A Sea at Dawn (Eulalia Books, 2023), a new bilingual edition of selected poetry, showcases the long career of celebrated Uruguayan writer Silvia Guerra. Known best as a poet yet also an essayist and the author of a fictional–poetic biography of poet Isadore Ducasse, Guerra is a multidimensional figure in the literary world. She is a researcher and a member of Uruguay’s National Academy of Letters who has also been described as a literary activist.
It is fitting that A Sea at Dawn, the first book to represent Guerra in English, is multifaceted and rich with a sense of embedded time proper to an edition of poems selected from nine books across decades. It’s one of those editions that gives a first impression of a quiet and thoughtful voice. As the reader gets deeper into the book, the poems propose to rearrange the reader’s mind and emotions, unsettling the calm exterior.
The cumulative impact of Guerra’s work suggests that somewhere, somehow, the poet crossed a stark line of experience that transformed and displaced her perspectives on reality. Guerra’s ekphrastic portrait of a drowned Ophelia, following the painting made by John Everett Millais in the early 1850s, is one of many cues to pay attention to the bodies and mortality of women.
The opening sections of A Sea at Dawn excerpt Guerra’s collections published in the twentieth century, from books dating to 1987, 1990, and 1993. A grouping entitled “Other Poems” follows, then selections from five books from 2000 and later. Each poem appears in facing-page format, allowing the reader to tack back and forth between the two languages.
Guerra’s poetry looks smooth on the surface, as the book’s title suggests. The first short poems confront dark emotions in an orderly, meditative way. Guerra tends to open with left-justified lines and an image holding the center: “How lonely the wave this afternoon / how lonely it was / and how it broke” (from the poem entitled “V”). However, Guerra’s sea of language and imagery will become linguistically complex, enfolding disparate kinds of abstraction and ambiguity, so the facing-page format allows readers to appreciate the creativity the many poems demand of the two translators.
Throughout A Sea at Dawn, Guerra attempts to maneuver around obstacles with riverine language, and tensions organize around this effort. It seems right that her collection opens with a poem titled with the number “I,” about using “a meaningless password” (“una contraseña sin sentido”) to clear a barrier. By not specifying what the password is for, she invites readers to wonder what’s at stake if she can’t.
Another obstacle is the stultifying ordinariness of existence—a lack of vitality in our everyday environments. Poems selected from Guerra’s 1990 book Idea of Adventure battle with an everyday lack of that very adventure. Each day ticks along like a machine. “Maybe one day the mechanism will change,” she writes, hopefully (“Quizá un día se cambie el mecanismo”), in the poem “III.” The poem “V” projects a similar need for change for women trapped within sameness, but here Guerra concludes without the hope:
it’s the daily grind
[“es el trajín / el mismo siempre / es el mismo cansancio / en las mujeres”]
the same old thing
it’s the same weariness
in women
The threat of “a crushing constancy” (“una machacada constancia”) returns later in the book, where it is more obviously deadly: Guerra warns of an unidentified man’s future suicide in the poem “III” from Shadow of the Lily.
She seems determined to escape this fate. Guerra’s invocation of magical language to prompt a change in circumstances recurs, though not always successfully, in later poems. A selection from her 1993 book opens with a contradictory message, again flagging a key point of tension: “Give me that talisman you keep, it will not help me / either, not at all” (“Dame ese talisman que guardas, que no me servirá / tampoco, para nada”).
Guerra’s magic evolves as she learns to pause and open time, inhabiting the gaps within it:
Long, stretched to its finality, fine matter
[“Larga, estirada hasta el fin, fina material / la engendrada en el agua con espacios / de nada entre los átomos, esa, estirada. / La misma que vencida, obnubilada, a veces, flota.”]
begotten in water with spaces
of nothingness between atoms, this, stretched.
This, defeated, dazed, sometimes floats.
Her landscape poems move in calm and meditative ways, but anyone progressing through A Sea at Dawn will notice that they’re shot through with trauma, advancing more questions about the impact of environments and what experiences stratify them. The poem just quoted, “Of Duration I Will Die, Chosen” (“De duración he de morirme yo, elegida”), opens and closes with fog hanging over the ocean. Its center portrays a self entrapped by fear, who imagines that she must run away in flames but finds herself cornered—like others who came before.
“Condition,” in the same group from 1993, evokes a darkness where something or someone is “perfumed by fear” (“el perfumado por el miedo”). Guerra resists the storytelling convention to provide a beginning, not just a story’s middle or end, so I kept found myself searching for hints about the sources of fear in the poems. Did the fears originate from specific events? From psychological “conditions,” as her poem title hints? Both, perhaps in some cause-and-effect relationship?
