In this piece, author Natalia Litvinova and translator Kelsi Vanada each select a few lines from the newly released English translation of the collection Basket of Braids (Cesto de Trenzas), published by Shearsman Books. Poet and translator comment on their chosen lines, revealing the context behind the poems and the considerations taken when translating them.

Kelsi Vanada:

Grandmother in front:
human head
and bird body,
she opens her wings,
inseminates the vegetables

Just four poems into Basket of Braids, after a series about how the hard-working women of Litvinova’s grandparents’ generation in Belarus sustained their families in the wake of World War II, which killed or devastated the men of the community, comes this startling image in the tradition of magical realism—and one of my favorites in the collection. Natalia’s note to me in the translation process speaks of the power of women elders, las abuelitas: their wisdom and their way of facing life’s difficulties. It’s “inseminates” (in Spanish “insemina”) that shocks and pulls me in—this woman is not frail or past her prime, but strong and sexual, holding the power to give life. 

Natalia Litvinova:

The women in my family
keep the hair
they cut off
in a basket of braids

One of the poems in the book begins with these lines. I want to take hold of them like the tail end of a ball of yarn, as I talk about a tradition that the women in my family carry out, even though we no longer know where it comes from. Poetry is often like this too, and that’s how a poem falls into my mouth: it’s as if the lines came from far away, from a nameless and timeless country, as though some of the lines in Basket of Braids had traveled on the wings of the oldest dragonflies to land on my eyelids.

My braids were cut off for the first time when I was nine years old, before we moved from Belarus to Argentina. Until then, I’d worn my hair down to my knees, in thin braids that swung in the wind or brushed the ground when I hung upside down from a branch so I could see the world in reverse. My braids were the paintbrushes that drew the story of my childhood on the ground.  

Those braids are now stored in a clear bag, together with my mother’s thick, reddish braids. And I believe her hair and mine converse when everyone is sleeping, in the languorous, mysterious nighttime. 

K.V.:

The village
forces my mother
to marry

Lest we as readers imagine the rural village of Litvinova’s grandparents too idyllically, the poem that begins with these lines reminds us that while small communities may support one another and work together for the benefit of all, they can also be intrusive or seek to impose a one-size-fits-all lifestyle. As Natalia told me, it’s like the old refrain: “pueblo chico, infierno grande” (small town, big hell). The speaker’s mother is an important character in the collection, seemingly her only parent. She’s characterized as tough, independent, fiery as her red hair, but also as a woman who is not without her secrets.

N.L.:

The village
forces my mother
to marry.
They braid flowers
into her hair,
mallow and plantain,
dress her in tulle
and lace

This is how I begin a poem in which I imagine, wildly, a woman from the village, the mother of the poem’s speaker, preparing for her wedding. There’s something listless in the figure of this woman looking out the window as if she sees a ghost—or perhaps her own future—on the other side. Meanwhile, the people of her community adorn her with flowers, and nature’s perfumes begin to pervade her hair and skin, hiding her wild-woman smell. Blank-faced, distant, she gives herself over to a ritual that tears her away from herself. This poem leads us to imagine the fragrance and the darkness of certain village rituals in Eastern Europe, which have marked the lives of so many women. This is a bittersweet poem, perhaps a brief legend or a rural tale, which will someday be lost among the pastures.

K.V.:

I could stay here,
looking into those dark eyes
that never cry

Like her mother, the speaker of the poems lives close to nature and seems to have a special bond with and understanding of animals. In the Spanish poems, the animals’ genders are not specified, and the Spanish possessive pronoun “su” is not gendered. When I needed to select pronouns in English, I tried to make choices that would go against traditionally gendered stereotypes—and so, a strong, imposing buffalo is female, as is a serpent (rather than identifying with the Biblical image of the serpent as the crafty, traditionally male, Devil). In the poem quoted above, I made the giant, antlered creature male, and he is the gentlest, most nurturing animal in the collection.

N.L.:

Like tumors
or nocturnal butterflies
in me live those
who are no longer…

…reads the first stanza of the last poem in the book. It’s a poem that stands out from the pack; even its tone is different from the rest. Perhaps it’s because the final poems in my books are a preview of what’s to come, a longing, a gentle breath of novelty. Basket of Braids is a tribute to the people who fed my imagination, turning me into a poem. I write to continue conversing with those who are no longer with us, so that literature might be the song of the butterflies that carry the names of our dead on their wings.

K.V.:

I am the last lodging
of the curse
that passed through
the women
in my family.

The pearl among this broken nacre

Many of the poems in this collection highlight the supernatural beliefs of the community, such as the evil eye and the protection of talismans. This brief poem speaks to both the connection between the speaker and her family, and also how her life constitutes a break from them as well, a separation. This poem has stayed with me, perhaps because it creates an image that gives me one way of thinking about what it might mean for Litvinova to write in the Spanish language about the culture of her ancestors half a world away from where she lives in Argentina—and for me to translate those poems into yet another language. Both linkage and breakage, close identification and separation, the beauty of memory and the ache of nostalgia.