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    The Spines of Love
    The Spines of Love
    The Spines of Love
    Ebook132 pages45 minutes

    The Spines of Love

    By Víctor Terán

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    About this ebook

    The Spines of Love collects work from Víctor Terán’s poetic oeuvre for the first time in a trilingual edition: in their original Isthmus Zapotec (an endangered indigenous Mexican language) and in David Shook’s Spanish and English translations. Sensual and intricately wrought, these poems take readers on an emotional journey through love and loss with a searing lyricism entirely Terán’s own. His lover’s body is a city where the poet can “give perfect directions,” her name slips over his tongue “like a fish between the hands / of a fisherman,” and when she leaves him it’s with memories like “an ocean of incessant fish.”

    The Spines of Love stands for a simple but bracing truth: Yes, love can hurt, but even after it departs, it strengthens us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRestless Books
    Release dateMar 8, 2015
    ISBN9781632060006
    The Spines of Love
    Author

    Víctor Terán

    With his work translated and anthologized around the world, Victor Terán is the preeminent living poet of the Isthmus Zapotec language of Southern Oaxaca, Mexico. He was born in Juchitán de Zaragoza in 1958. His work has been published extensively in magazines and anthologies throughout Mexico. Since 2000, he has also appeared in anthologies in Italy and the United States (Reversible Monuments, Copper Canyon: 2002; Words of the True Peoples, U Texas P: 2005). A three-time recipient of the national fellowship for writers of indigenous languages, his first book,Diixda; Xieeña (Barefoot Words) was republished in 1997 by Ediciones Bi'cu' Nisa. His books of poetry include Sica ti Gubidxa Cubi (Like a New Sun; Editorial Diana: 1994) and Ca Guichi Xtí' Guendaranaxhii(The Spines of Love; Editorial Praxis: 2003). Terán works as a media education teacher at the secondary level, on the Oaxacan Isthmus. David Shook’s translations of his work have appeared in Poetry, World Literature Today, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, Oxford Magazine, PN Review, and a Poetry Translation Centre chapbook. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured on BBC4.

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      Book preview

      The Spines of Love - Víctor Terán

      Translator's Introduction

      David Shook

      Read in Zapotec Spanish

      The Spines of Love, a selection from Víctor Terán's first three books of poems, offers a case study in the neopastoral imagery of contemporary Isthmus Zapotec poetry. Here is the natural world of the Isthmus of Tehauntepec, mapped in love imagined, consummated, and lost—Terán can give perfect directions / to wherever [we] ask. The North Wind, the moon, the half-dead horses and mangy dogs of Juchitán. (Let's not forget our party's host, mezcal.) That's all there, and will prove striking to the reader new to the Isthmus Zapotec tradition. But what has become more evident to me the longer I've spent time with these poems, the longer I've lived inside them, is their belonging to the world. Víctor Terán may live on a small isthmus in Southern Mexico, he may write in a language with a mere 100,000 speakers and even fewer readers, but he is a world poet. His most recent personal project attests to that: an anthology of forty poems by forty world poets, from Basho to Cavafy to Baudelaire, from Whitman to Eliot, all translated for the first time into Isthmus Zapotec by Terán himself, who uses Spanish cribs. The Spines of Love, Terán's first selected poems in any language, and the first ever trilingual Isthmus Zapotec-Spanish-English book that I know of, proves that he belongs in those esteemed poets' company.

      In 2012 I visited Juchitán for the first time, despite having known Víctor for several years, and even having toured the UK with him in 2010. Juchitán is, as my friend Neil describes it, violently hot. Like hell, but more humid. On entering Víctor's patio in the Séptima Sección, a neighborhood known for being Juchitán's roughest as well as its most artistic, I was greeted by a broadside featuring José Emilio Pacheco's poem Tomorrow, which I happened to have translated just several months before. The prominent display of the poem, which asks if the horrors of today's Mexico are indeed the promises of past tomorrows, suggests the political dimension of Víctor's work, explicit in poems like Soldier but more often hiding just beneath the surface of his lyrics. Ultimately, to write in Isthmus Zapotec is a political decision, a bold declaration not just of the right to speak one's own language but to do so with such craftsmanship and flourish. Spanish has a complicated relationship with the indigenous languages of Mexico, and likewise contemporary Spanish-language poetry with that written in Isthmus Zapotec, Huastecan Nahuatl, or Zoque. Despite the one-sidedness of that conversation, with little, mostly token indigenous work able to permeate the country's literary culture, Víctor reads and dialogues with his Spanish-language contemporaries. He is relentlessly curious; it is fitting that this collection be published by Restless Books.

      After a home-prepared feast featuring courses of dehydrated shark salad, iguana cooked in a sauce with its own eggs, armadillo baked in its shell, and soft-boiled turtle eggs—a powerful aphrodisiac, Víctor warned—we drank Indio beers in his living room, sweating through our shirts and into the couch cushions, while he recited, in Isthmus Zapotec, Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

      Isthmus Zapotec is a language utterly unlike anything that William Wordsworth might have heard or imagined. It's a tonal, Verb-Subject-Object language from the tiny Oto-Manguean family, with some 60+ mutually unintelligible dialects. But, through the miracle of translation, Wordsworth was entirely at home in it. He wore it like an emperor's robe. And though perhaps it's sacrilege, I think Víctor might even have improved—perhaps it's the tonal magnificence of Isthmus Zapotec, its rhythmic employment of glottal stops—the sonic texture of the poem.

      Víctor later told me about his difficulties at translating daffodils, which don't exist in Southern Oaxaca. Isthmus Zapotec, too, has its own flora, symbolism, and idiom. Though I have spent some time in Zapotec

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