Line / Break | Season 4 with Javier Peñalosa M. and Robin Myers

Interview Transcript

Ryo Yamaguchi (00:05):
Hey everybody, I’m Ryo Yamaguchi, the publicist at Copper Canyon Press, and you are tuning into season four of our interview series Line Break, which goes off the page and into the poems and minds of our beloved poets. We’ve had so much fun over these seasons hearing poems, talking about writing, books, life, it’s been one of the favorite things we do at the press.

(00:30):
So friends for season four, a format change. For this season, we are doing some close reads. Each episode will focus on either a single poem or single topic wandering away and returning and wandering away again along all the little paths we simply can’t resist. The episodes will probably be a little tighter, a little shorter, can’t say for sure. Thanks for joining us.

(00:56):
I have been haunted by Javier Peñalosa M.’s What Comes Back, which will be publishing next April. It’s a simple story of searching for that which has disappeared and it is full of ghostly presence, footprints in the sand, items left behind, rumor, horizons, and especially maybe faintly heard if you press your ear close enough to the dried riverbed, the trickle of water. This story by way of serial poems is one of contemporary urgency, it deals with climate change and aridification displaced peoples and migration, war and an uncertain future. But it’s told so prismatically and in Robin Myers’ translation, it arrives with such clean stark sound that it feels timeless. I can’t help but think it’s an age-old myth. I’m so lucky to have both Javier and Robin here today from Mexico City and Buenos Aires to indulge this feeling I have to talk about myth as it lives with us today and what comes back and elsewhere. Robin and Javi, thank you so much for being here.

Javier Peñalosa M. (02:12):
Thank you, Ryo. Thanks for having me.

Robin Myers (02:14):
Thank you so much.

Ryo Yamaguchi (02:17):
I’m really so excited to be talking with you both about this project. I really am haunted by it. I’ve read it so many times and in so many different kind of settings. And I don’t want to start the conversation, Javi, actually to ask you. And part of it is, I think maybe my introduction is inadequate to talk really about how special bodies of water and rivers and as they go underground, and I know it alludes to the specific landscape around Mexico City where you live. And so I’m kind of curious if you could describe a little bit how you first got interested in the rivers and in the waterways around you and decided to take on this project.

Javier Peñalosa M. (02:57):
Yes. Well, I’ve always been amazed of knowing that Mexico City used to be a lake. And for anyone that comes to Mexico City today, there won’t be visible traces of that lake and rivers. So that’s something that always haunted me. And at some point I just wondered and thought that maybe all that water wasn’t gone, not really gone but disappeared or found another way to be in the lake. So yeah, it was something related to the search of water in a more symbolic way, like the metaphysical thirst that you might feel at some point and how you or me look to quench that thirst through searching, in my case, through language. I don’t know if it makes sense. Well, it doesn’t, but it’s okay, something like that.

Ryo Yamaguchi (04:34):
Yeah, I think it makes a deep sense to me. I love the idea of a metaphysical thirst. I think it occurs to me that all of my thirst is metaphysical now, and all the water I drink is symbolic of something. I’m so curious about that kind of that symbolic idea or this feeling of something that used to be here, a trace maybe would be a word that we would use or something. And with that, and this is a question for you, Robin, I’m curious how you first got drawn to Javi’s work or what kind of enticed you about this project and wanting to translate it.

Robin Myers (05:12):
I was lucky enough to meet Javi while living in Mexico City where I also lived for many years and sort of still live in an in-between state with Mexico City. But as part of my early phase of living there many years ago, I met and Javi and I became friends around the time that you were working on the book, Javi. And I remember reading an early version of it before it was published and then had the good fortune to witness its publication in Mexico with the press on Ediciones Antilope, which is where I’ve published as well. So it was a sort of meandering path to and with the book, which I loved the very first time. I read it in an earlier draft, and I think part of what has always fascinated and moved me about Los Que Regresan, the title of the book in Spanish, was how carefully and lovingly and subtly it treads its own course through this place that I was finding myself living to.

(06:28):
And I think in addition to the essential mysteriousness of the book, it’s a book I’ve read countless times and it remains sort of ungraspable to me in some way, which is I think something I treasure about the poetry I love most always. And yet I think it also gave me a new way to relate to this landscape and history. And I think at a time when I was beginning to translate as well and I was writing my own poetry and thinking a lot about the often very violently multi-layered history of Mexico City, which could be said of so many places, also aware of the sort of intensity and strangeness and often discomfort and horror of translating into English in a way that books from other places can be so readily instrumentalized, sort of, “This is the book that symbolizes everything about a site of conflict,” and the way that I think both past and contemporary violence and Mexico City is often sort of stamped onto the narrative of the country in a way that I, as a US citizen living in Mexico, often feel always deeply uncomfortable about.

