In Stolen Flower, Irma Pineda evokes the rage and resilience of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples who have suffered state-sponsored terror with poems that grow from a tragic seed—the 2007 rape and murder of a 73-year-old Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, by soldiers of the Mexican army—into a multivocal call to honor lost lives and seek justice. This is the third poetry book by Irma Pineda to be translated into English by Wendy Call, who translated the poems from both of their original languages: Didxazá (commonly known as Isthmus Zapotec) and Spanish.
We spoke with Irma and Wendy about the book’s roots in family histories, the editorial process behind trilingual poetry, and the lessons they have learned through working together as translators.
Christian Elguera Olortegui: Irma, when you self-translate your poems, do you feel you are creating a new text, or do you try to remain faithful to the original? What’s your stance on literary self-translation from Indigenous languages to Spanish?
Irma Pineda: When I translate from Didxazá to Spanish, I try to carry over most of the poem’s elements; I mean, the idea, the imagery, the symbolism, the rhythm… I don’t always succeed because the two languages don’t have equivalents for every phrase, so I try to conserve the idea and the image, to end up with versions that are comprehensible in both languages.
C.E.O.: Besides your relationship with the Zapotec people and the story of Ernestina Ascencio Rosario that you depict in Stolen Flower, what were some other influences (whether literary or cultural) that made an impact on these poems?
I.P.: The main influence behind my writing Guie’ ni zinebe / La flor que se llevó (Stolen Flower in English) is my own lived experience. I was born and raised in a town that, due to popular struggle, was harassed by troops of the Mexican armed forces in the late seventies and early eighties. The soldiers killed people from my town, they disappeared my father, they raped women I know. Later, in 1994, I witnessed the same sort of violence in Chiapas during the uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN): the same story of soldiers raping women, disappearing children, and jailing, murdering, or disappearing people from the communities of Chiapas. It remained imprinted on my memory, and when the crime against Ernestina Ascencio took place, my wounded memory was awoken. I remembered that poetry can be a means by which to exorcise pain and speak of the violence committed against our peoples. Also, I had read some authors who had written about similar subjects, like Julia de Burgos, Aimé Césaire, and Pedro Mir, as well as other Zapotec poets like Macario Matus, Víctor de la Cruz, Enedino Jiménez, and Víctor Terán.
Arthur Malcolm Dixon: In Stolen Flower, you turn a terrible occurrence (the murder of Ernestina Ascencio Rosario and the invasion of Indigenous lands by the Mexican army) into a work of great power and beauty. How do you conceive of this process of creating poetry through tragedy?
I.P.: I find it necessary to write about tragedies like the case of Ernestina Ascencio or the violence against Indigenous peoples and communities. I need to channel the painful memories out of my mind and body because my own hometown went through the same tragedies. When Juchitán decided to rise up and fight against the regional strongmen in the seventies and eighties, the Mexican government sent the army to suppress the rebels. My own family was among those rebels, and so my uncles were murdered, my father was kidnapped and disappeared by the soldiers, and my mother, my brother, and I had to flee our town to save ourselves. I kept those stories in my memory for a long time; I didn’t want to talk about it. Later, in 1994, when the Zapatista uprising took place in Chiapas, I once again saw how the same violent acts were committed against Indigenous people and communities. Again, I kept it in my memory. But, when the tragedy of Ernestina took place, my body and mind felt the need to push out what was causing so much pain, and I started to write as an act of exorcism, of liberation. Every morning I woke up, wrote a poem, and cried until, without realizing it, I was having a conversation with the soldiers. I was finding a path to healing through poetry.
A.M.D.: In her introductory note on Stolen Flower, Wendy mentions that she has been translating your work into English for sixteen years. What are some lessons you have learned about translation, or about your own work as a poet, over the course of these years of collaboration?
I.P.: One thing I’ve learned is that translation can give a poem many possibilities. In the process the original poem can be improved, becoming more beautiful or sounding better in the other language, but you also run the risk of the opposite, of losing something, of the translation not being able to communicate what the original sought to share with its readers. That’s why I felt it was very important for me to work closely with Wendy on the translation process, since it allowed me to talk with her about the intention behind every word in the original language, such that she could share the deepest meaning of every poem in English.
C.E.O.: Wendy, you translated Stolen Flower into English from both Didxazá and Spanish. When translating the book, to what extent did you make use of Irma’s Spanish versions of the poems and to what extent did you translate directly from the Didxazá? Have you taken classes or otherwise studied Didxazá in order to translate Irma’s work?
Wendy Call: Stolen Flower is the first book of Irma’s that I’ve translated from both original versions of her poems. I began translating this book a long time ago; I created very rough first drafts of most of the collection back in 2017, working only from the Spanish, with guidance from Irma on the Didxazá versions. In late 2021, the opportunity arose to take Didxazá classes online with a young teacher from Juchitán, Friddamir Romero. I jumped at the chance and have been Friddamir’s student ever since. I am a very slow language learner and Didxazá is a difficult language (at least for me) to learn. At this point, I can read the poems in Didxazá with the help of a dictionary. I now focus on both originals of any given poem. I returned to my drafts of the poems that make up Stolen Flower the same year I began studying Didxazá, working my way through Irma’s Didxazá versions and seeking what I think of as the “ghost poem” that exists between the two original versions, serving as a record of Irma’s choices as she navigates between two languages, cultures, histories, cosmologies, and poetic traditions.
