In the first five lines of Marigloria Palma’s last book of poetry: “Napalm.” That one word tells us when we are—sometime in the flash or shadow of the Vietnam War—and even a bit about who we are reading, a political subject willing to pronounce the price of empire. Versos de cada día was published in 1980 by La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, though my copy indicates the book itself was “printed in Spain,” another symptom of empire (the first one) and of the island’s embattled literary industry. The printing press did not arrive in Puerto Rico until 1806, almost three centuries after Mexico and almost a century after Cuba; even now the lack of indigenous mass production means books rarely stay in print for long, so that every secondhand copy in good condition is a treasure. I’ve indulged in two: one to mark up as I translate, one for my long-term library. But literature always exceeds its changing technologies of production, and my experience participating in Puerto Rican letters over the last decade has been among the richest of my life. Where books are scarce, we produce an abundance of photocopies, collaborations, and vernacular histories. Here’s one:
In 1980, Marigloria Palma—born Gloria María Pagán y Ferrer—was sixty-five years old, recently widowed, and on the brink of a disabling Parkinson’s diagnosis. I have the sense that she embarked on this book as a spell for surviving hard days—“días inéditos,” she calls them—as if whatever suffering goes uncollected bears down double. These poems are “lyricism in chancletas” and a “Nylon housedress printed with strawberries,” the insufficient and repetitious pleasure of “coffee, crackers, maybe some cheese.” Meanwhile the phone rings with news of homicide. Depression and anxiety are lousy muses, but writers must make use of them, and Palma squeezes “this tired pallid poem” until it bleeds like “a cherry, the Spanish kind” or breaks open like “a nest of wasps.” Rather than attempting to enchant the quotidian with sentimental description, or to placidly accept the world as it is, these daily verses chase down vague frustrations to their vital sources in lust, rage, and rebellion. As the poet proceeds, she finds herself still “spoiling for a fight with life,” still “roaring, bucking, like a white horse who wishes to be painted chocolate brown.”
While Palma was writing the poems I’ve translated here, she lived in Viejo San Juan, in a colonial mansion she shared with her mother. After spending many years restoring the dilapidated structure, she seemed to find it gloomy, with its “frowning portico” and “ironwork of scolding fingers.” Sometimes I stop by her old address on Calle Luna, marked with a marble plaque that she installed herself in 1976—a premature memorial, prophylactic against oblivion. The poems, of course, are the real memorial, resurrecting the quarrelsome traffic of the old city and her place in it: “a few Nuyoricans…here to Iberize,” an old friend who in her bourgeois paranoia about rising crime wants to buy herself a gun. She finds fellowship, if not consensus, with bats, butterflies, “the coquí tethered to her song”: small creatures that have survived the archipelago’s several ends-of-the-world. Viejo San Juan has now been gentrified nearly to death, but my mother, who lived there between 1981 and 1984, remembers dangers at the dark end of that specific street. Cue Willie Colón’s classic salsa: camina pa’lante, no mires pa’l lao. Palma, dismayed, chronicles the neighborhood’s inequities : a woman selling lottery tickets in the meager shade of the colonnade, a man who dies drunk on the sidewalk while his friend shouts, “Someone should bury this old sardine!” She’s keenly aware of how she herself might be perceived in this context: circling the plaza in her old-fashioned “grey stockings,” failing at small talk with neighbors.
When Palma first left Puerto Rico in 1944, she was a poor unmarried nobody, the striving artist daughter of a “mulata” laundress and a white landowner who sired at least thirty-nine children. By the time she came back, she was middle-aged, the respectable bourgeois wife of the Austrian Jewish philosopher Alfred Stern, who seemed happy to call Puerto Rico home, having lost all his close relations in the Holocaust. Palma, too, had suffered personal losses, including her friend Julia de Burgos, whom she met while working at Juan Antonio Corretjer’s Spanish-language newspaper Pueblos Hispanos in New York. Upon returning, she reconnected to her home island’s elite cultural institutions—el Ateneo, el Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña—and began writing frequent essays and columns for local publications like El Mundo and Puerto Rico Ilustrado on topics as diverse as the space race, antiblackness, and the visitor economy. Though she participated actively in “this pentagram called up-to-date,” she never seemed to click with the new literary crowd, which is one reason, I think, why she is under-recognized today—no movement comrades to propagate her work. No children, either. In these Daily Verses the poet practices for death, imagining her own body returned to the earth and “someday eaten,” perhaps by a gentle cow, along “with all those grasses, another form of life.”
Palma often described herself as an introvert. Take, for example, Daily Verses 97: “I’m terribly serious, and when I see another person laugh, I’m surprised.” She subjected her own character to obsessive scrutiny; in this book she even articulated the concern that her poems somehow “tighten the leash” on the world’s “undulating music.” (I don’t think they do.) But like most introverts, her silent gaze also concealed withering social judgments: she once remarked that her books would have been more popular had she died dramatically like her friend Julia, or cozied up to the governor, like Clara Lair. In Versos de cada día I can feel her painful solitude, her discomfort with her new class position, and her despair over Puerto Rico’s ongoing status as a territory in the grip of U.S. militarism. At the same time, I’m enlivened by her attraction to lives different from her own: “the delicious babble of students with their frenetic bongos” or “la loca snapping her skirt” in the “matchpoint heat” of hurricane season. Palma’s restless erotic intelligence works like a tuning fork, searching the body politic for hidden springs of liberation.
Uniquely among Palma’s books, Versos de cada día opens with a brief preface theorizing the purpose of her favored genre: “Poetry is a magic arrow in direct flight from one soul to another, and if it’s good, it never misses.” Am I, then, her mark? Are you? Translation has the uncanny power to refigure who counts as contemporary; because of me, Palma is now a twenty-first century poet in English. I cannot neutralize or even perceive all the ways my versions are marked by my own moment, and yet I do feel she pierces us precisely. If not Vietnam, then Gaza. If not “rackets of warplanes showing off” over San Juan, then amphibious tanks commandeering the beaches of Arroyo. The Puerto Rican landscape still proclaims its natural sovereignty: “the sky achieves, as it almost always does, that tone of Independence Blue” while the flamboyán trees “march down the sonorous street” with their “riot of darts” and flags of fire. Lately it feels like our collective cry has broken into open conflagration and everyone can feel the heat. The Puerto Rican struggle has even scored a spot on primetime television. My unsolicited advice? Don’t change the channel when the superstar stops singing.
In his Nobel Prize speech, the West Indian poet Derek Walcott makes a curious claim: “the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language.” The line returns to me often as I translate Palma, becoming more conversant in her dialect of crickets, bombs, bells, shadows, fish, loudspeakers, numbers, and angels. Dialects, after all, are more than individual: they emerge from and come to define a community. I have made many friends in the process of translating this supposedly solitary poet: Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Nicole Delgado, Ricardo Maldonado, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Xavier Valcárcel, and Mara Pastor, who first introduced me to her work. Together we congregate in the profane church of her dialect and recite her daily verses: “Life, I love you, I love you in this moment, I love you for your sweetness. I can’t say I’ll love you tomorrow…” But her candor keeps us company. Her doubt makes it more likely we’ll wake up wanting another morning.