Homeland of Swarms

“The Caracas between / the teeth that we refuse to let go, of blocked bloodstream. City whom I fear,” writes Oriette D’Angelo of her native city in her bilingual poetry collection Cardiopatías/Homeland of Swarms, translated into English by Lupita Eyde-Tucker.

In her translator’s note, Eyde-Tucker speaks of “encounter[ing] challenges with Venezuelan vernacular,” specifically as it relates to the “suffering experienced by Venezuelan people.” Through fidelity to the particular phrasing and strong verbs of the Spanish original, Eyde-Tucker manages to get across the visceral experiences captured in the original, as is evident in her translation of “Forbidden to Pass By and Stay”:

You couldn’t handle the birds sleeping on my forehead
you fractured the entire structure of my deformed breasts
squeezed the throat to silence my body
so it wouldn’t scream:                      I don’t like what you say!

Here, the words fractured and squeezed directly convey the embodied experience of censorship. At the same time, these translations capture D’Angelo’s evocation of the despair and hopelessness so ubiquitous among Venezuelans between 2011 and 2014, the result of political unrest and economic crises that led to widespread hunger, poverty, and violence. These poems also speak to the experience of living in a country where the government’s corruption and the president’s incendiary discourse against the political opposition have emptied words such as citizens and patriotism of meaning:

Femur on dirt
tibia on dirt
self-esteem on dirt
patriotism on dirt
the ego of a country sustained by fertilizer
the visceral manure
that makes us citizens

Disease is an extended metaphor in this collection (cardiopatía is a disease of the heart), one through which the poet explores, among other things, a crippling kind of fear related to the lack of safety experienced in the streets––“I go out into the street and see an assassin in every man.” The speaker in these poems must choose whether to stay or leave, when neither is a good option: “What differentiates us is the disease we choose / and the one they force upon us.”