The Rust of History

This moving intergenerational translation of a poet whose life and work can teach us so much about history and Black Puerto Rico by a poet making history right now is a study in the stakes of transformation. In these poems and in Salas Rivera’s return to his grandfather’s context, we get a felt sense of change, loss, and longing on the scale of the body, the barrio, the country, the revolution, and the soul.

If you could take off your arm, give it to your grandchild to play with, would its hand be open or clenched? “Te sería muy fácil seguir viviendo,” the poet writes, which the grandchild translates as “To go on living will come easy.” Poets sometimes make a great deal of the power of the particular, and that’s not wrong. But it’s also right, for this book, for this translation, to sometimes drop a singular reflexive pronoun like “te” and hand over a verse, specially one with the promise of access to life, to all of us. Yes, the poet is keenly aware that the biological arm was taken by imperial war, that colonial poverty sentenced him to years in diaspora, that colonial poverty was there to welcome him back. But the poems of Rivera Avilés—in their original forms as much as in Salas Rivera’s translations—know what Audre Lorde knew in “The Uses of the Erotic”—that we can continually handle and hand over the particulars of the everyday as portals to a life force that is a collective birthright: all earth without a nation state, all love without fear, all freedom without selfishness, all joy without shame.

Raquel Salas Rivera translates the poems of his late grandfather Sotero Rivera Avilés—a disabled veteran of the Korean War and descendent of enslaved sugarcane workers—with mastery and care, as well as an ear attuned to the lyric labor of giving voice to trauma's infinite aftermath, the dangers of forgetting, and the quest for belonging.

The experience that Raquel Salas Rivera offers us is enriching in the most diverse ways—the poetic, the political, the psychological. Having the courage to translate his grandfather and fellow poet Sotero Rivera Avilés, Raquel manages to transform the childish position in which we are so often placed as children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces. He proposes, through irresistible translations, a reinvention of relationships, in the family and in literature and in language itself, so that they can turn from being infantilizing or hierarchical—to emancipatory and enthralling.