(07:57):
And there’s something so careful, I think, about the way Javi’s book brings readers into contact with so many different kinds of loss and absences, but also presences and connection. And I think on both a poetic way and in an ideological way, it’s a book that I kept thinking about over and over again as I tried to sort of take stock of where I was and where I came from.

Ryo Yamaguchi (08:34):
It’s truly wonderful answers and I think, Robin, you are describing experiences I’ve had in this work and in these pieces that I’ve been unable to describe until now as you’ve said it. Well, for one, that I walk away puzzled by something that the book has delivered that I can only feel inside me or something. And that some of it also is that the specter of violence is not categorizable or slottable, it isn’t stamped, it isn’t easily received in this work. And I think it’s so powerful, and this is I think a quality I’ve seen in following your translation projects elsewhere too, I’ve seen in other works. And I’ve always admired the projects that you’ve picked up and chosen.

Robin Myers (09:18):
Thank you.

Ryo Yamaguchi (09:19):
This is great. Let’s hear something, I think let’s hear from it. I think we must, right?

Javier Peñalosa M. (09:23):
[foreign language 00:09:49].

Robin Myers (10:06):
Landscapes don’t preserve what happens along the length of them. A riverbed doesn’t keep the rivers running water, the stones don’t retain their moss, don’t conserve the flight of passing birds, don’t gather shadows. We want to reach the place that calls to us, but we’re following a path sketched in memories and our straight line is a spiral. Our shoes heavy, our bodies a puncture, we followed the riverbed down.

Javier Peñalosa M. (10:36):
[foreign language 00:10:37].

Robin Myers (11:16):
And all we found were stones, raised stones with names and dates, stones of different shapes and colors. It was a field ready for farming. I drifted from the group and walked gingerly trying not to tread on them. I wanted to find my grandfather’s house and the nameless stones were there too, piled on top of each other, the stones they used to build the walls, the walls we used to build our houses.

Javier Peñalosa M. (11:43):
[foreign language 00:11:58].

Robin Myers (12:21):
But landscapes also preserve what happens along the length of them. Stones also store fire and are polished with the strength of water or wind. If animals sleep there, if a thistle grows or a fruit ripens, if a group of people crosses the mountain early in the morning, the land starts filling up like a vessel until it can hold no more and spills over.

Ryo Yamaguchi (12:48):
So lovely. Oh, so beautiful. And it’s so of course, wonderful to… I love this section of this book actually, and I think it’s so central to the story, to the impetus of the work. And it makes me think about questions about journey. I mean, one thing, and maybe it’s because of a time we are living now in an era of many, many years of so much migration, forced migration, migration as a result of climate catastrophe and on so many different levels.

(13:22):
This is a complicated question, a twin question maybe I have. One has to do with, I think, I’m almost thinking about landscape and I have a curiosity about this whole question around myth, which is, as you wrote this, Javi, and as you read it, as you are in this language, how much you’re thinking about the specific landscapes around Mexico City or elsewhere, or if you feel that you have that this work exists in an astral plane, exists in a metaphysical place that can maybe be more universal? Maybe I’ll ask that question first and then ask this question about journeys.

Javier Peñalosa M. (13:59):
Yes, thank you. Yes, Mexico City and the surrounding area was in my mind when I was writing, but there was also another landscape. And now that you are talking about journeys, lately, I’ve been thinking of the need that we have to get close to something bigger than ourselves. I have a small daughter now, she’s a toddler, she’s a year and a half old. And being with her lately, I feel how she looks and goes to something bigger than her and usually it’s her mom or myself or something else. But I’ve been thinking about this way in which bodies and even language is always trying to get closer to something bigger, I don’t know, [foreign language 00:15:19].

Robin Myers (15:19):
Something that can protect or shelter it.

Javier Peñalosa M. (15:30):
And I feel that I do these journeys through language in that kind of search having this need of getting myself closer to something bigger than myself. And in that sense, I feel that there’s like this exterior landscape and inner landscape, and I don’t know how they get together, but they coexist in a way, I don’t know.

Ryo Yamaguchi (16:21):
No, it is truly beautiful. I’m thinking of old art theory, I used to read about sculpture and the scale of things where you have something that’s small that feels like a trinket, and then something that’s human-sized which is the most intense maybe form of sculpture because you are in this confrontation, and that’s something of course that’s much larger than you. And when asking this question of when something in front of you stops being an object and starts becoming a landscape, at what scale, I love the way that you have kind of made it a childhood or that it’s fundamental to us as former children that we would be drawn to something larger. And that approach feels eternal to me, I think maybe, which maybe means it’s never satisfied or something.

