Anita Endrezze
Poeta, escritora y artista. Es media india Yaqui y media Europea (eslovena, rumana-alemana del norte de Italia). Endrezze nació en Long Beach, California, en 1952. Se graduó con una maestría de la Universidad del Este de Washington. Vive en Everett, Washington, está casada y tiene dos hijos y trabaja como relatora de historias, artista y profesora. Endrezze imparte cursos universitarios y su obra ha sido traducida a siete idiomas, publicada en diez países.
Obra: The north people (1983), at the helm of twilight (1992), The humming of stars and bees and waves: poems and short stories (1998), and the mixed-genre collection Throwing fire at the sun, water at the moon (2000).
POESÍA INDIA
ESTADOUNIDENSE CONTEMPORÁNEA
Traducción: Márgara Averbach
HACEDOR DE CANCIONES
Hay un borracho en la avenida principal,
desplomado
frente a la Misión de los Evangelios.
Está soñando con pintos del color del vino
y el hielo y tambores que dicen los nombres
del viento. El cabello le esconde la cara,
pero creo que yo lo conozco.
¿Acaso no hizo canciones que la gente canta
todavía en sus sueños?
¿Acaso los coyotes no le pidieron canciones
nuevas
para darle a la luna?
¿Acaso no bailó toda la noche una vez y rió
cuando las mujeres se pusieron tímidas de pronto
al amanecer?
¿Acaso no hizo una canción para mí solamente,
una canción bendita porque la cantaron sólo una vez?
Si levantara la cara,
le vería los ojos, vería
si está cantando ahora
una canción que disuelve las almas.
Pero está todo encogido
y todo el mundo camina a su alrededor.
Todavía debe tener mucha magia
para ser tan invisible.
Me acuerdo de él diciendo:
Hasta el pasto tiene una canción,
aunque sólo la oiga el viento.
SONG MAKER
There is a drunk on Main Avenue, slumped
in front of the Union Gospel Mission.
He is dreaming of pintos the color of wine
and ice, and drums that speak the names
of wind. His hair hides his face,
but I think I know him.
Didn’t he make songs people still sing
in their sleep?
Didn’t coyotes beg him for new songs
to give to the moon?
Didn’t he dance all night once and laugh
when the women suddenly turned
shy at dawn?
Didn’t he make a song just for me,
one blessed by its being sung only once?
If he would lift his face
I could see his eyes, see
if he’s singing now
a soul-dissolving song.
But he’s all hunched over
and everyone walks around him.
He must still have strong magic
to be so invisible.
I remember him saying:
Even grass has a song,
‘though only wind hears it.
LA HIJA DEL QUE HACE LOS MAPAS
la geografía del amor es terra infirma
es un barco de papel
navegado por oficiales
con estrellas en los ojos
cartógrafos de la ferocidad de lo desconocido
es la mano segura de una mujer
en el timón del atardecer, la brújula
de sal de su deseo
* * *
el mapa del deseo está en el borde
de dos cuerpos distantes
es la lluvia que envía la sed como un barco
es la hoja de palma flotando sobre aguas
alejadas de la orilla
* * *
el pasaje secreto hacia el interior
es mi estuario de intemperancia
el florecimiento dulce y lánguido
está en el calibre de tus manos
* * *
el movimiento circular de nuestro viaje
es el radio del cielo y el mar, profundos
territorios a los que nombramos
con nuestros nombres
en el timón del atardecer, la brújula
de sal de su deseo
* * *
el mapa del deseo está en el borde
de dos cuerpos distantes
es la lluvia que envía la sed como un barco
es la hoja de palma flotando sobre aguas
alejadas de la orilla
* * *
el pasaje secreto hacia el interior
es mi estuario de intemperancia
el florecimiento dulce y lánguido
está en el calibre de tus manos
* * *
el movimiento circular de nuestro viaje
es el radio del cielo y el mar, profundos
territorios a los que nombramos
con nuestros nombres
THE MAP MAKER’S DAUGHTER
the geography of love is terra infirma
it is a paper boat
navigated by mates
with stars in their eyes
cartographers of the fiery unknown
it is the woman’s sure hand
at the helm of twilight, the salt
compass of her desire
* * *
the map of longing is at the edge
of two distant bodies.
it is the rain that launches thirst
it is the palm leaf floating on waters
far from shore
* * *
the secret passage into the interior
is in my intemperate estuary
the sweet and languorous flowering
is in the caliber of your hands.
* * *
the circular motion of our journeying
is the radius of sky and sea, deep
territories we name
after ourselves
Anonymous Is Coyote Girl
From a newspaper photo and article about my godfather, James Moreno, East Los Angeles, 1950.
(Three police officers took a brutal beating in a wild free-for-all with a
family, including three young girls.
From left, James, 19, and Alex, 22, in jail after the fracas
on the porch of their home at 3307 Hunter.)
Jimmy is staring off the page, hands in his pockets.
A four-button dark shirt. No bruises,
but he looks dazed.
Alex wears a leather coat and a polka-dot shirt,
which is in itself a crime.
Nowhere is there a photo of a young girl
with a face carved like a racetrack saint,
eyes with all bets called off,
grinning like a coyote.
(Officer Parks had his glasses broken
with his own sap
and was thrown through a window.)
Jimmy and Alex are my dad’s cousins,
lived on Boyle Heights and tortillas.
Mama says the cops always harassed them, those niños
from East L.A., driving their low-riders,
chrome shinier than a cop’s badge.
