Translations by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
Va dedicada la selección a Yolanda Arroyo y a las otras prietas escritoras del Gran Caribe y a sus aliadas, que hoy viven en todas partes.
This selection is dedicated to Yolanda Arroyo and the other Black women writers of the Greater Caribbean and their allies, who today live everywhere.
Dos elefantas se balanceaban/sobre la tela de una araña
La gente dice
acá viene esa a suceder
a ser la otra, la destronadora
no lo notan, ni siquiera lo presienten
no ven
que por primera vez en esta historia
dos negras letradas
en la misma isla habitan
comparten una tinta;
de repente somos tantas
cada una camina por su senda
que sostiene la de otra como un puente.
Two elephants balance/on a spider's web
The people say
here comes that one to succeed
the other one, the dethroner
they don't notice, they have no clue
they can’t see
that for the first time in our story
two lettered black women
inhabit the same island
share the same ink;
suddenly we are so many
each one walking her own path
sustains the others like a bridge.
Contributor Notes
Mayra Santos-Febres is an award-winning novelist and poet. She is professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She obtained, among other awards, the Letras de Oro and the Juan Rulfo, both in the short story genre. She is the recipient of a John S. Simon Guggenheim scholarship (2017) and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Residency in 2018. She is the author of the poetry books Anamú y manigua (1990), The escaped order (1991), Boat People (1994), Tercer Mundo Lecciones de resignation (2014-20), Huracanada (2018). She also published the novels Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2001), Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (2002), Fe en disfraz, Nuestra Señora de la noche and La amante de Gardel and the collections of essays entitled Tratado de Medicina Natural para Hombres Melancólicos and Sobre piel y papel.
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is a translator and professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York where she teaches U.S. Latinx and Caribbean literatures and cultures. Her translations have appeared in The Nation and sx salon. She translated Boat People by Mayra Santos Febres (Cardboard House Press 2021). She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (University of Illinois Press 2014) which will be published in a Spanish edition, Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño (University of Illinois Press 2021). She is currently editing a bilingual anthology of Julia de Burgos’ collected writings. She is editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010), and managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
