Three Poems from Cuba

The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, Ed. Mark Weiss. (U California P) $29.95

To celebrate the release of The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, edited by Mark Weiss, Molossus is happy to publish three poems from that anthology. Our selection, recommended by Weiss, includes two late founders of the Orígines group, Piñera and Diego, as well as the younger Molina, b. 1968, now a expatriate living in Rome.

The anthology presents a wide selection from Cuba’s past sixty years of poetry, including many poets relatively unknown to English-language readers. The selection’s variety allows for a realistic survey of Cuban poetry, including all major schools, movements, and groups. The poems themselves are presented en-face, English translations across the page from their Spanish originals. On the whole, the translation itself—including work by editor Mark Weiss, Nathaniel Tarn, Mark Schafer, Mónica de la Torre, and Harry Polkinhorn—is competent and adheres relatively tightly to the form of the Spanish poems. Weiss’ introduction is dense with literary history, but more interestingly engages with the recent course of the Cuba-USA relationship, especially how its larger sociopolitical implications trickle into our literary correspondence.

More information about the poets below, including the Spanish originals as well as more poems, can be found in The Whole Island.

Herbalist

XXXXX• for Alicia, on her birthday

The pharmacist’s youngest daughter
dressed like a schoolgirl set our each morning
for petal and root,
bullrush and honey.
Fear did what love could— it made her
a stalker, a beast of gaze and scent.
She stole, she watered, she begged
of the soil
that was also the soil of the dead.

Ancient star,
sun of other times that rots the flower’s pollen,
that sweetens it,
why did you awaken me
to the good and the suffering of others
but without the magic, the spells,
the effective action or power
with which the pharmacist’s daughter
hid a language,
kept secret her formulas.

XXXXXby Alessandra Molina, tr. by Mark Weiss

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