And why wasn’t Coyote Girl mentioned, that round-armed
girl with a punch like a bag of bees,
a girl with old eyes, her lips cracking open
as she saw the cop sailing through glass, boiling out
of Boyle Heights, skidding on the sidewalk, flat as a tortilla?
(The officers received severe cuts and bruises,
were treated at a hospital and released in time to jail the youths,
who were charged with assault with a deadly weapon.)
Two years later, I was born and Jimmy entered the church,
hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, watching the christening.
Four drops of water, like popped-off wafer-thin buttons,
fell on my head.
No.
He never showed up that day
or any other. My spiritual guardian must’ve been there
in spirit only.
He didn’t know nada about Got and no one knows
where he is today, but I think you could find him at the end
of a knife. Or in the slash of the z
in ¡La Raza! the dark blood
reds of graffiti. Or tomatoes
grown in old coffee cans
by a white-haired man
sitting in the sun in a dark shirt,
next to an old woman growing younger every day
as I tell her story, my story,
our story
with all the grace and power
of a deadly weapon.
“Anonymous is Coyote Girl” from Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon.
Indian Vices (IN THE PERSONA OF FATHER OCH)
By nature Indians are very lazy and sworn enemies of work.
They prefer to suffer hunger than to fatigue themselves
with agriculture. Therefore, they must be forced to do this by their
superiors. With six industrious Europeans one can do more
in one day than fifty Indians
—Joseph Och, Missionary in Sonora: Travel Reports
of Joseph Och, S.J., 1755-1767
Mining: The Indian is naked, swinging
quarter to half hundredweight steel-edged crowbars.
He climbs beams with notches set step by step,
carrying ore in plaited baskets
on his shoulders.
They are given one half-bushel of maize per week.
This is their payment unless they have a family–
then they are given two half-bushels.
Two men using a wheelbarrow could haul out
more than can thirty lazy Indians
working an entire day.
Natural resources: They are naked, with only a loincloth.
Otherwise they would steal valuable ore.
Instead they laugh
when their hair is thick with dusted gold
so that they look like ugly yellow-haired creatures.
Their hair is long and they secrete fragments
of ore there, wrapping their hair up
like a turban. You can no more trust them
than you would a Turk.
Gold and silver ore varies.
Some is very heavy, pure
silver spiked, as it were,
with silver nails.
The completely black
very heavy ores
are considered the richest.
Processing: The Indian washes his hair
several times a day, sluicing water
over his long hair, letting the silver fall
into a bowl which he then strains,
keeping more silver.
Then again, the Indian must relieve himself
and he hides behind a bush,
thereby stealing more ore
in a most despicable way.
Some can be reduced by fire . . .
or be broken up
and placed into a clay oven
. . . with molten lead,
until . . . the lead has amalgamated
with the silver.
Pebbles and slag float on top
and are skinned off
with hoes and the lead heated
with a double fire
until it becomes light and frothy
like glass.
This froth is removed in heaps;
what remains is pure silver.
The waste product: When the Indian dies,
perhaps careless at work, he is wrapped in a horse blanket.
Thread from deer or plant fiber
is used to sew him up.
It is heathen, this practice
of putting bows and arrows,
small bowls, and other things
in the grave. Instead, I pull the bell rope
and they are pleased at the songs
and lighted tapers
on the altar of the whitewashed church.
They die when they want to,
saying they are only journeying
to the next village.
They have many vices
which I have discovered
and abolished, including the throwing
of patterned sticks,
which is like gambling.
They would rather lie on blankets
in the bushes, throwing these sticks
against the rough wool to muffle the sound,
than work in the fields
or in the mines which are very near,
nor do they think of tomorrow
and the profit that must be made,
whether it is gold, silver, maize,
or their heathenish souls.
“Indian Vices” from Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon.
The Gulf of California
There are two memories of tides:
one for the deep blackness that split
away from the mother sea
and one for sea that found itself
in the daybreaks of rivers.
Yet it was all one sea
tracked by comets and the Elegant Tern,
seals in speckled pod-shaped skins,
and whales, opening their small eyes
when the hands of people drew fish
out of the salt.
Geologists tell us that the sea split
millions of years ago
before the Yoemem, Yoremem,
Kunkaak, O-Otam
curled their tongues around the names
of themselves and raised the conch shell
to their lips, so that the sound of nature
became human, too:
kalifornia vaawe
Then the sea was measured
and divided into leagues.
The Spanish ships called it dangerous
because the sea tore in two ways,
tide and rivers,
so they contained it in maps
written on dead animal skins
with ink made from dried octopus blood
Mar de la Kalifornia
Golfo de California
Then it was named the Vermilion Sea
when the red-shelled crabs clicked in the waters.
It was the Sea of Cortés
because it’s the right of the Conqueror
to claim the world in his name.
It’s his right to name hunger after himself
and to take away rivers
and children
and to give back the bare bones
of life
in the Queen’s name.
What can you say about men
who name the mountains “mother”
madre
when the worst curse they can shout
defiles their mother
in the act of creation?
Now we call the Gulf of California
polluted
with the pesticides of fields
and the wastes of factories.
And the voices of the fin-backed whale,
sardines, sea-kelp, anemone,
and turtle are quieter,
so that we have less memory
of the way it was
and less hope
for the way it will be.
In the winter I eat strawberries
from Mexico
and oranges, sectioned and split
apart
on my north continental plate.
I don’t know much about my relatives
picking the fields near Bacum, Torim.
I don’t know much about the spiny sea urchin,
except that it knows more than I
about the sea, the sea that names itself
unnameable
movable horizon.
“The Gulf of California” from Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon.
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