Colaterales/Collateral

By Dinapiera Di Donato

A winner of the prestigious poetry award named for the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz—in a special bilingual edition featuring English and Spanish translations.
 
These poems were written during days spent clearing river debris while the author was living along the Hudson River in Manhattan. They speak of these wanderings in the imaginary landscape of a nomadic subject who erases and rewrites.
 
This volume by Venezuelan poet Dinapiera di Donato earned the Paz Prize for Poetry, presented by the National Poetry Series and The Center at Miami Dade College.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781617752032

Book preview

The National Poetry Series and The Center @ Miami Dade College established the Paz Prize for Poetry in 2012. This award—named in the spirit of the late Nobel Prize–winning poet Octavio Paz—honors a previously unpublished book of poetry written originally in Spanish by an American resident.

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of poetry books annually through participating publishers. More than 160 books have been awarded since the Series’ inception and the recent addition of the Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation; Stephen Graham; Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation; Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds; The Poetry Foundation; and Olafur Olafsson.

As a department of Miami Dade College, The Center began in 2002 as an umbrella organization producing literary programming that embraces authors and writing, journalism, play- and screenwriting, reading and literacy, and the successful Miami Book Fair International. The Center’s community outreach consists of reading campaigns and book discussions, writing workshops, author presentations, panel discussions, master classes, and much more to promote the craft and power of the written word.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Akashic Books

©2013 Dinapiera Di Donato

English translation ©2013 Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-191-2

eISBN: 978-1-61775-203-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013938708

All rights reserved

First printing

Akashic Books

PO Box 1456

New York, NY 10009

[e-mail]

www.akashicbooks.com

Agradecimientos

He tenido el placer y el privilegio de trabajar con Alina Galliano en la versión inglesa. Su aporte y profesionalismo han sido de enorme importancia para este libro.

Así mismo quiero agradecer a Alicia Perdomo H. una lectura atenta y las ideas para la portada.

Mi reconocimiento, por su generosidad y apoyo.

Acknowledgments

It has been both a privilege and a pleasure to work with Alina Galliano on the English version of my poems. Her support, encouragement, and professionalism have been central to this book.

I would also like to express my gratitude to Alicia Perdomo H. for an attentive reading and her ideas for the cover.

Thank you again for your generosity and support.

———

The translator would like to thank Idra Novey, Pierre Joris, Johnny Temple, his colleagues at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, Yvette Siegert, and Alina Galliano, whose support and insightful criticism proved instrumental in ushering these poems into English.

ÍNDICE

Introducción por Victor Hernández Cruz

UNO: EN LA CAVERNA

El día

La noche. Escritura llevada encima

Un instante ilegal

La clavícula

La llaga seca

Territorio ocupado

En un campo de azafrán aman sus tubérculos con ese amor lila que baila en las cestas

El pulmón de la desplazada con su huerto salvaje salta

Nieva largamente en la pantalla

DOS: EL RAPTO

Sargento Josanna Jeffrey

La santa, la cruzada, el secuestro

Ruega

Antes de empezar ya en Liverpool bombardearon el café del cardamomo

Mensaje de Tel Aviv: La verde plegaria

Mensaje de Liverpool: La verde plegaria

Virus

El genio

Y Farizada la sonrisa de una rosa contó—mensaje cortado—

Tesoros de Basora encontrados en el MET mientras asaltan Mirbad

TRES: PORTAL DE LAS DORMICIONES

Tryon Park Entre Munira, la brillante, Alina, la noble y Altagracia, la dominicana

Querida, aquel que hablaba de Ibn Al-Arabi con Rachid Sabbaghi …

El señor El-Yanabi borra la sombra de Munira en el parque

El Cazador y sus perros cuando duermen en las ermitas

Los expertos en rayos x infrarrojos de las galerías …

CUATRO: PASARELAS DE MENSAJERÍA (ORIA Y LAS VOCES)

(Falsos) recuerdos de Nina Berberova

Borrar (las santas frescas)

Enviar (Las embalsamadas)

Entrevista de la Madonna Hodigitria, la de la flecha

El testamento de nuestra señora

No hablo de una vida japonesa, te estoy hablando de mi madre

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Victor Hernández Cruz

ONE: INSIDE THE CAVERN

Day

Night. Script Written on Our Skin

Unlawful Moment

Clavicle

Desiccated Wound

Occupied Territory

In a Field of Saffron Loving Their Roots with a Lilac Color …

The Lungs of the Dispossessed Expand in Her Wild Garden

Snow Falls Ceaselessly on the

Reviews for Colaterales/Collateral

[tungsten_peerts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a vital, strong, even blistering sequence of poems. They are by no means easy, but the range of language on display here is nothing short of astonishing -- and I'm only talking about the English translation!I need to re-read the book: this is not the sort of work that one can breeze through once and then summarize. Once I make my way through again, I will come back and turn this into a proper review.Di Donato has a powerful voice, and I thank Akashic Press for introducing her to me. More to come.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some of the poems here--especially those in the first half of the work--are really lovely, floating on a mix of grace and clever wordplay that makes each poem both worthwhile and memorable. Many of the poems, though, are weighted down by heavy and regular allusions to historical and biblical characters and events. In these poems, it's often difficult to follow the train of the poem, and while the language is still lovely, the meaning sometimes gets lost. It is a lovely edition, with the Spanish text printed to face the English text on the opposite page, but the poetry itself feels unbalanced in many ways. I think I'll occasionally go back to a few of these poems, but I don't see myself feeling the need to reread (or recommend) the collection as a whole.

