A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written
I had the good fortune of getting to know David M. Brunson while we were both pursuing MFAs at the University of Arkansas. We quickly bonded over folk music, whiskey, and many (I mean many) bad puns. When I first read David’s own poetry, I admired his dense descriptions, his generosity towards the people that inhabit his poems, and his ability to look deeply and intimately at his beloved landscapes in the contexts of their often dark and violent histories. A couple years after I’d met him, when David took up translating poetry, I was excited but not surprised that he consistently chose to translate contemporary poems that were both socially urgent and historically complex. His recent anthology, A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written: The Poetry of Venezuelan Migrants in Chile (LSU Press 2023) is a vital and distinctive collection that translator Geoffrey Brock has praised for bringing us poetry “that is as urgent as the news.”
David M. Brunson's poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Booth, Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, Deep Vellum's debut Best Literary Translations Anthology, and elsewhere. He is the editor and translator of A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written: The Poetry of Venezuelan Migrants in Chile (LSU Press 2023) and the co-editor of Copihue Poetry, a digital magazine dedicated to international poetry and translation.
Josh Luckenbach: A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written is a unique anthology, and one I’m very grateful exists. The anthology is made up of very recent work written by fifteen different Venezuelan poets currently living in Chile. How did this project come about?
David Brunson: It’s a long story, but I honestly stumbled into this project by chance. If some things had gone differently, it probably wouldn’t have happened. I was a student at the University of Arkansas MFA program and was studying on the poetry track. However, I’ve always been a big reader of international literature and poetry in translation, so I was very interested in the literary translation track that my program offered.
In the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to travel. I had a bit of a Spanish background because of some undergraduate courses and time spent in Costa Rica. I’d always wanted to see South America, and though it was in no way a research trip, I figured “Hey, maybe I’ll come across some poetry to translate.” I was deciding between Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, and eventually settled on Chile because of their reputation as “The Land of Poets” and because I knew many friends and family members who had traveled there and loved it. So off I went. A classmate had put me in contact with the poet Maximiliano Sojo, so we decided to meet up for coffee. We became fast friends and still are to this day.
During our first conversation, I learned a great deal about Venezuela and Chile—Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis at the hands of an authoritarian government that was causing an accelerating migration across the region, and Chile’s socially stratified reality that still struggles to shake off the vestiges of the Pinochet regime. In the weeks that followed, we continued our conversation as I was introduced to the community of Chilean and Venezuelan poets at a poetry reading at Pablo Neruda’s house museum and at a second reading at Librería Proyección, a leftist bookstore in downtown Santiago.
By the time I flew home at the end of the month, I’d accrued quite the chapbook collection—many of them titles by LP5 Editora, a Venezuelan-Chilean publisher run by the amazing poet and editor Gladys Mendía. Reflecting on my conversations with Maxi, Gladys, and Sara Viloria (and the fact that during my trip to Chile, I got to know more Venezuelans than Chileans) the anthology project began to take form. From this point on, the project just began to grow beneath the weight of its urgency. In 2018, over 3 million Venezuelans had fled their country to search for a better life abroad. Today, that number is over 7 million. By the time this interview is published, it’ll probably be close to 8 million. Of those numbers, at least 500,000 (and probably many more) Venezuelans live in Chile, oftentimes in terrible conditions, and with a great deal of hostility from large parts of Chilean society.
The poems that I encountered on my trip addressed this surging migration and stood as testaments to resilience and survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity. The anthology is a way to elevate the stories and voices of Venezuelans living in Chile, to further integrate them into Chilean literary institutions, and to connect them with Anglophone readers. Fortunately, I was able to get funding through the University of Arkansas and returned to Chile in 2019-2020, where I encountered at least a dozen more poets whose work is now reflected in A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written. I know that’s a long answer! It has truly been a complex and transformational process.
JL: In the book’s introduction, you situate the poems in terms of politics, immigration, and global refugee crises. You also discuss how the poet’s role differs from the journalist’s. For anyone who hasn’t read the book, can you give a sense of how you view the role of the poet in society?
