- Two Poems by Cristina Peri Rossi
Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but has lived in Barcelona since the early 1970s, when she went into political exile. The only woman associated with the Latin American Boom, Peri Rossi has continued writing despite political repression, tenuous immigration status, and linguistic discrimination. She has published nineteen books of poetry and earned many literary prizes, most recently the 2021 Premio Cervantes.
My translations focus on the theme of lesbian intimacy as it relates to queer concepts of home in exile. Peri Rossi’s portrayal of exile is woven with eroticism, affection, and affect made manifest in corporeal experience. Yet her work highlights what is in excess of the corporeal, especially what is beyond normative body/spirit and human/animal distinctions.
While “Blanca” and “Fertilization” describe distinct orientations to the paranormal, both texts engage the reader in unraveling the coherence of the normal. “Blanca” was first published in Descripción de un naufragio (1975), a collection of poems using a shipwreck as an allegory for the rise of the Uruguayan dictatorship. Peri Rossi’s engagement with the visceral mystical in this poem is decidedly [End Page 27] situated within the context of exile and transatlantic crossing. The poem highlights the disorientation of trauma and uprootedness and expresses a sense of being outside oneself, of watching the shipwrecked figure from without, and points to the psychic and spiritual impact of exile beyond the material realm.
“Fertilization” takes up the visceral mystical in a very different way. First published in her most recent collection, Las replicantes (2016), the poem fractures the concept of human fertilization by employing monstrosity, emphatically focusing on queer intimacy and parthenogenesis. The act of fertilization here centers language, hymns, gesture, memory, and ritual, rather than what can be physically incorporated into the body. Moreover, the poem likens this abnormal intimacy to the Christian conception of paradise. This blasphemous use of Christian mythology to narrate lesbian intimacy echoes Peri Rossi’s early work, which was banned by the dictatorship in the 1970s. Through both poems Peri Rossi participates in a transnational tradition of lesbian feminist knowledge production that highlights the potentiality of queer intimacy and erotic power and ultimately argues for forms of relation that move against and beyond white heteropatriachy and reproductive futurity.
Blanca White. Whether foam, or dove. Forever laid on a beach path land of the spirits where the sands join together and wind trembles in trees. Wind trembles and sands sing.
As if the calm of the world dwelled in her body, on her skin. To have her like this, silent, white, [End Page 28] motionless, free of time of meetings and cities.Monda. Smooth and bald like a statue, hairless but for light pubic fuzz, like a breeze where lips get caught the wind the afternoon the heat and the cry —saltwater I sipped between her legs.Impenetrable.Tossed in the air, rising and falling down her body swaying her like a reed, unable to feel unable to sigh unable to turn or respond. Wet with rain pouring endlessly on skin opening her pores like passages —where the entire sea entered.Foreign. Isolated from delightful vices of moonlit nights and disquieting vices of afternoons of lovers without clocks. Isolated from delightful vices of suspect nights that call her alone to the sea and tossed at the mercy of the waters at the mercy of seaweed and approaching fish stalking her. [End Page 29] Settled in her home like fire in the hearth like a silent ancestor who no longer visits,like mother and daughter. And loved by me as if she alone were both the desired mother and the fervent daughter.As if she alone were boththe mother I loved one summer nightwhose daughter I loved a lifetime.Sealed. A secret kept from me a jagged oyster that could wound my fingers my face hands voice my thoughts and dreams, closed like an urn. Like a crypt.Sacred. An untouchable goddess whose altar I visit each day with offerings —pine branches, laurel flowers, the fruits of a bounteous tree, leaving behind a trail of empty homages.Still, fixed in time like...