Landsmoder
On October 21, 2011, Salvadoran poet Elena Salamanca arrived at the Plaza Morazán donned in a “dress of patriotic blue linen, a silver diadem, and blue velvet heels,” and proceeded to shroud five statues of women in body bags and lay funeral wreaths of cypress at their feet, before staging a reading of the poems that would become, as Salamanca explains, “Landsmoder (mother of the nation) which just as well could be switched to Landsmorder (murderer of the nation).”
Outraged by the spiraling murder rate in El Salvador, Salamanca was protesting the “Primer grito de la independencia,” a celebration invented by early-20th-century politicians to mythologize the birth of the country. Salamanca’s poems are full of blood and violence, delivered by a speaker who is vengeful and filled with rage:
I want to eat the bird of this land:
to sink my teeth deep into its chest
bursting with national anthems.
I won’t keep constantly repeating that the flag is
the shroud that will cover me in death.
The ground is cold,
and the flag is
a napkin I’ll use to wipe the blood off my lips
after devouring the bird.
While the spectacle of Salamanca’s performance is lost on the page, translator Ryan Greene does his best to recreate the effect, as in these closing lines from “They ripped out your eyes and on your vacant corneas they placed two national flowers”:
They put a flag on your chest
and they left you in the coldest earth on this earth.
Blind one:
May the sky please guide and guard you.
In a prefatory Translator’s Note, Greene explains that “attention to sound” was paramount in his “translation choices,” whether manifest in the decision to “carry over sonic vestiges directly,” or to “recreate sonic relationships.” Thus, for example, “blind-sky-guide” aims to reproduce the “triplicate echo of ciego-cielo-ciele” with the “addition of please […] to allow for an interstitial sky that, while not legible on the page, can be heard when read aloud.” In its unique combination of protest, performance, and translation, this book opens Salamanca’s truly monumental work to new audiences and future generations.
