The Hormone of Darkness is not a collection but a playlist, as translator Farid Matuk takes care to assert. It is a compilation of Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta’s greatest hits, selected from four of her poetry collections, a body of work spanning from 2004 to 2018. Raised under authoritarian Fujimorism and a government guilty of violent suppression and the forced sterilization of indigenous women, Otta works through the trauma of political instability by seeking the mystical, the hopeful, the luminous. Matuk’s introduction, “Tender Complicity,” outlines the literary career of a writer who refers to herself, “poetically speaking,” as “a bit of an extraterrestrial.” Matuk paraphrases her: “Poetry can respond [to injustice] … by democratizing the possibility of the sacred for everything and everyone.”
Otta embraces the banalities of modern life, exploring sexuality not through rejection of contemporary cultural expressions of desire but through acceptance of them. The writing that Matuk has compiled is poetry for clubbers, Instagram addicts, fans of reggaeton. It’s rife with references — to vaporwave, Spider-Man, Hello Kitty, Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, porn sites, dating apps, situationships, et cetera — yet it always circles back to greater metaphysical wonderings. She eschews convention both in content and form. Some of the poems in The Hormone of Darkness are titled. Some are not. Some feature typical capitalization and grammatical structure. Some do not.
One untitled poem on the twelfth page of the book appears as such:
me gustaría averiguar
cómo entraste a mi casa-
corazón,
porque no tiene puertas ni ventanas
de casa solo tiene las
luces apagadas
me pregunto cómo tú.
y mientras más pienso en ello
menos entiendo otras cosas.
The next page displays the English translation:
i’d like to figure out
how you got into my house-
heart,
as it has neither doors nor windows,
the only homey
thing about it is
that the lights are off.
i ask why you.
and the more I think of it
the less I understand anything.
Matuk’s translations often take the shape of the original piece, tracing it as a tattooist would trace a stencil on skin, but shaky lines and altered forms cannot always be avoided. Preserving Otta’s omission of traditional capitalization, Matuk shrinks the first-person singular into its lowercase. It’s a common enough choice in poetry, as the English pronoun I’s petulant insistence for attention does not always mesh with the subdued styles of certain poets. Later in the poem, however, Matuk reverts to their original procedure, capitalizing the pronoun when it occurs in the middle of a sentence. It’s a notable irregularity, slightly opaque in its intention. Is it more vital to preserve Otta’s lack of capitalization at the outset of each line than in the center? Does the self increase in importance as the poem spools along? With these inconsistencies, Matuk may be seeking to replicate Otta’s revolutionary bent, her occasional disregard for linguistic rules as much a stylistic choice as it is a political decision against repressive norms.
Matuk’s further alterations to the original form of “i’d like to figure out” are present merely to improve readability. The comma inserted in the fourth line, for instance, separates a phrase from the one that follows it, a distinction Otta does not make. Italicization of the words “why you” in the third line from the bottom more clearly designate them as a statement or thought. And then Matuk creates a line, splits “de casa solo tiene las / luces apagadas” (“[related to] home it only has the / lights off”) into “the only homey / thing about it is / that the lights are off.” The change improves the sentence’s flow, turning it from something stilted to something smooth, but it has the consequence of hanging one final line limply out to dry after its mirror-poem has already ended. Disruption of form is one of the many sacrifices a translator may have to make. If they are twins, Otta’s poems and Matuk’s translations are fraternal.
The informality with which Matuk approaches questions of structure and phrasing suits Otta. One can imagine her writing each line of poetry with a casual shrug, slipping mentions of pop music and celebrities and social media into vibrant explorations of spirituality. In the poem “Joy of living,” she describes:
Un selfi intermitente de momentos imposibles
Y su continuación lógica
El perreo inconsútil que transparenta nuestras ánimas
Resueltas en una insólita ecuación
/
An intermittent selfie of impossible moments
And its logical extension
The seamless perreo that clarifies our souls
Solved by a single freak equation
Otta’s commitment to the accessibility of her poetry (“democratization” as she calls it) leads her to topics some might consider unliterary, here being the mention of selfies and perreo — that is, a Latino dance related to twerking or grinding. Immediately after “Joy of living” is a poem that ends as follows:
Contemplo la montaña y desprende un gemido
Miro a través de la ventana y lanza un aullido
Soy un sol que nunca se oculta en un mar que nunca regresa
No encuentro calma en estar viva
/
I look at the mountain and it gives off a moan
I look through the window and it howls
I’m a sun that never sets in a sea that never returns
I don’t find calm in being alive
Existential musings flourish alongside vulgarities, each bit of beauty or smut an equally vital aspect of life. Also at play here is Otta’s distinct word choice, captured expertly by Matuk to meld images of nature with those of the human body. The mountain moans, the window howls; in “I saw a herd of toads,” “a hermaphroditic breeze” brushes by, and in “A star fell,” Otta proclaims, “I want to fuck flowers like bees do.” Matuk’s English poems carve deeper into Otta’s goal to communize the sublime, not only translating her grosería and internet age wit but forgoing linguistic prescriptivism altogether, turning “también puse un dios por si las moscas / en un lugar discrete / para que jueguen a encontrarlo” into “Just in case / I also tucked a god somewhere discreet / so y’all can play at finding it.” Here, the Spanish ustedes (implied in juegen) is made into the English “y’all,” a dialectical construction created to fill the void of a second-person plural pronoun. Although Otta’s original text includes a traditionally “standard” pronoun, Matuk’s translation takes the informal tone from the idiomatic phrase “por si las moscas,” which translates literally to “for if the flies,” and transmutes it to “y’all,” redistributing the weight of the Spanish verse while maintaining its stenciled shape.