DB: I think that a lot of what poetry does is give language to the layers of meaning that exist beneath the surface of daily experience. Ultimately, I think this is the poet’s role—to plunge into the depths of experience to discover new forms of meaning. When that daily experience is conflict, struggle, and exile—as is the case of the poetry of Venezuelans in Chile—some really powerful poems emerge. To speak more about the differences between poetry and journalism: while journalism is a critical and powerful tool, its primary concern is usually concrete facts as a way to craft a narrative and hopefully arrive at some kind of truth. It can’t always cut deeper into the subtleties of lived experience—and that’s okay. I can’t imagine reading a series of poems every time I wanted to check in on the news. It’d be exhausting! However, poetry’s ability to bring voice to unvoiced realities has the power to change the ways that we view and experience day-to-day reality, the intellectual and emotional truths we devote our energy towards, and the voices that we choose to hear. I’d like to think that that’s ultimately the poet’s role. I think for the poets in this collection it is—not only to document but to elevate, as a means of survival.
JL: In 2021, you collected many of these poems in a similar, but untranslated, anthology (Una cicatriz donde se escriben despedidas, Libros del Amanecer, 2021) that was published in Chile. How was the process of translating the poems for this new bilingual edition, A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written? Were there any poems or poets that you found particularly hard to translate? And, if you’d like, could you speak to your philosophy of translation in general? What makes for a good translation?
DB: Overall, it took close to four years to see this collection through from beginning to end. I think this project is unique in that it was ultimately a project of discovery. Certainly not all, but many translators approach the craft by identifying a text by a single author that they’re drawn to, usually one that has already been published, and they translate and publish the work. When we decided to do this project, I only knew of a few of these poets. So much of this book came to be thanks to Chile’s incredibly welcoming poetry community. Thanks to Gladys Mendía—also one of the poets in this collection—I was put in contact with several more of the authors here. It seemed that nearly everyone I met also knew of a poet who would be great for the anthology, so I followed these chains of contacts as best I could, through poetry readings, festivals, get-togethers, and even random encounters on the street. There was certainly a lot of magic here.
As part of my governing philosophy, I aimed to use as open of a selection criteria as possible, as this project was in no way about gatekeeping or prestige. Though many of the original poems in this anthology were prize winners or finalists and were published in books and magazines across Latin America, many others had never been published before being included in the anthology. For a couple of contributors, this was their very first poetry publication!
As for difficult poets/poems—each voice presents a unique challenge, one in which I must maintain the essence of their language, but in the words of my native language. I always want to strike a balance between making sure that the poem sounds like the writer of the source text—not like me the poet—while simultaneously filtering it through my native language and my voice as a translator. I try to leave a sort of “ghost fingerprint” on the text—my voice as a translator—that exists in a non-interfering kind of way. I always avoid trying to colonize a text by making it conform to the sometimes very different social contexts of contemporary poetry in the United States, as one of my biggest goals is to increase the plurality of literature available to English-language readers and to expand the possibilities of voices, styles, and forms in my native language.
As for what makes a good translation, I honestly don’t have specific criteria. If the translation moves me, then I find it to be successful. I think it needs to replicate the poetics of the original text in a meaningful way. That might mean using the same structures as the source language in English or inventing parallel structures that recreate something of the original. I think the translator and the author have to approach each other as equals. Like any poem, I want a translated poem to be exciting.
JL: I fell in love with many of the poems in this anthology, and I’m grateful to know the work of these fifteen poets now. One of the poets I was especially taken with was Eva Tizzani. There’s a wonderful strangeness of imagery in some of Tizzani’s poems, but it’s a strangeness that always keeps me grounded to the emotional core of the poem. (I’m thinking of lines like: “I am / the bed full of crumbs / tired shoulders” or “I sleep on clams and flowers” or “country in the name of the father, / a fistful of crosses in its mouth” or “Dead moths, / wolves in the garden / of buried men, / the red wings covering my face / turn into a scream.”) What did you learn from translating those Tizzani poems?
