Terry Ehret
Photo courtesy of Terry Ehret
Bio
Terry Ehret is one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press. Literary honors for her previous collections, Lost Body, Translations from the Human Language, and Lucky Break, include the National Poetry Series, the Commonwealth Club of California Book Award, the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and a Northern California Book Award nomination. Her most recent collection is Night Sky Journey, published by Kelly's Cove Press. She has taught writing at San Francisco State and Sonoma State Universities, California College of the Arts, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with the California Poets in the Schools Program.
Note: Terry Ehret will be working in collaboration with John Johnson and Nancy J. Morales.
I discovered Mexican poet Ulalume González de León in a workshop on the prose poem at San Francisco State in 1982. Our text featured a translation of “Anatomy of Love,” and I was instantly enthralled by the language: richly erotic imagery blending anatomical and scientific vocabulary in an unconventional syntax. To discover just how this poem worked, I experimented with the seventh part, “a la recherche du corps perdu,” dismantling the language, then reassembling the words in new patterns. The result was “Lost Body,” the title poem of my first collection.
Thirty years later, wanting to read more of the poet’s work, I googled the name, not knowing at the time that González de León was a “she” —a confusion she apparently didn’t mind and even courted during her life. When the first entry that came up was my name, I realized that the one internet reference to her in English was the epigraph to my poem. Immediately I wanted to rectify this. Working with fellow Sonoma County poets John Johnson and Nancy Morales, we set to work translating her biography and some of her poems. This grew into an ambitious project to translate her collected poems, Plagios.
My co-translators and I plan to use this grant to secure the publication rights, and to travel to Mexico to spend time with the poet’s family, to visit her home, and to acquaint ourselves with some of her unpublished poems and stories. More important, the NEA’s acknowledgment of the importance of this project supports our goal to bring this visionary poet’s life and work to a wider English-speaking audience.
"To Tell A Tale" by Ulalume González de León
[translated from the Spanish]
It is the country of Going and No Return
where the clocks mark the winter exactly
and only in your memory would there be spring
if you had time to remember
But there is only time to look for the white queen
Here the heart freezes and cannot break
Here the fountains of tears freeze
Here the words that name things of color freeze
and only the word of your name survives
But you don’t know the name of the white queen
Little is known of the white queen:
who inhabits a silence without windows
who inhabits the castle of Get-out-if-you-can
who inhabits the land of ice
Little is known of the queen:
who is completely white
who cannot imagine that all the roses gathered together
could raise a glow in her cheeks
nor that with all the wings of all the birds
could she fly away from her absolute winter
Little is known of her
But you don’t need more to look for her
nor do you need more to find her
and to move farther away from her forever
discovering how already you leave no traces
in the snow
discovering how you are losing all evidence
of your life
About Ulalume Gonzalez de Leon
Ulalume Gonzalez de Leon (1928-2009) was born in Uruguay and became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1948. She was an award-winning poet, essayist, and translator whose work regularly appeared in journals beside the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, and Czeslaw Milosz, and yet, her work is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In the 1960s and '70s, she was among a generation of Latin American writers experimenting with language and challenging the traditional identities of women. Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, who provides a prologue to this collection, called her "the best Mexican poet since Juana Ines de la Cruz." Plagios is a compilation of 158 poems from six collections published between 1968 and 1979.