Does anybody want to ask me an uncomfortable question?
Or maybe a comfortable question.
Or a comfortable question.
I wanted to ask this earlier, but you
seem to be the perfect person--
really, both of you-- to address this to, which is,
you speak of living in metaphor.
And I think of these very different countries,
Catholic Mexico and Protestant America,
and I wonder if you live in metaphor in different ways
in the two languages.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
Do you--
Do you if I live--
me, myself, and I, if I live--
Yes, and in your poetry.
Yeah.
You mean if I live in a different metaphor in English
than I do in Spanish?
Yes, uh-huh.
I probably do.
Because metaphors are never the same in any language,
and they construct themselves in different ways.
And so, now that I've heard the poems in English translated
by Wendy, definitely there is a different way
of living in them.
And in my mind specifically, because I
do come from an American mother and a Mexican father,
there's a constant war of translation.
It's kind of like a workshop where pieces of language
are being thrown around.
That's the way it was in my childhood
because there was always this constant fight between Spanish
or English, and which of the two languages would win.
And that war is, in itself, a metaphor.
So I would say that, in my case, there is a metaphor of war,
and of languages, and of workshop,
and of constant translation, and of constant treason,
in the sense that translation is a way of treason,
and of what is lost in translation, as well.
And that metaphor could also go on forever.
So I don't know if Wendy would have
something different to say.
There is a wonderful poem that Tedi
wrote in her book, "Luz por aire y
aqua," which translates to "Light Through Air and Water."
Great title, by the way.
And it's called-- its title is "Sin Título," which, of course,
means "untitled."
And it's dedicated to Tedi's mom.
And I was just thinking that, as you asked the question, Fenton,
and then as you answered, Tedi, because there's
a part in the poem where Tedi says,
I hear the word orange slow on your tongue.
And then, right behind it, I hear "naranja" really quickly,
those three quick syllables.
And then she goes on to say--
and there is the metaphor.
It's the oranges.
They're sitting in an orange crate.
And she says, and then I hear "huacal" but it doesn't--
I'm paraphrasing here, of course-- it doesn't
seem as real as "crate."
And I think that that's an example from your work
that I would respond to your question with.
I noticed in your work and in some
of the work of other contemporary Mexican women
poets, a real ease and comfort and confidence with philosophy
and a real sense of being able to make large proclamations
about big things, like the nature of will, for example.
And I don't see that in contemporary US
women's writing as much.
And so I wonder if there's something that--
where do you draw, personally, your own sense of comfort
with philosophy or with taking on larger questions that
are both abstract and physical at the same time,
in your own writing?
What was your own impulse to do that?
Well, first of all, I studied philosophy so I have--
it's kind of like a vice with me.
And then, the subject of will has always astounded me,
how one does not control it.
It's like an animal.
Because one can make a lot of decisions.
I'm going to-- I'm going to stop doing this.
But your will always goes another way.
So will is a very strange thing.
It's like the animal that we have inside.
And also, what you said about--
I don't know about other women poets in Mexico--
about American poetry not being like that.
I've been reading, now that I've been at the Poetry Cottage,
I've taken advantage of the library they have there.
And I've been reading Jorie Graham.
And I think she's a very philosophical poet.
You're right, yes.
Extremely philosophical.
All her poems are very long.
They're meandering poems.
And they are poems about thought more than about experience,
or let's say about experience through thought.
It's like if one can never really be there
unless one thinks about it.
And I think she's very much in that kind of atmosphere.
That's the atmosphere of most of her poems.
I've translated Anne Carson into Spanish.
And I think she's also quite a philosophical poet.
But, of course, she has the privilege
of knowing ancient Greek and an irony to that privilege, which
makes her very special.
But maybe you're right.
I don't know.
I don't know what other Mexican poets you refer to.
But, in any case, it does start from something that I studied.
And, in the case of will, that very savage animal
that I have inside.
Thank you.
One thing I would just say very quickly
is that three wonderful Mexican novelists
are here as well today.
Actually, they're in the room.
And many of us enjoyed hearing their presentation just prior
to this one.
And one of them, Cristina Rivera-Garza,
was talking about how, as someone who teaches in the US,
she brought her students over to her house
for a presentation and a reading of their work.
And they were so impressed by the fact
that she has a PhD in history.
And she went on to comment about how, in Mexico, it's
quite uncommon--
I think she said there's one university where you can now
study creative writing.
As opposed to here in the US where, of course,
we have many creative writing programs.
And perhaps that's a part of the puzzle too,
that in Mexico we have so many wonderful contemporary poets
who are all experts in something in addition,
something else besides their poetry or their fiction
or their essays, their crónica.
And it's a good reminder to us that we
need to study very hard.
Many things, I'd say.
I had a question about English versus Spanish poetry.
And if you, Ms. Mills, if you always start from Spanish,
or if you sometimes write English poetry and then
translate it, or how your process works.
No I've never written poetry in English.
When I started writing, when I was an adolescent,
English was predominant in my--
it was the language that I spoke, that I mostly spoke in
because I went to an American school,
because my mother was a predominant figure
in my adolescence.
So English was the strongest language when I was, let's say,
up to the age of 15.
And then I decided that it was politically incorrect to speak
in English in Mexico.
Because I always had to do a lot of explaining.
So I forced myself to only write and think in Spanish.
And it was really torture for a while
because when a thought started, let's say
the stream of consciousness started in English,
I would stop it and say, no, you have to do it again,
but in Spanish.
So it was a very tricky process.
It made me very self-conscious, obviously.
I was always thinking about what I
was thinking, that I had to think in Spanish and not
in English.
So I became very unspontaneous.
But at that time, when English was the predominant language,
I started writing prose, not poetry, in English.
And, as usually happens when you're an adolescent,
I thought I was very interesting.
And I thought my life was very interesting,
so I started writing my autobiography in English.
And then, when I turned to Spanish,
I stopped writing for a very long time.
I didn't write until I was in college studying philosophy.
And then I immediately started writing in Spanish.
And I never again wrote in English.
And a poem has never occurred to me in English,
although I do read a lot in English.
Heidi, do you ever write any poems in Spanish?
Oh, to Wendy.
Yes, Wendy.
Do you write any--
I'm sorry.
I thought--
When I was a student studying Spanish in college,
I did sometimes have to write exercises and poems in Spanish.
And I really enjoyed it.
And I went on to write a couple of poems in Spanish.
And, at some point-- or, you know, bilingual poems.
At some point, I felt like that was a pose, and sort
of an uncomfortable pose.
Kind of the opposite side of what
Tedi is saying with political correctness,
that as somebody who is not of Latina ancestry,
for me to write poems in Spanish,
it didn't seem like the right thing to do.
I decided that it was wrong.
That it was not right for me to do this in any serious way.
But, of course, I think it is right and interesting
for me to do it as an exercise and as a way to improve
my own Spanish.
So it's interesting.
We've kind of had complementary experiences
in that way, an experience of starting out in one way
and then making a conscious choice that no,
that's not the right way for me to go.
We're sort of like a mirror, huh?
So we're out of time.
Thank you, Tedi and Wendy.