Translator's Note

I first met Jesús Maya while living in Toronto in 2010. As a student of Spanish and Latin American literature at University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature, I felt that I could not effectively or ethically claim to study a culture without familiarizing myself with people from that culture and immersing myself in the local community. On the invitation of a Nicaraguan-Canadian friend I’d met in my Master’s program, I began attending Latinx cultural events around Toronto: concerts and lectures at a community center called Casa Maíz, dances and May Day celebrations at a steelworkers’ union hall, and Sunday morning poetry readings at a Caribbean café. Much to my surprise and delight, the people I met in these community spaces welcomed me even though I was a non-Latinx “canadiense”...and to my even greater delight (or should I say relief?) they continued to accept me even when they found out that I was actually not a canadiense at all, but a bona fide Buffalo, New York-born gringa. Soon I was reading my own poetry at these events, helping to organize a cultural festival focused on bringing poets and political activists together, and translating work by various local Spanish-speaking writers, then reading it alongside them at public events.

It was through this community involvement that I encountered Maya. A recent immigrant to Canada, he was working by day as a painter of home interiors and by night organizing cultural events. The first time I heard him perform his poetry, he was accompanied on electric guitar by his younger brother Emanuel; they called their duo Los Santos Inocentes (The Holy Innocents). In the cadence of a song, Maya spoke of the harsh realities of growing up in poverty, the pain of living with addiction, the hope of a new life as an immigrant, and the stark reality when learning that a new life brings with it new challenges. While some of these themes may seem familiar, Maya brings a freshness to them that comes from looking through the lens of childhood and youth. Though the themes of his poetry are intense, he approaches them with humor, playfulness and heart. It was with great joy that I attended the launch of his first book, La Tolvanera, in 2012. Drawing a crowd of around two hundred people and accompanied by live music, it remains one of the most joyous literary events I’ve ever attended. 

I decided to translate Maya’s work soon after the event. Over a period of about five years, with many pauses in between, I translated the book with guidance from Maya’s friends Matlactli Kiahuitl, a writer, and Paloma Villegas, a sociologist who focuses on migration studies. Both the subject matter – which describes intense experiences quite different from my own – and the conversational tone of these poems posed a challenge for me. I spent many hours talking with Maya, listening to his stories the life experiences that led him to write these poems and watching films that he enjoyed as a child, in particularly the classic Pepe el Toro trilogy from the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. At a later stage in the translation process, I shared the manuscript with Ben Johnson, a writer and catholic worker in Dubuque, Iowa who provides support for men experiencing homelessness, to see how these poems would be received by a monolingual English reader who has lived in much closer proximity than I to the realities that Maya describes. Receiving his feedback helped me further to strike a conversational tone that would convey these poems’ message and mood to English-speaking readers.

Rats are the bane of any city dweller’s existence. Years ago, when my friend adopted two white rats as pets to keep her company in her Manhattan apartment, she would regularly tell her neighbors that they were gerbils, since the idea of someone keeping rats as a pet is enough to strike primal fear into any New Yorker (and according to her, most people don’t know what gerbils actually are). Maya is also a lifelong city dweller, but for the child narrator of these poems, rats are loving companions, beings who deserve tenderness and care. Though they sometimes turn against the humans whose habitat they share, (“It hurts to be bitten by someone you love”) they are a source of comfort, laughter, and friendship.

In recent years in the US, we have been bombarded by gut-wrenching stories and images of immigrants seeking refuge within our borders. Primarily from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala as well as Mexico, these people are fleeing poverty, environmental destruction, and the violence of organized crime, which is itself a result of our country’s long-standing War on Drugs. These asylum seekers endure harrowing conditions on the journey north, and unfortunately, some do not make it alive. If they are able to enter the US, they regularly endure economic hardship, social isolation, the fear of an uncertain future, and discrimination in their new home. However, as Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned in her acclaimed TED talk on “The Danger of a Single Story,” it is necessary to avoid the temptation to only hear one incomplete narrative of a person or group of people. Having lived and worked for several years with Central American and Mexican immigrants in my current home of Dubuque, Iowa, I know that their stories are complex, nuanced, and unique to each individual’s experience. The gentle humor and tenderness of Maya’s work serve as a call to resist the temptation to categorize and stereotype people, to remember that each person, no matter where they come from, has a singular story to tell, and thus to affirm the dignity of all.

Jeannine M. Pitas

In the Classroom