Javier Peñalosa M. (17:16):
It’s like the thirst, it’s physical thirst.

Ryo Yamaguchi (17:20):
Yeah, yeah.

Javier Peñalosa M. (17:21):
Never satisfied.

Ryo Yamaguchi (17:23):
I love it, I love it. Well, and let me ask this question about journey, because there is this thirst and this thirsting after and this journey that’s happening. And maybe this is a question for you, Robin, or Javi if you want to answer, I was a little bit curious, there are so many great stories in our global literature about journeys, and I was wondering if there was maybe a model or an analog that you see in this story, if there’s a tradition that you’re drawing on or, Robin, that you see in it?

Robin Myers (18:00):
I feel like it’s a question that could go in so many vast directions, and maybe the first thing that comes to mind is a sort of a countering narrative where I think about mythical journeys in, I don’t know, the Western canon, like The Odyssey, where there is this sort of one person who is in the context of war and struggle and territory and ownership who sets out and struggles and then returns. And this is a kind of utterly collectivized journey and perpetual return. And I remember that being something that astonished me structurally about What Comes Back the first time I read it was the fact that all of the sections, the title of the book and all of the section titles are Los Que Regresan, which maybe this is a parenthesis that I’ll say that this was a translation dilemma also because Los Que Regresan refers to the ones who come back, those who come back. And that was strictly sort of an oral lexical kind of just trouble I had with how there was something so compact and perfect to me about Los Que Regresan in Spanish, and I ended up translating it with a similar compactness, but a slightly different meaning as What Comes Back, and my understanding was what comes back with those who return.

(19:42):
And so I see something that’s happening, a current, no pun intended in this book as a sort of wonderfully amorphous we, that it’s not a hero’s return, it’s a shifting, changing chronologically uncertain community who are looking for something they have lost that also connects them to the land that they come from. And so I see that as not quite as simple as the sort of anti-hero, because I don’t think there is no heroism, that’s not the point I feel here, but just a sense of something that is shared potentially over the course of many generations in a way that the book very beautifully never specifies of whether, we don’t know how long it takes this journey. But I think that as both having a kind of mythical encompassing gaze, sort of thinking about a quest and a history and struggles, but also I’m thinking about your inner landscape, Javi, the sense also of something on a spiritual level in a way which can be expanded or contracted in a way that the book itself does, and I think readers can also project as they read.

Ryo Yamaguchi (21:20):
That’s really wonderful, Robin. And I mean, it’s something I feel very much in this work too, the collective sense or the collective subjectivity of this group who’s traveling. And as a reader, my experience is that I am among that group. I think that’s so inviting about is that I feel I’m a traveler too in this and not reading a story of other travelers or another traveler. And I think you’re also touching upon something, I mean, at least I will say my own personal view, but I am sure others would share it with me, is that I think the idea of a singular heroism of one hero as an agent has become a very entrenched and honestly deeply problematic narrative in a lot of our culture. I think we glorify that form of heroism in absolutely violent ways and things, and I don’t want to go on a whole tangent about that, but one thing that I feel in this work is that sense of collective heroism in a way. And I think it’s really, really wonderful and in many ways necessary, I think you said something like a corrective or something like that earlier and I love that.

(22:25):
On this point, Javi, I wanted to ask a question about the sections of this work, and in particular, the section which is comprised essentially of portraits of different individuals, I think in this group or elsewhere. Javi, I was wondering if you could maybe explain that section or even just explain the three sections as a whole and how they fit together. I mean, whatever comes to you first, yeah.

Javier Peñalosa M. (22:46):
Okay. By the time I was writing the book, I felt that I was finding a lot walking in the streets and wandering, little photographs like the ones from the IDs, but sometimes you just find someone’s face in the street. So without knowing why or what it would become, I started collecting some of them, and then I started placing them right in front of me and trying to imagine who they were. And then something occurred to me, and it was that the picture of these people was lost for them but found for me. And in that sense, I felt that I found a way of saying something political without being a pamphlet and also something that was important for me in a more spiritual way. And it was saying that what seems to disappear in some place appears somewhere else. And that section of the book was my will to bring back people that were disappeared in a place, but I was trying to make them appear in another place, something like that. I don’t know if it was clear or made sense, but something like that.

