On Translating Manuel Becerra

It has been some seven years since Manuel Becerra wrote this ars poetica during a stay in New York’s Hudson Valley. When I emailed him recently to ask about the poem’s creation, he remembered a powerful feeling from that time: the desire to play a string instrument. It haunted his physical, compositional reality of typing on his keyboard. Becerra also recalled some of his thoughts about the poem’s form: “I wanted to create an effect. Within each description, the stanza could take shape in an independent way: a sort of herbarium, a list of dreams, a delirium. It would speak to how I see the world from my position as a Mexican poet.” 

Becerra was born in Mexico City in 1983. To date he is the author of five poetry collections, for which he has received numerous awards in Mexico, along with readings and residencies abroad. A tendency in Becerra’s work that surfaces in these two poems is his awareness of humans as fellow animals. In keeping with our times, his vision does not diminish specific human populations: it reflects a more ecopoetical lean, presupposing that the consciousness of other animals in the world holds significance. In earlier poetry collections, Becerra confronted violence against other animals, and he takes violence against humans as a tragedy permeating community history. Meanwhile, his human figures can coexist and blur with the forms of other animals, and vice versa. 

Here, he invokes the world beyond Mexico’s own boundaries with the title reference to André Breton (1896–1966), a nod to Breton’s explorations in psychic automatism and surrealism as pathways for visualizing thought itself. However, Becerra made a point of telling me, he’s uninterested in constructing a Eurocentric project. Reading as a translator, I can see that his writings display an awareness of  how poetic affinities enable us to redraw our maps, opening us to different, more global orders of knowledge and spirit.

A reader well versed in the work of Mexican luminary Octavio Paz (1914–1998) might pick up on Becerra’s enthusiasm for his predecessor’s Ladera este (East Slope, 1962–1968). A collection threaded through with scenes from India, East Slope includes reflections on time and existence as a poet. 
“I am a history/a memory inventing itself,” Paz writes in “Vrindaban,” as translated by Lysander Kemp, a meditation sited in one of Hinduism’s sacred cities. In “Sharj Tepe,” Paz references “una leona echada,” or “a lion sprawled” in Eliot Weinberger’s English version. Years after reading the book, Becerra remembered this poem while reimagining other words associated with the lion. He uses a female lion, following the Paz original, even remarking to me that in time she became somewhat human in his mind, so I have rendered his semi-quotation in italics as “yellow rise with reclining lioness figure.” Rather than a conventional quotation, then, this italicized moment evokes a memory that transformed with time. Another italicized line in Becerra’s ars poetica, “Rosa indecisa entre el perfume y la muerte” (“Rose undecided between perfume and death”), conjures a moment from a poem by Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda (b. 1931).

Like the imagery from East Slope that intrigued Becerra, and like writers on the move, the burro channels and refracts global dynamics. Becerra specifies, “The image of the donkey, with its African past, has been linked to a status in service to others.” In his ars poetica, names and roles shift. The burro merges with the figure of the poet. This sleight of name is purposive: “I try to liberate the animal from its history as a beast of burden through antonomasia.”

Becerra similarly centers and shifts the figure of a poet, namely Emily Dickinson, over the course of “Déjà Vu.” Before her figure disappears behind a locked door, Dickinson inhabits a short sequence of scenarios adding up to the order of things: a sort of portrait gallery, a list of visions, a presentiment. 

Like “Ars poetica,” “Déjà Vu” showcases Becerra’s interest in cross-border 
affinities in poetic history. Dickinson has fascinated a long series of Spanish-language poets. Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spain, 1881–1958), Amanda Berenguer (Uruguay, 1921–2010), and María Negroni (Argentina, b. 1951) are just a few. 

“Déjà Vu” comes from a longer series that Becerra set in New England, still unpublished in the original Spanish. I live in northern New England myself, and long ago I spent a summer lodging in a house very close to the Homestead, now part of the Dickinson Museum. I enjoy the way that Becerra’s transnational writings merge south with north, all the while layering one era over another. The mood is dreamy and contemplative. His New England set especially displays the sort of motion that he described in another poem as “an unconventional translation across the star chart.” Each poem showcases Becerra’s ongoing preoccupation with the flow of consciousness, which has always moved his writing from within.