And this particular poem is probably the last--
one of the last screenshares I'll do.
[LAUGHS] This particular poem was a challenge
to translate because it plays on a song by Ismael Rivera,
I don't know if you know it, but it's
called "Las tumbas," which means "the tombs"
but is also the name of a very famous prison in the United
States where a lot of Puerto Ricans were sent.
And the song is simultaneously about being imprisoned
but also, like many of Maelo's songs,
about his struggle with heroin.
And it's one of the most beautiful songs
I've ever heard in my life.
And this was a common theme in salsa songs of the time.
For example, there's one song that actually has a refrain
in English that's--
(SINGING) I'll never go back to Georgia.
And it's because Puerto Ricans were
sent to a prison in Georgia.
And this particular epigraph, Las
tumbas son pa los muertos, y de muerto no tengo na,
would translate roughly as "The tunes
are for the dead, and with the dead I share nothing."
And this was the structure of El Oso Blanco.
So this was how it was designed to have an interior patio
and then to have the person around that interior patio,
and this became more and more intense
as I moved forward in my investigatory work, which
was very difficult because there are actually so few books
written on the carceral system in Puerto Rico.
It's shocking.
But part of what made this very intense
was that there were even like pigs in the original design
and all kinds of livestock.
And later, as conditions of the prison got worse,
prisoners depended actually on the things
they were growing in this interior garden to eat.
So this is a play, of course, on blanco, which is--
and blanco has many meanings, but blanco means white,
but it also means--
it can mean "blank," like "blank space."