Ryo Yamaguchi (24:52):
That’s so fabulous. I mean, I’m a little weepy to hear you say that. I mean, I think maybe because it rectifies my own feelings of loss of family members and things, and to think that they’ve left my life so they can be part of someone else’s brings me such comfort or something. And of course, this connection with strangers, and I don’t know, also by way of an artifact, I think this object that is suddenly present to you, there’s something very magical about that to me that I really love.

Javier Peñalosa M. (25:28):
And something else I found through this is that the things that appear had to do with my will to find them. So another thing that was happening to me, it was that I couldn’t find these little insects that I remembered from my childhood. And at some point I said, “Okay, they’re gone. They’re gone, they’re not here anymore.”

Ryo Yamaguchi (25:59):
They’re extinct? Yeah.

Javier Peñalosa M. (26:00):
Yeah, they’re extinct, they’re gone. And after a week or so, I saw one, and then the week after that, I found another one, and then they started popping out. They were not like hundreds, but they were still there. What wasn’t there was my will of finding or seeing them. So I think that there is something about that as well, your own will to see what you think that has disappeared and that is gone.

Ryo Yamaguchi (26:45):
Yeah, yeah. I love this, you’re saying to think that I can have the power to actually just by my will, just by my desire to have the universe be whole.

Javier Peñalosa M. (26:55):
At least to, I don’t know, how do you say this in English, Robin, but at least the convocar.

Robin Myers (27:03):
To summon them.

Ryo Yamaguchi (27:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Javier Peñalosa M. (27:07):
And that’s a way of bringing things back, I think.

Ryo Yamaguchi (27:14):
Yeah. So it’s really wonderful, this idea of return, I mean, there’s this circularity, I mean, there’s so many, I guess I’m thinking geometrically about the work of this linear path within the circularity, the disappearance and the return. But the way you’re describing it here, it just makes it on a much more emotional level. I don’t know, yeah, it’s really wonderful.

(27:42):
Let me ask a very large and pointless question maybe, and I’ll give it to you, Robin, perhaps if you’re up for it. Thinking of this idea of kind of restoration, we were having a conversation in one of our other interviews recently about restoration in the mind, it’s very present to my mind, this idea that literature can be restorative. And Robin., I’m curious in working on this project or just in general in your expertise in working in many contemporary literary projects now, what can literature do for the world right now? What does the world need out of these stories? How’s that?

Robin Myers (28:30):
Okay.

Ryo Yamaguchi (28:30):
If you need me to narrow it down, I can, I think, but I prefer not yet.

Robin Myers (28:35):
I think, I mean this may be a cop out, I’m sort of trying to build a little bridge for myself from what we were just talking about, but the idea of multiplicity. And I think this idea both that sort of thankfully a resistance to or a complication of or an invitation to something else as opposed to this sort of hegemonic experience which has certainly dominated the Western canon for a long time and certainly literature in the English language, not just the English language, I think maybe we could say this of the Spanish language too, for instance.

(29:23):
But I think the sense that the world is… And I think this also is part and parcel of what we’re talking about in terms of migration also, and that the world is millions, billions of people live multilingual lives, multicultural lives, lives of enormous transformation, of generational realities. And so I think what literature can do is function in as many ways as there are people as a sort of prism for individual and collective experience. I mean, there’s a metaphor, this is definitely a cop out on my part, but just I think we often speak about a literature as either a sort of telescope that kind of projects us outward, farther than we can go by ourselves, or as a microscope. And I think this is often poetry is talked about this way as this kind of teeny tiny study of one little thing, one little person and their mind.

(30:35):
And I think for me, literature at its most alive and necessary has a kaleidoscopic effect. There’s a sense of looking at a fixed point, but something is moving all the time and it requires participation, it requires interaction and curiosity and light little bits of glass. There’s a sense of something that’s changing all the time. And I think for me, that’s also what translation is for, is the idea that something in order to be brought to life again must be transformed. And I think there’s something maybe kindred about that idea and what Javi was saying about something that is lost, and of course since time immemorial, there’s this obsession with what is lost in translation.

(31:34):
But the point really for me is that it is not just what is gained in a kind of zero-sum game in a sort of economic sense, I don’t like that at all, I think just more the sense that translation, if a translation feels alive, it is a transformation. And so I think thankfully, we’re also in a moment where there is more and more curiosity about translation as a craft, more attention being paid to it as an art. And there’s a long way to go, I think, before translation is not kept in its own sort of little box, but I think that is starting to change certainly in English, I mean, thinking about the US publishing market, which has been so doggedly multilingual, and I think often uncurious about literature published elsewhere, much more so than what I’ve seen in the Spanish language publishing industry, for instance.

