Copihue Poetry

The three poems here appear in Quejido, canto y arrullo (Garceta Ediciones, 2023), a collection grounded in the lyrical self in which the poet experiences emotions—mainly, the pains and glories of love—and also creates new emotions through her musical-poetic practice. Sounds do things, and create effects. The title evokes three sounds, groan, song, lullaby, which might also be translated through their functions, complaint, seduction, affection. When Yeny reads the poems, her voice itself changes, becoming more angry, more flirtatious, or more sweetly lilting, which provokes a mirror response in the listener; sometimes, as in the case of the final song here, she directly sings the poem, whose title “Song for Being Loved” makes the point, da capo: a song, if sung with tenderness, can create love. What is poetry, what is music? The art of arranging words on the page is accompanied in Yeny’s writing by a constant attention to the sonorous qualities of these words, not as rigid metric, but as just the reverse, a kind of fluid lava or flowing river of musical notes. Yeny is fond of sentences that run on without breaks, and condense multiple phrases into the same line, to the point of creating an ambiguity as to subject and object; in the poem for the devil, for instance, she shifts from the third person impersonal objectivity of a theological treatise, to the second person direct address to a devil, with complete freedom and within just a few lines. Hypothetical questions send the devilish tails of their question marks into her own life. Despite the evocations of the supernatural, these poems are very human, with the enraged devil and the placating woman transforming by the end of the poem into a kind of mutual penetration of selves where such clear dichotomies burn in hellfire. In general, I think that Yeny’s poems, whether they be for a daughter, friend, family member or lover, adopt an incandescent intensity where argument swings into its opposite. She is ironic toward those who live without such intensity; the “descansito” in the title of the second poem, or “little rest”, evokes the corniness and sentimentality of the tidy cemetery plot, rather than the true vast splendor of death with its more dramatic rest. (I think of music here, too, where a rest is silence.) There were a few tricky linguistic moments (“amar / mar” became “devotion / ocean”, to take an example), but for me as translator, respecting the fluidity of Yeny’s poetry, where movements of emotion find their parallel in a molten grammar, was the primary difficulty, as I looked to create understanding in English while also keeping the registers and possible meanings open. More recent poems of Yeny’s adopt the perspective of the Bío Bío in the south of Chile, a beautiful extension of these texts, where the natural world itself becomes another world singing of its movements and the changes in the depths of its currents.