Migrations and Mutations: Four Writer-Translators on Writing and Translating from Our Bodies

As writers and translators, we ask: How do situated bodily experiences shape the literatures of belonging? How do our somatic autobiographies feed and fuel our literary creations? All our of us work between English and at least one other language: Azerbaijani, Spanish, and Isthmus Zapotec. Our poetry and creative nonfiction—both what we translate and what we write—seek to understand experiences of migration and mutation, travel and transformation. 

At the 2023 AWP Conference in Seattle, we four writer-translators, all living and working on the West Coast, presented poetry and creative nonfiction emerging from the struggles of displaced peoples to connect body and place via story and lyric. As the essays collected below demonstrate, such connections are essential to survival. 

 Marco Antonio Huerta Alardín and Cecilia Martinez-Gil describe their transnational lives and from dislocations created by a range of violences: civil war, homophobia, and political unrest. Wendy Call and Alison Mandaville describe their experiences as translators of poetry by women—literature that is rooted in the body, in some cases by choice and in other cases by force.

“Cuerpo Migrante, Cuerpo Mutante: From The Riverbanks of Painted Birds To The Ochre Basins of Spat Obsidian”

Cecilia Martinez-Gil

I come from Uruguay though its political name is República Oriental del Uruguay, which renders mi país natal with a name establishing its geographical location: the republic on the Eastern tierra of the river Uruguay, in Guaraní, río de los pájaros pintados. My family's ancestry comprises migrants from West and East Africa, the Middle East, Mediterranean Europe, and East Asia. My DNA proves that my ancestors are the extinct Charrúas, the first people inhabiting the lands the conquistadores appropriated. One of my ancestors founded the city hospital and others were caudillos who fought alongside los Libertadores of the land on the East of the painted birds’ river. The blood of my lineages flows like a río in me, and from this inheritance, the brown body of a poet mutated from the mud and sand in the riverbanks.

Mi abuelo paterno was a carpenter who restored churches. He was a green-eyed, red-skinned Basque who often looked down at me, ¡qué lástima que la niña es tan oscurita! Mamalola was a kind, righteous woman whose piel oliva barely hinted su sangre from Andalusian Gypsies, Charrúas, and formerly enslaved Africans. She was the seamstress for the Luso-Brazilian Count and Countess terratenientes who raised my father. The count's efforts to instill in Papi his blue-blooded mores entailed that he became a priest or joined the navy, which he did. Briefly. Instead, Papá became a political activist resisting the military coup for the Gobierno de facto en mi paisito. He escaped before a paramilitary group raided my house. The armed men tossed libros subversivos in the center of the patio and lit a bonfire. I was nine when I watched the flames from my window, as if bailaores de flamenco. Still, my body is a synesthete when a fire alarm goes off—I close my eyes to avoid smelling ashes, spit soot as if stuck to my teeth, and cover my ears to banish the dread goose-bumping my skin.

Clandestine correspondence was the only means to communicate with my father when he escaped persecution to live in exile for a decade during those darkest years. This communication would have been hazardous had the letters been found. Letters concealed meaning like riddles coding allegories of experience. In one letter, my father described my resilience. His prose moved metonymically from an anecdote of my childhood to a story of a starfish, able to regenerate after mutilation. Though each letter was destined to disappear, once, a letter twisted and tossed in the fireplace survived partially blackened. My father rescued it from the hearth and reread it. Then, he tore it into pieces and threw them over Río de la Plata, hoping that the tides would keep my words streaming in the brown river. But the wind blew the torn pieces back, spreading them over his shirt like paper polka dots—Mi hija es indestructible. [1]

I started writing a place-based memoir during the pandemic's shelter-in-place and the surging of my trauma. All the Places that Called Me Home is a collection of essays about my nomadic life living in over fifty homes and over a dozen countries. During the first nineteen years of my life, I lived in ten different homes, in Montevideo’s barrios, in the rural towns of Minas and Durazno, on a small farm where I first learned to milk a cow, and on a dairy, and a wool farm, where I learned to plant vegetables and to ride horses without a saddle. Before I finished the 12th grade, I had attended nine schools. Then, I moved to Argentina and lived in five cities, from metropolitan Buenos Aires to ciudad norteña del altiplano Jujuy, where I realized my body's skills at learning inhabitance. Soon, this body carried me to countries across Las Américas, and Western Europe, from the foggy silvers of Stockholm to the liquid sapphires of Ibiza. I tasted my first burrito in Luxembourg Ville, the Gamay grapes of Beaujolais Noveau in a quaint Beaujolais village. I ran through tulip fields in Bruges, was entranced by Cante Jondo en Sevilla, and I emerged from the musty scent of ancient catacombs to my aliento caliente while sighting snow blanketing Trier. And every time I migrated, I mutated, I regenerated como una Estrella de Mar.

I've never suffered the pain of being undocumented, but like many immigrants, my identity can be traced back to la tierra primordial. The metaphor of la vida in the in-betweens es verdad. Although I first rooted en la tierra de América del Sur, el lugar que le dió color a mi piel, yo tengo raíces in Santa Monica, en América del Norte donde encontré mi lugar en el mundo cuando dí a luz a mi hija. However, liminal living is an allegory when we contemplate the factor of time with the fact of the body to experience phenomena. Migrants are attached to recuerdos del pasado while the hope of el futuro measures nuestro presente con un reloj de arena. Y así el cuerpo lucha para poder ser y estar.

I forget that our cuerpos are composed of Earth’s elements—somos Naturaleza. Sometimes, I've fruitfully juxtaposed my elements with those of my surroundings. Sometimes, I've failed to achieve an adequate adaptation, like when I hiked at the Coso Range, Tehachapi, and Inyokern, on Eastern California, guided by Dr. David S. Whitley, author of Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit. [2] There, place fire-branded me, coaxing me to regenerate. Before then, I’d written a collection of poems entitled a fix of ink, and the eponymous poem alluded to cave paintings, resonating with the archeologist’s prose as if our words shared familial DNA:

[…]

Incomprehensible ancestral life

rippling me in reasons 

fixing me in ink,

tracing me bold as a chiseled silhouette,

etched by fingertips and nails,

opened as red palm to 3D my story: 

bleeding my mark

healing on my mark

solidifying the sign,

as I reap me in penned might. 

For I am dyed in an ink

that doesn't let me die. [3]

In the fall of 2019, David Whitley took me to sightsee rock art by the Coso People of the Northern Paiute Nation. At Coso Junction, where volcanoes had existed prehistorically, (Coso means fire), the early 1900s’ pictographs by Coso Kawaiisu, Bob Rabbit, the last known Rainmaker and Shaman, imprinted in me as I blended con el lugar, y mi piel was another shade of the ochre chaparral freckled with volcanic obsidian. The wilderness absorbed me scarring mi pierna. The scratches resembled a musical score with tiny dots of coagulated blood like quarter and eight notes forming incidental melodies and harmonies—my injuries sang the land’s tune playing upon my skin. A veces, we heal creatively migrating to a new ecosystem and elementally mutating to survive atravesando la expression hacia el umbral de la palabra.