The Farewell Light

How would it feel to be plucked from your current life, from everything you know, from the things you don’t even know you know, only to be thrown into an entirely new environment? As an adult, Nidia Hernández emigrated from Venezuela to Boston; The Farewell Light, her debut poetry collection, is her response to this seismic shift. Mystical, ungrounded, fluid, and floating, these poems describe a world where everything is new and nothing is tethered, then trace the growing sense of connection to the new place. Consider “Loba, my dog” (Loba, mi perra):

I was watering the banana plants / Estaba regando los cambures
it was very late / era muy tarde
and I could hardly see / y casi no veía

I was holding the hose / Sujetaba la manguera
Suddenly / de pronto
the water’s force / la fuerza del agua
suspended me in the air / me suspendió en el aire
in a circle / en forma circular
I start to go round [ … ] / commencé a dar vueltas [ … ]

Loba my shepherd / Loba, mi pastor
was with me / me acompañaba
doing the same beside me / hacía lo mismo a mi lado
we were satellites of each other / éramos satélites la una de la otra

Loba / Loba
who was my guide / que fue mi guía
came back to tell me  / volvió para decirme
we still have our kingdom [ … ] / que aún tenemos nuestro reino [ … ]

This sense of being unmoored yet comforted extends through the volume. It applies equally well to those of us who feel ungrounded and adrift in the strange world that has developed around us over the past few years.

The first section of the book seems to focus on Hernández’s memories of Venezuela and life there. The middle sections explore nature and include her reflections on language, culminating in delightful interactions with three poets: Walt Whitman, Edith Sitwell, and the Peruvian Jorge Eielsen. “Walt Whitman” concludes with a powerful contrast between the forces of destruction and creation:

At the edge of the black hole / Al borde del agujero negro
but in front of a sea of lilacs / pero ante un mar de lilas
sitting on the grass / sentada sobre la hierba
in the arboretum / en el arboretum [sic; not in the English] I touch his beard / toco su barba
his venerable beard / su barba venerable
I stroke it and I amend myself / la acaricio y me enmiendo
Walt Whitman’s beard / la barba de Walt Whitman
longer lasting / con más tiempo
than all the stars. / que todas las estrellas.

Having walked through Boston’s Arboretum in springtime when the air was heavy with rain-drenched lilacs, the black hole’s suggestion of imminent collapse still seems tinged with that intense, impermanent fragrance. The concept that Walt Whitman might outlast stars, which might themselves disappear into the black hole, is to me profoundly comforting. The Sitwell poem also hints at this tension between destruction and creation, starting: “The night shimmers its light / over a poem by Edith Sitwell / in which she speaks of a church / destroyed by the war”. In the original, it reads, “La noche titila su luz / sobre un poema de Edith Sitwell / en el que habla de una iglesia / destruida por la guerra.”

Hernández’s poems in the later part of the book feel more grounded than her earlier pieces. One of the best poems in the collection, in my opinion, is “The meaning of the world” (El sentido del mundo),  with its swooping volta. It starts:

Someone knocked on the door / Alguien tocó la puerta

I wasn’t going to open it / no iba a abrir

I was translating glimmers / traducía destellos

And closes with:

there was a great pause / hubo una gran pausa

the snow / la nieve

generative / generativa

fractal / fractal

elegant / elegante

was opening its curtains / abría sus cortinas

This piece takes us out of the closed room where the poet is “translating” and throws us into a present that is “elegant” and sharp-edged, the snow opening its curtains. Isn’t that what the present is—sharp, generative, a chance to open ourselves? The poems about the past are filmy and insubstantial, like memories, while those about Hernández’s current life have the sharp, cold beauty of a winter’s night.

This volume gives us the poems both in translation and in the original Spanish. I like such a structure because I can determine whether a particular choice of word or punctuation was the poet’s or the translator’s. In the quotations above, it’s clear that punctuation is virtually nonexistent and capitalization verges on Cummings-esque—for the most part, entirely faithful to the Spanish original.

To my taste, this idiosyncrasy does not improve the work. Why not have a period after “venerable beard” in the Whitman poem? To me, the period would make the reader stop, catch their breath, and think how Whitman’s beard might feel. Instead, I rushed along to “I stroke it” (la acaricio) and had to return to the earlier lines to ensure that I hadn’t missed something.

In one poem, “María Fernanda,” Hernández actually employs commas, but the translator, the renowned Rowena Hill, removes them, changing the meaning of the section, as noted below:

I can’t go to you / No puedo ir hasta ti
it’s not the photos / no son las fotografías
that the unconscious shuffles / que baraja el inconsciente
(a word you loved / (palabra que amabas,
together with dramaturgy / junto a dramaturgia,
Shakespeare) / Shakespeare)

Note the commas after “amabas” and “dramaturgia.” They clarify my understanding of the stanza. This is a list of words that María Fernanda loved, which included unconscious, dramaturgy, and Shakespeare. Hernández is not profligate with commas, and excluding these two profoundly affects the poem.

The poems in this collection reflect an effort to come to terms with the roiling uncertainty of a world in constant flux. Certainly, the poet’s world has been upended with her emigration from the country of her birth to a new one. All around us, our worlds are changing in the face of climate change, political upheaval, and evolving social mores. Under such constant buffeting, Hernández’s work offers us a glimmer of hope, suggesting that we can find stability and beauty at the same time we accept the impermanence that surrounds us.