As the poems build, Guerra advances experiments in contrast, ambiguity, and frequent decentering of human presences. The Spanish language is useful for blurring and decentering in that a verb can be conjugated without a visible pronoun: for example, “Duele” tells us that someone or something hurts but not whether the one hurting is a she, he, one, you, or it. This allows writers to minimize the identification of actions with the agents performing them.
Choosing any option for the English translation excludes others, affecting not only the translation of a single verb but the resulting options for how pieces of larger sentences and scenes fit together into an overall picture. Translators Pitas and Kercheval acknowledge that this challenge of grammatical omission affects much of A Sea at Dawn, and omitting pronouns can affect the coherence of ideas in English.
“After several discussions, we decided that there was no way to resolve this issue globally,” the translators write in their afterword. “We responded on a case-by-case basis.” These incremental challenges can be thought-provoking for anyone who moves across languages. “Sigue sigue,” Guerra writes in the late poem “31”, which the translators recreate with the addition of the vaguest possible pronoun: “It keeps on keeping on.”
Guerra lets the landscape drive many scenes, compressing the human role to its minimum, as focalizer. As a result, poems like “Below, a Lagoon” (“Abajo, una laguna”) fit well into contemporary international discussions about eco-poetical strategy:
Tangential to the rest of the shape
[“Tangente por el resto de figura / corcovea Zigzaguente en la espuma / que deja su verdor. Los tallos / Acuáticos vellosos en marea se / mueven como masa conjunta”]
it bends, Zigzagging in the foam
that leaves it green. Its stems,
Aquatic fuzzy move with the
tide as a coordinated mass
As this excerpt also shows, Guerra begins to insert capital letters in unusual locations. They create an alternative kind of enjambment between enjambments, pulsing and shifting the energy within her lines.
Something of her distanced tone may result from Guerra’s interest in linguistics, suggesting technical observation that she can use to disrupt functional language patterns with the otherness she seeks. I imagine her conscious effort to open grammar and find the gaps inherent within its mechanisms, like pausing time to seek the abysses within it.
Procedurally, Guerra treats lines as brushstrokes, sometimes layering the start of one stroke over the end of another. The translators create a cascading effect for the sounds of “Moss on a Smooth Rock,” a nature-themed poem:
Nocturnally tied
[“Nocturnamente atados / la casuarina acuática y /el jilguero del fondo / Sobre el tormento prieto / de ser uno De ser dos / de quererse”
the aquatic whistling pine and
the goldfinch from the depths
Over the tight torment
of being one Of being two
of wanting to
The more I read, though, the more some of Guerra’s poems felt like indirect ways to acknowledge trauma: protective expressions creating distance between herself and the world. Her attention to gender in her earliest work, as well as the poem on dead Ophelia, made me wonder about multiform violence affecting women. Guerra also makes many references to memory, but if there are remembered sources of trauma or a particular set of stories that might ground trauma in lived events, she leaves them mostly offscreen.
Poems from 2001 titled with the names of the Fates, or the Moirai, unite ceremonial and mythological possibilities with gender, violence, and the stopping of time as a strategy for generating an other place. On one level, the three poems can be read as the philosophical musings of women, possibly generated during their daily work. The first is from Clotho (the Spinner, spinning thread of life), another named for Lachesis (the Allotter, who draws out thread of life), and a third from Atropos (the Inflexible, who cuts the thread of life).
“Clotho” opens with a mirror warping the present time. People walk across a landscape, but the scene takes a sudden, hard turn:
Red and smiling cheeks swell
[“Se llenan los carrillos los rojos los sonrientes / de un aire / que ahí arriba se dice que es purísimo. / Y se habla de la guerra. Del color de la guerra”]
with the air
that is so pure, they say, up there.
And they speak of war. The color of war.
The speaker can neither escape nor satisfy a demand to serve as a witness to remembered violence:
And the dead appear, lined up with their empty plates
[“Y aparecen los muertos, en fila, con el plato vacío / me preguntan algo que no entiendo, no entiendo / qué me dicen no entiendo qué hago ahí, por qué me siguen. Y yo no sé qué hacer, y ellos tampoco”]
and ask me something I don’t understand, I don’t understand
what are they saying, I don’t understand, what am I doing here, why are they following me.
And I don’t know what to do, and neither do they.
The incantatory “Lachesis” presents a scene that sounds lovely, light and glittering, until it, too, takes a hard turn into the ominous zone:
It’s a prism. It’s a spinning prism.
