Doppelgängers: Of “Sirens”
The translation previous is not literal; it reflects my e-conversations with Reina María. The original, “Sirenas,” seems both to refer to a specific narrative and to a variety of more general cultural references (the sirens, boats, blue birds, fathers, monuments, somebody's book on truth). I say “seems” because the reader must intuit their play of meaning. In response to questions I sent about the range of meanings to open, Reina gave me a backstory showing that the poem remembers events of October 1984: “I heard [sirens] and asked my mother what was happening. She told me that Indira Gandhi had died. The day before I had read [Mahatma] Gandhi's book with the title—or something like it—of My Experiments in Truth, and I put lilies in the living room. Some ten days earlier, a truck driver who works with my tía had come to her apartment in our building to see a friend suffering from a kidney ailment. I didn't want to see him and was afraid of him. But he saw the tip of my sandals in the doorway to the room and he said some things to me, prophecies that all came true. For example that I would feel great pain upon the death of someone who wore a mantle, he made one with his hands. And then I thought that Indira was coming to Cuba, and it turned out that she had died. From this came the sound of the sirens, the text” (email, June 23, 2005 ; emails in my translation). After reflecting on this backstory, I was working on the phrase “la mujer del pájaro azul” (literally: the woman of the blue bird), considering ways to keep US associations with bluebirds out of the intuitive mix. I asked Reina if she had any specific images in mind. A peacock, for example, could emphasize pomp and spectacle around a national leader like Indira Gandhi. Her response sent me in a different direction, toward the term “indigo”: “The bird is blue because of a drawing I remember of a bird on an Indian fabric, it's nothing symbolic, perhaps the flower of Novalis is the closest thing in my weaving” (email, July 10, 2005 ). Indigo, both color and dye, evokes the fabric of the mantle, which I've named within the poem (the woman is now “mantled with” birds, not just “of” one). Despite the explicit cues that I've added to the translation, however, intuition still holds the poem together instead of reason. We do not hear the backstory about the truck driver's vision of the mantle or even learn what woman has died. For that version, corrupted with rational explanation & a prophecy, you need this other narrative to twin and betray the poem all over again. Final note within the note: Reina's July 10 email in this conversation came from Jorge Miralles' computer, not hers. Hurricane Dennis had poured water into her apartment, cutting off the phone line that she uses for email. She carried everything she could downstairs, moving from the vulnerable house built on top of the building into family apartments below. A few days later, as I reconstruct the translation process in this note, the hurricane's more gentle remains are here in Illinois where they mean something different, a good soaking desperately needed in a year of drought. Reina goes about reconstructing her home.
--KD
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