Sarah Gord Blog 11

I have really been enjoying Mucha Muchacha’s playfulness with language, translation, and (re)definition. I feel like there’s a lot I’m missing because of my basic grasp of Spanish, and Google Translate can only give me so much. I’m always looking for ways to elevate multilingualism in my classroom, and I would love to teach some of these poems next year to privilege my students who speak Spanish as a native language and therefore have much better access to connotations of words than I do.  

The first line of the first poem holds so much: “to tell is to count” because “contar” means to count (and “contar un cuento” means “to tell a story”). This is both literal translation and a new way to think about the progression of events in a person’s life. I am also struck by the differences between “Te voy a contar un cuento” and the translated “I will tell you a story.” The Spanish in this case begins with “te” (you), opening the thought with the listener. There is a lot of playfulness with what comes first in the line, and who is doing the telling or being told. The story itself seems to take on an active role in the telling of itself. In the lines,  “Splotches on skin interpret and / keep time with the story she is going to tell you,” it seems as though the splotches have more agency and control than the “she” because they are earlier in the sentence and actively “interpret” the story. The speaker repeats the phrase “the story she is going to tell you,” which contrasts with the hypothetical “she will tell you the story,” which would lead with the “she” rather than “the story.” Instead, "the story" remains the subject and the focus of the sentence. 

The pronouns themselves also jump from “I” to “she” to “you,” and it is not fully clear who each of those pronouns represents. This leads to a feeling of interconnectedness, as well as the feeling that there is more than one story being told simultaneously (by “she” and the “I”) – or, perhaps, that there is one story being told in two ways. This is supported by the final lines of this poem: “The story that she tells you / good for swaying to sleep. / But mine makes you hum / until you lose your breath.” Humming seems like a positive word, but the final line is ominous and dangerous. 

I also really enjoyed the poem, “How to be Spiritual in Stilettos,” though I still am not sure what to take from it. Hernández-Linares seems to be reframing and reinterpreting gendered objects like stilettos and sewing machines throughout the collection. The first stanza emphasizes the pain of fitting into very uncomfortable shoes (“squeezes / ten swollen toes…too narrow…pointy”). The next stanza, however, explains the pain: “We want to see / from new levels.” “Hitting” and “marching” are both powerful words that assert agency. I’m not quite sure what the take-away from this poem is meant to be, though. There is a hopefulness of reaching new heights, but it still strikes me as artificial and material (words like “flouresent,” “size six little girl wishes” are throwing me off). Would love to hear how people interpreted this one.