(32:37):
But anyway, that’s another story. And what I mean is that I think just this idea of literature as having, yeah, just the transformative capacity, not in a sort of self-helpy way, but in the sense that in order to look through that telescope, we are seeing something that is transformed and we must also be transformed. And that is never still, that’s always a moving object.

Ryo Yamaguchi (33:07):
Yeah, no, it’s absolutely fantastic. And you’re articulating so many angles of joy for me in this. I think when I get the most depressed sort of about the world or I feel, yeah, the most depressed or negative, then I’ll read a poem I love or I’ll see a bird I’ve never seen before. The world will remind me that it is still so vast, so rich, and that there are forms of accretion and accumulation that are sustainable. Human creation, justice. I mean this idea, I’m thinking there’s been so much conversation about how justice is not a zero-sum game, we can all benefit if we make the right choices and things. But I just love this idea of sustainable forms of proliferation, I hear you kind of describing, I don’t know, it’s truly wonderful.

(34:03):
Well, I think this brings us to a point. I really could talk all day about this, I could hear the entire book I think, but maybe we’ve got time just for one more piece and we can leave it at that. Would you be up for reading again another piece or section of pieces?

Robin Myers (34:19):
All right, so we’re going to switch the order this time, English and then Spanish. We weren’t all the same size. We weren’t all the same. How many of us were there? We were the ones from the beginning. There were two, three, sometimes nine, I can’t remember. How many of us were there? We swam in the river in the morning. The water was sweet and it burned as it wet us. The current was gentle and it didn’t pull us under, but I don’t remember how many of us there were.

Javier Peñalosa M. (34:49):
[foreign language 00:35:03].

Robin Myers (35:21):
It’s like we’re blind marching one after another. This isn’t the place we wanted to come to. Is the body of the water what we were looking for? The one from San Juan has been convinced for days that we’re already home. The crow always thinks we’re about to begin. The old man hasn’t opened his mouth. We don’t know if we’re going or coming back were the words that will wound.

Javier Peñalosa M. (35:45):
[foreign language 00:35:58].

Robin Myers (36:15):
A great weight pulled us downward. It wasn’t gravity. And we decided to speak aloud to keep our voices from falling away, to keep them alive like flames. And we repeated again and again, the water that goes away must come back, the water that goes away must come back. Because things don’t disappear, a rooster crowed in the morning and there were new cracks in the walls. I opened my mouth, but I didn’t get it right and my own mouth was the hollow space.

Javier Peñalosa M. (36:43):
[foreign language 00:36:51].

Robin Myers (37:21):
All the islands are going under, the water will rise, the islands are going under. There is no water. Be patient. The islands are going under the flanks, the little beaches formed on the shorelines. “All the islands are going under,” he said.

(37:37):
“What’s an island?” I asked.

(37:40):
“An island is when you can’t find your shoes in the morning. An island is words you don’t know how to say and it seems like they’re floating, but they’re touching your tongue. An island is the memory of your mother. An island is a back rising from the water.”

(37:55):
“I don’t see any islands.”

(37:57):
“We’re on an island right now. Can’t you see it/ we’re floating.”

(38:01):
“There is no water here. All the islands are going under all the valleys. They’re not going to burn. They’re going under and they’ll take us with them into the water.”

Javier Peñalosa M. (38:12):
[foreign language 00:38:20].

Ryo Yamaguchi (39:15):
Yeah, that’s marvelous, such a marvelous excerpt. And it was such poise, it was beautiful. I think it’s a wonderful place to stop. Thank you both so much for this is truly nourishing conversation. I’m so grateful to have you two today.

Javier Peñalosa M. (39:31):
Thank you.

Robin Myers (39:35):
Thank you so much, Ryo.

Javier Peñalosa M. (39:35):
And a special thank you for Robin because, I don’t know, I don’t have the words to express my gratitude towards her work.

Robin Myers (39:49):
Don’t make me cry, Javi, thanks to you. It’s such a joy to translate this book and to see this what it’s becoming with Copper Canyon. And thank you so much to both of you.

Ryo Yamaguchi (40:03):
Thank you.

Robin Myers (40:03):
Yes, thank you, Ryo.

Ryo Yamaguchi (40:04):
This will be a wonderful entity in the world and necessary one. I’m so happy to bring it out. Thank you both again, wishing you both the returns that you need in your lives and that bring you the best. So thank you so much. And thank all of you out there. Thanks for joining us for this one, this is a really special episode. I’m so happy we got to do this. And we’ll see you for the next one.

[End Transcript]