Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Claire Joysmith
is a woman on an 18-year mission. It’s taken her that long to publish an
anthology of Mexican-American literature, particularly poetry written by
Chicana women authors, called Cantar de Espejos: Poesia Testimonial Chicana
de Mujeres. She recently presented the book
at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park April 4 after stops at the
Centro Cultural in Tijuana and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD)
campus. Indeed, her mini-book tour (from which she made no royalty income since
she doesn’t get any money from the book) did so well that most of the copies
she had with her sold out at UCSD and only a few were left over for the Centro.
Contrary to what
you might think from her name, her Anglo appearance and her flawless
American-accented English, Joysmith is actually a native-born Mexican, the
daughter of immigrants from Great Britain. “I’m a first-generation Mexican,
though I don’t look it,” she said. “I identify as Tepostista, from a small village outside Mexico City where I
live. It becomes an alternate way of identity-building, especially in the state
of Morelos, a major area of violence, where looking like a gringa can be dangerous. I have narco neighbors. We say hello and are polite to each
other.”
For years
Joysmith has made her living as a professor at the Autonomous University of
Mexico City (UNAM), and her idea behind Cantar de Espejos was to introduce Mexican readers to the best
writing, especially poetry, by Mexican-American women. That meant that their
poems, originally written in English — albeit sometimes the mash-up “Spanglish”
dialect that incorporates a lot of Spanish words, idioms and sentence
structures — needed to be translated into Spanish. That was Joysmith’s job,
though she admitted she made the controversial decision to leave English words
in some of the poems to preserve the bilingual mash-up aspects of the
originals.
“This is the
first anthology of Chicana poetry in Spanish to be published anywhere, in Latin America or in Spain,” Joysmith said.
Though she would want to introduce Mexican readers to Chicana prose as well,
she added, “I began by translating poetry because of its immediacy. Poetry goes
back to our roots in every way. The 23 poets [represented in Cantar
de Espejos] are a testament to our lives
and their rich and oral poetic experiences, and heritage of mestizaje” (a word referring to the interracial blending of
Spanish and Native people that produced most modern Mexicans). A few of the
poems in Cantar de Espejos are
presented in both English and Spanish, but the principal audience for the book
is Spanish-speaking; Joysmith’s introduction is in Spanish and most of the
poems appear only in her Spanish translations.
“This volume is
meant as building a bridge” between Mexican and Mexican-American cultures,
Joysmith explained. “I decided to look for poems representative of Chicana
literature and poetry, and poems that would speak to Mexicanos and Mexicanas. They kind of fell together. Some got left out, some got brought in.”
Joysmith said that her criterion for whether or not to include a piece was, “If
I were reading Chicana literature and poetry for the first time, how would I
feel if I read this?”
Her first big
problem was securing the rights to republish the poems from their American
authors and publishers. “Permissions to reproduce and translate U.S.-published
material are very costly,” Joysmith
noted. “I had to e-mail people saying there’s no money, this is Mexico, this is
UNAM, can you waive the fee?” Her third step — after selecting the works she
wanted and negotiating for the rights — was actually doing the translations. The
fourth step — and, it turned out, the most difficult — was getting the book
published.
“I found a small
independent press,” she recalled, “and Yolanda Lopez was willing to illustrate,
and then the press closed down during the economic crisis. Then I tried to get
a U.S. publisher, and they all said they couldn’t do it. It was too expensive.
So it sat in the drawer for over 15 years. … In 2011 I finally found a home for
the book at the Centro del Mesoamerica Norte. It’s the only place in Mexico City where you can find a good
collection of Chicano/a writing.”
Joysmith said
that part of the problem getting the book published was that her translations,
particularly her attempt to reproduce the linguistic clashes and mash-ups of
the original texts even while turning them from (mostly) English to (mostly)
Spanish, kept confounding Mexican copy editors. At the small press that first
accepted the book and then went out of business, she recalled, her copy editor
was “very much a purist. He gave me back the manuscript full of red markings.
He must have had a dictionary in one hand and a red pen in the other. He marked
up not only the translations but the originals as well for ‘misuse’ of
Spanish.”
Understandably
upset that the copy editor had missed the whole point of her work, Joysmith
wrote a response that “practically became an exegesis of Spanish writing in
purple ink. I explained all the cultural-literary identity markers. I also
pointed out that already published work cannot be changed — and he still
wouldn’t work with it.”
Even when the Centro
del Mesoamerica Norte agreed to publish the
book, Joysmith’s struggle to preserve the binational and bicultural integrity
of the material continued. “I found myself working with a team,” she said, “and
some of them asked me why Chicanos use Spanish in this part and not in others.
The next question they had was, ‘Wouldn’t this be confusing for the reader? Why
do you, as a translator, leave this word in English when there’s an acceptable
word in Spanish?’”
Fortunately,
Joysmith found allies at the Centro, a
group of women that were enthusiastic about the book and paved the way for it
to be published as Joysmith and the original authors would have wanted. “The
cover was done by a Mexican designer,” she recalled. “I gave her the books I
had on Chicano/a art, and they inspired not only the cover but the nice
drawings inside. Working with these women, I found they were open to new
experiences and visions. It was so interesting that we’d got beyond all these
barriers and all the explanations in the text. But the computers and their
spell-correction features went berserk.”
Cantar de
Espejos contains 56 poems by 23 authors; 12
poems were originally in Spanish, while the other 44 were translated by five
other women as well as Joysmith. In her own translations, she said, she drew on
Chicano/a literary theory and in particular the concept of “bilingualism.”
“When a Chicano/a text is translated from English to Spanish, it begins to
speak in a different voice with intriguing realism,” she explained, adding that
the two languages “coexist into a new life” even though, in her versions of the
poems, Spanish is the main language and “the Chicano/a markers of difference
disappear.”
Much of
Joysmith’s appearance consisted of readings of some of the poems in her
collection. Instead of reading all of them herself, she called on various
guests — including Abel Macias, who introduced her on behalf of the Centro and
joked about his bad “pocho Spanish.”
Joysmith explained that for some of the poems in the book, including Gloria E.
Anzaldúa’s “Vivir en the borderlands
quiere decir que,” she had used different typefaces for some of the lines to
reproduce some of the linguistic mash-up effects of the original.
Joysmith said
that for a book that took 18 years to produce, Cantas de Espejos has been surprisingly successful. “This is the
second printing,” she said. “For a book of Chicana poetry, that’s amazing. It
has been really well received by different audiences, not only in Mexico City.
In Durango, the reading room was packed by an audience mostly of high school
students, youngsters who asked the most revealing questions. I asked them why
they were so interested in reading about Chicanas, and one man said this book
grounded for them what their relatives in the U.S. were experiencing.”