Nevertheless, as with the earlier capitalization in “i’d like to figure out,” Matuk makes a few more ambiguous translation decisions in the playlist. For example, “Definitive animal” contains these lines:
Roba, caza, aniquila
Copula con perras
Copula con lobas
Mata Mata
/
Thieve, hunt, annihilate
Fuck bitchx
Fuck wolvx
Kill kill
Not only has Matuk replaced the cold locution “copulation” with “fucking,” but two nouns that Otta has gendered femininely become gender-neutral. The manner of neutralizing perras and lobas is irregular, intentionally made more pronounced due to English’s lack of obvious gendered endings like -o and -a. Matuk’s insertion of -x in both nouns is likely an attempt at queering them in the same way that -o’s and -a’s are often replaced by -x or -e in Spanish-speaking LGBTQ+ or feminist circles (see: the title of Otta’s novel, Lxs niñxs de oro de la alquimia sexual). A more straightforward addition of a queer signifier can be found in the playlist’s titular poem “The hormone of darkness,” where Matuk translates gente, Spanish for “people,” into “folx,” a term used by the queer community to denote inclusion of marginalized identities. Folx, at least, is a word that exists in vernacular, while bitchx and wolvx are mostly unpronounceable and invented solely for The Hormone of Darkness. Yet Matuk, who uses gender neutral pronouns (as do I), is doubtlessly aware that the vast majority of nonbinary Spanish speakers refer to themselves with neopronouns, a portmanteau of neologism and pronouns. While used sparsely among certain English-speaking queer individuals, English — already having they as a generally accepted singular third-person pronoun — does not require neopronouns to describe gender neutrality as Spanish does. For a language whose only third-person pronouns are él and ella, the invention of new words is a necessity. Therefore, Matuk’s bitchx can be interpreted as an homage to Spanish gender fluidity, wholly distinct in its expression and conception from its English equivalent.
The stencil of an original text in the context of translation is, at times, negligible. Depending on the translator’s intent, of utmost importance is the congruence of the piece that takes form in the translated language — each twin should have their own sense of individuality, after all. The bulk of Matuk’s translation is a superb conveyance of nuance that can never be fully communicated without the original context. In “Caribbean,” the lilted, rolling syllables of “extrañándola” becomes “missing her.” In “Poetry is supreme killjoy,” the lively imagery of “aguafiestas” becomes “killjoy.” Some self-deprecating English-speakers call it a language as flat as slate, a far cry from oft-romanticized Latinate tongues, but to mourn the loss of meaning in a translation is to ignore the unique artwork produced as a result of it. Matuk derives bits of lexical genius from Otta’s poetry, as in “(( How would life feel … ))”:
Una mirada fija en mí me fija en mí
Ahora que vivo en una pequeña habitación
Más que la ausencia de una fuerza gravitatoria
Lo que experiment es una caída libre eterna
/
A steady looking at me steadies me
Now that I live in a small room
More than the absence of gravitational force
What I feel is free fall forever
Beyond the parallel repetition of “fija en mí fija en mí” and “steady looking at me steadies me,” Matuk creates alliteration from Otta’s non-alliterative writing, adjusting the literal “what I experience is an eternal free fall” into a fluid phrase. Likewise, an earlier line in the same poem changes from “cazadores de miel alucinógena” to “hunters of hallucinogenic honey,” a word-for-word translation that may even sound more intentional in its second incarnation.
Translation is rendered unnecessary in the poem “I love her and this song,” which is composed of English language comments on a Rihanna music video. It includes lines like “I’m obsessed and shes so sexy omg” and “I love this girl. Just omg,” an outright rejection by Otta of the prescriptivism that Matuk also spurns. Bookending the poem is her explanation of the comments’ source, written entirely in lowercase and ending with “<3.” Here again, Otta’s “democratizing” of literature is on full display. Her poetry projects a clear philosophy: that the colloquial is poetic, and the poetic is colloquial. Poetry is not only “the supreme killjoy”; it is also “all the parties.”
The playlist Matuk has crafted from Otta’s oeuvre calls to mind a quotation by French-to-English translator Kate Briggs in her book-length essay This Little Art: “Translation as a laborious way of making the work present to yourself, of finding it again yourself, for yourself.” Within the words of a radical Peruvian “extraterrestrial,” Matuk finds poetry that can speak to an Anglophone audience, elegantly twisting structure and vocabulary to tell a story of acceptance and openness and hope among chaos. A culmination of the skills of a queer poet and a queer translator, The Hormone of Darkness has a certain serendipity to its language, both Otta and Matuk creating art with the same ultimate goals — broad, lofty concepts, like accessibility of literature and queer expression, but also simple bits of camaraderie, an affection playing at the delicate translation of Matuk’s right-hand stanzas. With Matuk’s expertise ushering them into English, Otta’s poems bleed — with love, faith, sex, filth, and Otta herself, and Matuk as well. Briggs again: “Translation conceived as a means of writing the other’s work out with your own hands, in your own setting, your own time, and in your own language …” It is an act as healing of trauma as the act of reading, as the act of creating poetry at all. Art conceived as a means of coping with political and societal danger. As Otta remarks in “This time they raised the bar too high,” “Only poetry could fix this mess.”
[Published by Graywolf Press on October 15, 2024, 160 pages, $17.00 paperback]