong.
It’s a real poem all right, and often a more powerful one than its English counterpart. But it doesn’t say what the English says. She does not supply a “correct” translation. For that she relies on her readers.
Elisa Chavez says of her project that: “The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.
“The poems I produced have secrets, horrific twists, emotional rants, and confessions hiding in the Spanish. It’s my hope that people can appreciate them regardless of their level of Spanish proficiency.”
My own great-grandmother was born and raised in Mexico. My grandmother was raised bilingual and my mother is far more fluent in Spanish than she cares to admit (she says she “doesn’t speak it,” but the one time someone really tried to cheat us and retreated into “no hablo ingles,” she was a FOUNTAIN of español). I was the first on my matrilineal side to be raised monolingual, in English. I love these poems because the process I go through, of reading the English first, then the Spanish and guessing at it, and then looking up a proper translation, feels revelatory.
Anyway, all that is lead up. The payoff is, I couldn’t find an “accurate” translation of the Spanish in this poem already online, so I asked my mom friend Francisca Cázares ( you can follow her at https://www.facebook.com/francisca.cazares or https://www.instagram.com/xicana_en_oaklandia/) for the true translation, and she gave me this:
I read that the Mexica drowned women
from nearby towns to appease
the goddess of rain.
Her temple had two
shelves of skulls.
My ancestors who adored the sun
kept their gods close
listening to their rapacious voices.
In their names they perpetrated miracles and atrocities.
It shouldn’t then surprise
that the towns outside Tenochtitlán
gave welcome to anyone
who promised an end to the cruel sun
the lying flowers, the waters
paved with bones of tributes
The Spanish god was gold
and ordered them to burn Tenochtitlán
sending her to reunite with
the drowned maids
To be honest this poem is challenging to me personally. As I said to a friend, “feels like Chavez’s point with this poem is something close to ‘don’t fucking romanticize human sacrifice, asswads’…Which, yes, but there’s so many more pressing issues…? I stand by loving what she does with making the act of translation part of her poetry, though.”
And then I went back and re-read some of the Chavez poem-and-translation sets that I think are raw genius incarnate, like “La sirena y pescador / The mermaid and the fisherman” or “El vampiro / ICE.”
So then I thought, well, all of Elisa Chavez’s other fans deserve to be challenged by “Tenochtitlan” as I have been challenged, probably. Or maybe I just want to talk about this with people who will understand, and sharing the translation contributes to understanding?
In any case I asked Francisca if I could share it with credit and she said yes, so here you are. She honestly did a beautiful job with the translation so if you go onto her social media for fuck’s sake be nice. The one thing I love about the implied criticism of the Mexica in this poem is that outsiders can’t actually read it. So I am the traitor breaching the language gates, please don’t make me regret it.
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