DB: Good question! I love Eva Tizzani’s poems too. Despite their brevity, these were among the most difficult poems to translate. As you mention, the specificity of her imagery creates such a sense of strangeness. But more than that, it’s a sense of distance, alienation, and decay. The poems are rife with images of Venezuela—of mangos, seashells, tapirs, María Lionza, tamarinds—all portrayed in states of decomposition, subjected to violence. These daily images are thrown slightly off-kilter, with objects that appear where they shouldn’t in a way that reminds of surrealism in its purest sense of being “super-reality.” Whether dealing with Venezuelan or Chilean imagery and cultural references, Eva’s technique creates a sense of psychic distancing that makes the reader experience a sense of alienation from reality that many migrants feel—a sense of alienation in both a home culture and a new culture, of standing behind oneself and keenly observing as the world happens. This is a theme that appears again and again throughout the anthology.
To answer your question more concretely, these poems show that poetry doesn’t always need a lot of narrative or “tell” moments. Sometimes the emotional core needs just a strange, masterfully-crafted image as the source of its power. Eva is also a wonderful photographer whose work captures with light what these poems capture with language. You can check out her work as a photographer here.
JL: Throughout the process of working on the anthology, you became friends with several of the poets included. How much, if at all, did you work with the poets on the translations of their own material?
DB: Well, I actually married one of them, and another was our witness at the courthouse! When I say that this anthology turned into a friends and family project, I mean it. Throughout the revision process, I communicated closely with all of the poets involved. In the past, the Venezuelan school system provided an excellent English education, so many of the poets are quite fluent and could critically engage with the translations. Though the process would vary from poem to poem, I would typically complete a draft, then sit down with the poet to discuss the text line by line. As a poet myself, I highly value the musicality of language, so it was through these conversations that I was able to start carving out a space for translations in English that can exist on their own as works of art in their target language but that also do their best not to erase the reality—be it grammatical, emotional, or cultural—that exists in the original Spanish-language poem. This is a deeply subjective line to navigate, and it varies between poets. Some said “Yeah, just do what you want,” whereas others had a more analytical approach. I really respect both styles, as they ultimately reflect the individual voice of each poet and what each poem calls for when it comes time to recreate it in a new language. More than anything else, it was important to me that each writer felt good about the translations, that they represented their voice, even though it was transfigured for a different language and culture. It was a wonderful experience, getting to know each poet through the act of translation. My wife, Ivana Aponte, was also an enormous support, providing help with references to Venezuelan Spanish and culture, and in general just making sure that I got it right.
JL: In addition to being a translator, you are also a poet. In fact, you were writing poetry for years before you started translating, right? I’m curious how you feel that translating has affected your own writing. Or has it?
DB: I was a latecomer to translation, but that’s normal, right? Kids in the United States don’t typically read a poem by Neruda and say “goddamn, I want to be a translator!” They read poetry that deeply affects them and they try their hand at writing poetry. This is a problem with how we teach translated literature: not recognizing it as such erases the labor of the translator. If this were different, maybe more students would read a translated work and think to themselves “Hey, maybe I could be a translator.” Perhaps this would then lead to a greater diversity of translated literature available to English-language readers, and perhaps (in an ideal world) we’d see some cultural changes too, like greater stylistic plurality and a heightened understanding that most of the world is quite different from the United States. It wasn’t until I started reading translated literature with the recognition of that key word—translated— that the work of the translator became more obvious and started to seem like something I could do. And once I did, my own poetry started to evolve. The way that I imagine my readers has certainly expanded. These days, most of the literary things that I do are right here in Santiago. Because of this, I find that a lot of the new pieces that I’m working on are geared toward the Chilean and Venezuelan readers in my community and Latin America in general. Because of this, I’ll sometimes write to these audiences knowing that the piece will be translated into Spanish. It can be liberating to think of audiences in this way!
JL: What projects are you working on now?
DB: Ivana and I have also launched a new digital magazine called Copihue Poetry where we publish poetry written in English, poetry written in Spanish, and poetry translated into English from any language. Our first issue featured work from over 20 countries/regions, and we’re about to publish our second issue, which will include poets from Haiti, India, Ireland, Chile, Venezuela, Korea, Romania, Spain, Cuba, Nigeria, the United States, Bulgaria, Catalonia, and Hungary. We’re always open for submissions of Spanish-language poetry and translations, and we’re frequently open for English-language poetry. Give us a follow on Twitter and Instagram, and send us your work if you have any!
Josh Luckenbach
Josh Luckenbach's recent work has appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Nimrod, Birmingham Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the University of Arkansas, and he currently serves as Managing Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
