Already people murmur I’m your enemy since they say that in verse I give the world to me.
This translation is included in Ilan Stavans’s Selected Translations: Poems 2000-2020, just released by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos. The one rising in my verses isn’t your voice: it is my voice since you are costumes and I, the essence; and the deepest abyss spreads between us.
You are the cold doll of a social lie, and I the virile flash of human truth.
You, honey of courtesan hypocrisy; not me; in all my poems I undress the heart.
You are like your world, selfish; not me; I gamble everything to be who I am.
You are only the severe ladylike señorona; not me; I am life, strength, woman.
You are of your husband, of your master; not me; I am nobody’s, or everyone’s, since I give myself to everyone, to everyone in my pure feeling and in my thought.
You curl your hair and wear makeup; not me; the wind curls me, the sun is my makeup.
You are a house dame, resigned, submissive, tied up in male prejudice; not me; I am Rocinante breaking out in gallop snorting God’s landscapes in search of justice.
You don’t rule yourself; everyone rules you; your husband rules you, your parents, your relatives, the priest, the tailor, the theater, casino, and car, jewels, banquet, champagne, sky and hell, and the what-will-they-say.
Not me; only my heart rules, my thought; I rule myself.
You, aristocratic flower; and I, people’s flower. You have everything in you and you owe it to everyone, whereas I don’t owe a thing to anyone.
You, nailed to the unmovable ancestral dividend, and I, a one in in social accountant’s tally we are the deadly duel that fatefully approaches.
When the masses riot without stop leaving behind in ashes the burnt injustices. and when, with the torch of seven virtues it pursues the seven sins, the masses run away, against you, and against what is unjust and inhuman it will be me in their midst with the torch in hand.
(Translated by Ilan Stavans)
Julia de Burgos(1914-1953) was a Puerto Rican poet and activist for women's rights who fought for Puerto Rico's independence. A teacher and scriptwriter for radio, she died an anonymous death in Spanish Harlem and was buried at the potter's field of Hart Island, New York.
Ilan Stavansis Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the publisher of Restless Books. His new book, The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language, is out in January.