My primary “self-teaching texts” as I try to improve my Didxazá reading ability are bilingual Didxazá-Spanish books of poetry and short prose, including works by the four poets that Irma mentions, as well as Víctor Cata, Elvis Guerra, Nelson Guerra, Antonio López Pérez, Esteban Ríos Cruz, and Natalia Toledo, among others. I am very lucky that Didxazá has a rich, published literary history. Some of the poets with whom I’ve collaborated as a translator are among the only writers working in their language variants, so there are few or no other literary books published in their languages.
C.E.O.: How do you deal with the risk of “domesticating” Irma’s poems for an English-reading audience?
W.C.: I try to immerse myself in the world of each book of Irma’s that I translate. I lived in her home region, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, for several years—though that was decades ago! I visit regularly and pay attention to other literature (as well as film and music and other artistic production) from the region. Translator’s notes—both to introduce a group of poems and to gloss references in a single poem—can be a wonderful way to give the context necessary for English-language readers to enter and appreciate each poem. That said, too much explanation doesn’t just flatten the poem, it reinforces a colonial mindset. When I begin translating a set of poems—Irma Pineda’s or anyone else’s—I amass a long set of notes. I pare them down drastically before publishing.
I am not sure that it’s possible for any translator to entirely avoid the phenomenon known as “domestication.” Sometimes, the gloss of a concept or term seems important to me. For example, in one of the poems published with this interview, the first two lines in my English translation are: “Gather up your sorrows, my sister / hide them among basil’s healing leaves.” I added “healing”—which doesn’t appear in either of the originals—because anyone reading Irma’s Didxazá and/or Spanish versions would understand that she refers to the use of basil in healing rituals. But an English-language reader might be thinking about pesto!
C.E.O.: In recent years, you’ve translated poetry by Irma Pineda, Mikeas Sánchez, and Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez. Why do you think it’s important to translate literature written in Indigenous languages to English? What are the greatest challenges when it comes to publishing and promoting translations from Indigenous languages in the United States?
W.C.: If we focus only on colonial-language and settler literary and cultural production from the region we call “Latin America,” we miss the vast majority of the narrative, lyric, and other literary traditions of the Americas. Maintaining such a focus is, to be blunt, racist. Racism is also the greatest challenge in getting these works published in English translation. The U.S. publishing industry is making progress, but there is still entrenched bias against Native and First Nations authors, as well as other BIPOC authors. Editors have told me it’s “not possible” to translate literature that is already bilingual. I have seen profound work dismissed by editors and other gatekeepers unable to see beyond their cultural contexts. I am extremely grateful to the literary journals that first published the translations that ended up in all five of the trilingual books I have translated or co-translated (with Shook, in the case of Mikeas Sánchez, and with Whitney DeVos, in the case of Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez). For Stolen Flower, those journals were ADI Magazine, Chicago Review, and Poetry.
A.M.D.: Stolen Flower was published by Yale University Press. How was the editorial process behind this book? What’s it like working with editors to publish not only a book in translation, but a book consisting of a trilingual translation involving a language (Didxazá, in this case) that is unfamiliar to many English-language readers?
W.C.: Working with Abbie Storch at Yale was delightful. She has such enthusiasm for the books that she acquires. Her editorial feedback, while light, was very helpful and wonderfully respectful. (In my experience, some translations aren’t edited at all!)
I also appreciate the careful attention Abbie devoted to the book’s interior page design. Irma and I curated the photographs that appear in the book, with some input from Abbie. (That said, we didn’t have much input on the cover design and it’s not one we would have chosen.) We are grateful for Yale’s willingness to invest in a visual book—a rarity for poetry in translation.
Publishing Stolen Flower trilingually was a smooth process, probably because it was my fourth trilingual book and I knew what to look out for and what to suggest. Two of my previous trilingual books had been the presses’ first-ever trilingual books. Both publishers had assumed it would not be more complicated than a bilingual book—when in fact it’s an order of magnitude more complicated! If you work only with hegemonic languages, it’s easy to forget (or not even realize) all that can be taken for granted: standardized spelling, diacritics, and grammar, even across geography; professional copyeditors; style guides. None of those things exist with a language like Didxazá and everything falls to the poet and translator.
A.M.D.: I understand you got your start as a translator by translating Irma. What are some lessons you’ve learned through the process of translating her over the years?
W.C.: Irma has taught me so very much. Because she is a professional translator, as well as (of course) the translator of all of her “born bilingual” poetry collections, she has been an excellent mentor to me in my translation work. It is a privilege to translate the same author over the course of their career, because most of what I learn from translating one book can then be applied to the next one. Studying Irma’s work deeply—as one must do when translating—has helped me understand how specific themes recur over the course of a poet’s oeuvre and also how they deepen and evolve.
I have also learned never to give up on a translation that has truly captured your heart. Irma and I published our first trilingual book with her Mexican publisher, the wonderful Pluralia, because I failed to interest a U.S. publisher, in spite of years of effort. Her second book was published by the nineteenth press I approached: Deep Vellum. That was progress! I submitted Stolen Flower to only a handful of presses before Yale accepted it, which was thrilling.
Very early in my writing life, long before I ever tried my hand at translation, a wise writer, Barbara Beckwith, told me, “Editors are getting to know you as they are rejecting you.” I have found that to be true. Yale declined another book I translated of Irma’s—one I’m still seeking a home for, three years later—before they accepted Stolen Flower. My advice: keep submitting, until they either accept a translation or tell you to stop!
Translations from Spanish to English by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Stolen Flower is available now from Yale University Press.
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