[yarb_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A set of unambitious PattiSmithlike poems which follow neatly in eachother's footsteps. They're divided into four sections, each with its own portentous title and lengthy epigraph, but there's not much difference between the sections. One of them seems to be marginally more concerned with the various mid-East conflicts and another with people wandering around galleries, but it's all much of a muchness.I quite like the way these poems handle cellphones, but in terms of style and subject there's nothing new here at all.A nice enough edition, bilingual, always to be welcomed, and the poems, being free of metre or rhyme, allow for a relatively straightforward translation. There are plenty of nice lines in this book, but nothing memorable or disquieting as good poetry ought to be.

[owen1218 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It was a chore and not a pleasure to read this collection of alienated urban poetry.

[andreablythe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Note: This was an ARC book."no soy el cuervo de mi madremi mirada es oscura de bella terminacióny yo no soy el olor del buitre del zamuro del ruego de mi madre/I am not my mother's ravenmy gaze ends beautiful and darkI am no longer the vulture's fragrance or the idiot's or my mother's plea"-- from "No Hablo de una Vida Japonesa, te Estoy Hablando de Mi Madre / I Don't Mean a Japanese Life, I Mean My Mother"Di Donato explores the modern world, full of cell phones and politics and popular music (Ani Di Franco and Janis Joplin, for example), by calling on ancient saints and virgin madonnas and the figures of forgotten Romans and Moors. The Spanish is presented alongside the English translation, but it also includes phrases and translations from Arabic. I struggled with the poems in the first half of the book. Though I enjoyed individual lines, the thoughts jumped from concept to concept so rapidly that I couldn't grasp the overall feeling or meaning of the poem. This confusion may have been, in part, due to the fact that it is a translation and that I'm missing some of the cultural clues.I found plenty of poems to love in the second half of the book, though, were there was a bit more of narrative flow and the structure of the poems didn't feel so disjointed. These poems were enough for me to enjoy the overall experience and I'll come back to this book again to see if my understanding of the first half changes with time.

[orangewords · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An ambitious collection, but a bit too hyper-referential for me to really get into it. There was a *lot* going on here, and I felt that it ultimately kept me from really engaging with the book as a whole. In addition, while I appreciated the nods to contemporary technology, I found constant references to cell phones and computers to be somehow… dated? Of the collection, my favorite poem was “An Attack on the Cardamom Cafe Before We Settle in Liverpool”. Clearly a well-written book, but it just didn’t grab me. As with most poetry, my opinion is definitely mine and mine alone, and others may enjoy this more than I did.

[tsoys · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading Venezuelan Dinapiera Di Donato’s prizewinning poetry book Collateral is no dip into the verse of slick and quick, but a door to poetic time travel, where distant pasts and modernity coexist, often from one line to the next. One could easily call the book’s four sections, realms: “One: Inside the Cavern; Two: The Rapture; Three: At Dormition’s Site;” and “Four: Message Networks (Aurea and the Voices).” Her poems’ spirituality collides with physical desire and passion, bloodletting and death, “As if a diamond stripped of rotten shell / could show life...” Ignoring today’s narrow temporal sense, painterly images taken from the early and mediaeval culture, myth, religious art, saints, dead languages, sacred sites, and harbingers of Catholicism, merge into the modern, cell phones, sex, satellites, and manga. A certain surreal shock results, as linear time folds back over itself by allusion to a holy name or a spiritual term engineered in juxtaposition to the now, a collateral effect moving backward and forward in time. She mines the violent but fertile cultural history of Christians, Arabs, and Jews. Culture in Collateral is made transcendent: an act, such as opening a door is recast as a past gesture recurring again in the present. Geography collapses. Meaning is multiplied, thought and visuals of various centuries meld together in a line of poetry. Past and present are not divorced by death, or distance, but exist as a universal, if sometimes dizzying instant, a...”turning off the news” in favor of a fuller sweep of the essential experience. This technique is brilliantly on exhibit in the first section titled “Inside the Cavern,” where the feeling is of a dark catacomb of existence, but one portrayed with great beauty. While the vocabulary of Catholicism may cause difficulty for some, reading a poem more once illuminates. Keep an internet device handy to help link any unfamiliar allusion to its textual significance. Di Donato’s Spanish, and the English translation by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, are presented side-by-side. Collateral was awarded the 2012 Paz Prize for Poetry presented by the National Poetry Center and Miami-Dade College. Dinapiera Di Donato teaches Spanish and French in New York.___Val Morehouse, Reviewer.