Editor’s Note: We are happy to share with our readers this selection of poems in bilingual edition from Coral Bracho’s collection Debe ser un malentendido (Ediciones Era, 2014), translated as It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Forrest Gander and published in English by New Directions in 2021. We are grateful to Coral Bracho, Forrest Gander, and New Directions for granting us permission to feature these poems, along with Forrest Gander’s introductory note on the English translations.
It Must Be a Misunderstanding is available to purchase from New Directions.
A Brief Note on These Poems
I’ll never forget reading a passage written by Bruno Schulz in which his protagonist, a child named Joseph, is stalked and trapped against a hedgerow by a howling, vicious, black dog that Joseph realizes, at the last second, is not a dog at all but, he explains, just a “man, whom, by a simplifying metaphoric wholesale error, I had taken for a dog.”
Such dream logics are at work all through Coral Bracho’s most personal and emotionally expressive collection of poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding, dedicated to her mother who died of complications from Alzheimer’s. But instead of Schulz’s characteristic atmosphere of anxiety and terror, Bracho finds tenderness, humor, grace, and even a kind of bravery in the interactions of personalities who encounter each other in a “Memory Care” facility, which Bracho compares to a “kindergarten or asylum or abstract space.” In the parallel worlds of the residents, a wall might be perceived as the stiff suit of a man, shadows might be taken for realities, light might be apprehended as traces of motion, quiet is strafed with fragments of voices, and everything exists and doesn’t exist at the same time.
I chose to translate this whole book rather than another selected volume (Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho was published by New Directions in 2008) because, although composed of individual poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding is really a deeply affecting book-length work whose force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences. The “plot” follows a general trajectory—from early to late Alzheimer’s—with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness. We come to know an opinionated, demonstrative elderly woman whose resilience, in the face of her dehiscent memory, becomes most clear in her adaptive strategies. The poems involve us in the mind’s bafflement and wonder, in its creative quick-change adjustments, and in the emotional drama that draws us across the widening linguistic gaps that reroute communication.
Surely, one of the reasons that these poems speak so potently to me has to do with the fact of my own mother’s recent death due to complications of Alzheimer’s. A long section of my book Be With is concerned with my relationship with my mother during her last years. Now those poems are too painful for me to read, but I find Coral’s poems uplifting—as I suspect you will.
It’s typical in translations from Spanish to English that ambiguities derived from non-specific pronouns often need to be rendered more specifically. If in one line, a man and a woman are talking about a jaguar, for instance, and in the next line the poet writes “Tiene una mirada tranquila,” the translator must make a decision about whether the man (he), the woman (she), or the jaguar (it) has that tranquil look. In poems that take place in a facility where people are literally losing their minds, mistaking identities, and experiencing hallucinations, the ambiguity of pronouns in Spanish can take on the legerdemainish drama of three-card monte. There’s some guess work involved.
Bracho’s poems have philosophical and psychological underpinnings even when they are descriptive. Her work has always managed to mix abstraction and sensuality, but in this book the two merge into a particularly resonant combination. We are inside a mind, maybe many minds, considering a mystery with signal attentiveness, openness, and love.
Forrest Gander
(Observations)
The puzzle pieces
get lost but not the look
she knows to be hers.
The forms, the objects, they merge,
they crumble; but a feeling
for the ensemble remains: between moments,
between fictions,
despite constant fractures. Like a threshold,
a hand hold.
(Observations)
That bird,
dropping down to peck the asphalt
so close to her foot, is something
she’s never encountered before.
There’s nothing to compare it with;
nothing that links it to that cat,
nothing it shares
with that bush.
They’re all unanticipated tenants;
convincing presences
in a space that, for the moment,
we share with them. There aren’t kingdoms
that harbor them or separate them out
into their particular territories,
no words
that link them together. This thing here,
fluttering its wings now
and hopping between the grass and the dust,
it has no likeness.
(Alzheimer’s. Follow-up)
Who is the President of this country?
—Well, it depends; for some
it’s one person; for others it’s someone else.
What is this called?
—I don’t know, doctor, because I don’t use
that; only you do.
How many children do you have?
—Quite a few.
What did you used to do?
—Now you’re going to ask me
to draw a clock.
Did you like to dance?
—Yes, of course, of course I danced.
And did you ever travel?
—Yes, naturally.
Where to?
—Well, to the same place everyone went.
(Intuitions)
Which thread is the one that tells our story
and lends us substance
when there’s no trajectory
by which to make sense of ourselves?
Which thread are we sure is vital?
The one that, maybe, ties together the handful of gestures
that comprise us; so we feel
we still have control. Gestures
that we repeat as certainties; that delineate
those certainties which once shaped us
and which now delimit
and nail us
to our shadows. Certainties
whose meaning and origin we don’t know,
but which nevertheless enclose
and protect us, like dive helmets
or grilles;
which still let us look through them
into the world:
that disquieting, incomprehensible
strangeness.
(Intuitions)
The attributes, the sounds of the words
simply go,
though the meanings remain there,
in stillness,
turning toward that opaque box
where they’re concealed: where one might be plucked,
and a little color squeezed out for us,
some flash.
But those depths where they’re hidden, interned,
get increasingly darker,
and they themselves more fleeting, uncertain.
Inside the box,
they laugh
and make provocations. But in other accents,
other voices that they invent.
Translated by Forrest Gander
Selections from IT MUST BE A MISUNDERSTANDING by Coral Bracho, translated by Forrest Gander, copyright © 2021, 2022 by Coral Bracho. Copyright © 2021, 2022 by Forrest Gander. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