[Es un prisma. Es un prisma que gira. / Es un prisma que fragmenta la luz, la descompone. / Es un sueño la luz. Es un sueño la luz que se repite. Es un espacio verde, que se hiciera / Hay dos amordazados en la luz / en el preciso verde”]
It’s a prism that shatters light, splitting it.
It’s a dream, light.
It’s a dream, light repeated.
It’s a green space, making itself,
There are two, gagged and muzzled, in the light
on that very green.
Guerra’s Spanish opens with one of those verbs with an ambiguous agent: What thing is a prism? Guerra doesn’t say; perhaps “it” is just the scene being presented. If these two gagged and muzzled figures are not in a prison but on a common green, the openness of their past or present subjugation stands out—and so does the absence of the agents, those anonymous people who did the subjugating.
As at other moments in this collection, I wonder if I should be recalling the public violence of the 1973–1985 Uruguayan neofascist dictatorship to process the scene. Its leaders and followers collaborated to produce wide-ranging and intergenerational trauma, not least when they carried out terror-inducing, public displays of violated bodies. But it is Guerra’s indirection that speaks loudest here, in her refusals to explain.
Given that duality of speaking while not speaking or lacing her speech with visible avoidance, readers must use her frame of updated Greek mythology to navigate uncertainty. The Fates poems document how Guerra imagines Clotho and Lachesis would speak to themselves while spinning and parceling out threads of life. This limitation refuses to account for the gagged and muzzled figures, so Guerra leaves us looking at loose ends.
“Lachesis” ends with another restatement of what the “it” is, at the heart of the poem:
And it’s the light, the iridescent tones of anguish
[“Y es la luz, los irisados tonos de la angustia / Ese silencio bordado de la tela / Crujiendo, desde la lluvia verde, casi transparente”]
This embroidered silence of the web
Rustling, under the green rain, nearly transparent
It’s hard for me not to see the “embroidered silence” as a social–psychological climate dripping with trauma. When we’re not permitted certainties, we begin to cast around for our own narratives to wrest personal or social meaning from the scene. For example, Uruguay opted to give amnesty to the perpetrators of state violence, which has led to long-term battles over public speech and public silence, a battle that other poets from the region have also entered.
In “Atropos,” named for the third, inflexible Fate who cuts the thread of life, an unnamed female figure moves “in terrible fear of the figure” (“en el miedo atroz de la figura”), also unnamed. A threat clearly looms, but to whom and how? Gradually, readers may become ever more conscious of wanting and needing to complete the scene, turning self-reflective about our own narratives.
Water in the gaze that meets hers and it’s a face with no soul
[“El agua en la mirada que se enfrenta y es un rostro sin alma / que se escapa para llenar ese otro rostro de silencio / para llenarlo con el hilo libado de los sueños, en la niebla. / La sombra sin atrás, sin cuerpo que refleje, la pura sombra”]
that leaks out to fill that other face in its silence
to fill it with the anointed thread of dreams, in mist.
Shadow with nothing behind it, without a body to reflect, pure shadow.
The atmospheric droplets and void of “Atropos” conjure a failed chiaroscuro, from which the souls we seek fail to emerge. This moment named for the Fate who cuts the thread of life feels especially weighted if the reader notices that this poem is immediately followed by a short prose poem documenting a concrete source of trauma, a family car accident.
Guerra’s storytelling sounds otherworldly, with horses erupting out of a hippodrome as if out of some ancient Greek racecourse, and the prose poem ends with a dark portent.
Three horses escaped from the hippodrome. One ran around us, but the second horse passed over us. It shattered the windshield and crushed the roof. Papá and grandma with cuts on their faces. Some people pulled us out of the car, repeating over and over in shock: “poor things, how awful!” Someone looked me over and said: “she’s unharmed.” It was the first time I’d ever seen a stranger get it so wrong.
[“Tres caballos se liberaron del hipódromo. Uno nos esquivó, pero el segundo caballo nos pasó por encima. Estalló el vidrio y aplastó el techo. Papá y la abuela con cortes en la cara. Unas personas conmovidas nos sacaron del auto mientras repetían una y otra vez: ¡pobrecitos, qué barbaridad! Alguien me revisó y dijo: está ilesa. Era la primera vez que veía a un desconocido equivocarse tanto”]
This is the closest Guerra gets to suggesting a direct link between an event and the trauma pervading the air. The wrongness she evokes seems larger than this single event.
At this point in A Sea at Dawn, as Guerra’s twenty-first-century poems come rolling out, I have been programmed to read for certain questions: When did this harm to the woman speaking really begin? What are the nature and origins of this harm? These questions overwhelm the feeling of calm with which she seemed to approach difficulty at the start of the book. Time keeps folding upon itself, and we have few answers but for the ones we find within ourselves.
