Translator’s Note

Translating Sara Torres’ work requires a profound immersion into a world where desire, identity, memory, and loss are constantly reshaping themselves. To read, to interpret Sara Torres’ poetry is a daunting task, one that makes many demands on the reader. Even more so if one is tempted to translate it. However, in translating these poems, I felt intimately and forever connected with them.  Torres’ writing often stands as a meditation on the embodied fragmentation of the “self,” with existential and emotional tensions permeating each and every line. In translating these lines, I found myself balancing a desire to remain faithful to her linguistic precision and unique, fragmented form, while also allowing the fluidity of English to mirror the same weight and resonance Sara Torres achieves in Spanish. The selected poems I translated —or parts of a whole, fragmented poem, depending on the reading—appeared in Phantasmagoria (La Bella Varsovia 2019). 

One of the central challenges I faced was preserving the tension between presence and absence. Whether through the questioning of memory—“call it memory / of what? of whom?” (llámalo memoria /¿de qué? ¿quiénes?)—or the unraveling of identity in “until there is no me*” (hasta que ya no hay me*)—the poems dissolve into a space where the self is elusive, indefinite. The dissolution of self becomes even more poignant in the repeated imagery of loss, making it both personal and universal. In my English translation, I sought to maintain this ambiguity, where both the individual and the collective experience of disappearance coexist. For example, “now that *I lose you* you resemble the nature / of Absence” (ahora que te *pierdo te* pareces tanto a la natu- / raleza de la Ausencia) captures a delicate balance of both a person and an abstract idea disappearing. Repetition is crucial in these poems, both structurally and emotionally. Translating repeating lines such as una vida que pudo ser otra vida que podría ser una / vida que no será y aun así posed the challenge of maintaining a cyclical, almost hypnotic element in English, without losing the depth of the original. The recurrence of words and ideas mirrors the inescapable return to past lives, potentialities, and spirits. I worked to keep such repetitions to enhance the poem’s resonance, reflecting on how the past continues to echo, unresolved, in the present. 

The imagery Torres uses is another defining feature of her work, especially in these poems, blending the natural, the visceral, and the abstract. From “you are a silver fish retracting” (eres pez de plata que encoge) to the violent “you* have strangled the ram with your hands” (has* ahorcado al carnero / con tus* manos), her poems move seamlessly between dreamlike hallucinations and sharp, visceral experiences. Capturing this in translation required a focus on both the vividness of the images and the emotional gravity they carry. I aimed to preserve the symbolic intensity while ensuring the language remained evocative yet clear, for to translate Sara Torres’ work, one must become an accomplice to her engagement with the vacated, the ambiguity, the “phantasmagorical” in-betweenness she so skillfully crafts. 

Sofia Monzón