Aguas/Waters is obsessed with dichotomies; the relationship between earth and space, the thin film between strangers and people we think we know, the struggle between naked truth and blissful ignorance, the heartache between presence and absence. In a blurb by Camilo Baráibar on the original Spanish version of Avero’s 2011 book Arca de Aserrín (Ediciones en blanco, 2011), which turned into the first section of Aguas/Waters, it’s noted that rain and water represent “that moment when reality is seen with new eyes: a known landscape that, when wet, is altered” (translation my own). The poems flow together, brimming with rain and flood and density. The waters are everything—the poems are what’s left after the sieve, the best and most succinct droplets of truth, put on display in the titular poem: “Water in the ink of the verses/ that will never be written./ Water overflowing the cold glass and drowned/ with an immensurable drop./ Water in the troubled river/ of our inner peace.”
As a Spanish speaker, I have to say that I’m a little more discerning in my reviews of works translated from the Spanish language. Often, a poem that sounds beautiful and lyrical in Spanish won’t have the same impact in English. This isn’t the case with Aguas/Waters, prolific Uruguayan writer Miguel Avero’s English debut, deftly translated by Jona Colson. Throughout the collection, Colson maintains the integrity of the original poems while lending context and making them accessible to readers from other cultures.
I frequently found myself immersed in the color palette of the book; the blues and greys present in nearly every poem cast a surreal, dreamlike quality over the collection as a whole, like floating underwater just beneath the surface. There’s a light that’s slightly out of reach and a void of the unknown creeping ominously from below. We published two of Colson’s Avero translations at MAYDAY, and they’ve stayed with me ever since. I was thrilled to find out that a full-length collection is slated for publication. One of the poems we published, “Elección/Choice”, made it into the collection. The stanza “Because today every mist rubs us with its lips/ and tomorrow the hurtful/ fangs of the sun/ will tear apart the uselessness of umbrellas” pulled me in just as swiftly as it had a few years ago.
Avero invokes umbrellas a handful of times throughout the text. I thought of what umbrellas mean to a person caught in a storm; protection and shelter, yes, but if the storm is powerful enough, a human-made device consisting of rayon and vinyl plastic and steel spikes will be no match for nature. Every time the umbrella imagery popped up, I was reminded of how small we are in the face of disaster. In fact, much of the collection put me in that mindset, like a child staring up at the sky or down into the sea, mouth agape in awe, wondering if the sky was falling or the sea was rising, my own distorted face reflected back.
Aguas/Waters is arranged in two parts: “Arca De Aserrín / Sawdust Ark” and “La Pieza/The Room”. I find it worth mentioning that the word “pieza” can also mean a piece of something or a fragment of a whole– thus, the second part complements the first and both sections lend each other more depth and nuance when placed side by side. The momentum of the collection picks up “La Pieza/The Room”, where the lines are a little longer, the language and references a little more specific. It feels like going from a big, ethereal, broad space to a more intimate area where the reader gets a better sense of the poet and the poet’s life. “Sawdust Ark” feels fluid, intangible, and watery. In contrast, “The Room” feels labyrinthine, each poem grounding the reader in an enclosed space, with some poems being titled after room numbers and building features, as our narrator descends into a darker space within himself.
The Uruguayan heritage of magical realism is prominent throughout the poems. The poems are alive, thick with themes of identity and memory; Avero’s brief foray into Ars Poetica in the poem “Found” has us pacing back and forth with the narrator as he interrogates the maddening and circular idea of the self: “and my voice echoed in that little lonely world/where only my own body lay,/ my lone mind and my poem.” Avero examines depression, isolation, selfishness, and fear of one’s own shadow, “no dust but drops/ and moss/ and intertextual ravines” (Pluvioteca/ Library of Rain).
“Terminal”, the last poem of the book and one of my favorites, is an excellent bookend to “Foreword/Prologo”; the fire to put out the water. Throughout the collection, Colson continues to prove that he’s the right translator for the job. The language isn’t flowery– at times, it’s almost too direct and stoic– but it doesn’t bore. Rather, the boundaries are often so blurred between the concrete and the phantasmagorical that there’s something almost uncanny about the plain language. It lends the collection an air of a vague threat looming overhead, like the five seconds just before a cloudburst.
Aguas/Waters is forthcoming from The Washington Writers’ Publishing House on May 16th, 2024.
PEPPER CUNNINGHAM (she/her) is a writer and editor based in the mountains of Southern Ecuador. She is a Translation Editor at MAYDAY Magazine. Her poetry and prose appear in Split Lip, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She is the author of Hope Is The Thing With Teeth (Bottlecap Press, 2023). She is also a poetry reader with Split Lip Magazine. Find her on Twitter/X @pepwriteswords and Instagram @pepper.m.cunningham.
JONA COLSON‘s poems, translations, and interviews have been published in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Writer’s Chronicle and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, Said Through Glass, won the 2018 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. He teaches in Maryland and lives in Washington, DC.
