Diamonds and Rust: A Book Review by Candice Louisa Daquin
Diamonds & Rust (Toad Press, 2025), a Chapbook by Catalina Vergara, Translated by Tiffany Troy
Diamonds & Rust is in English and Spanish on facing pages, and the books subject matter, as mentioned by the translator, is: “inspired by themes of love and memory in Joan Baez’s eponymous song. This love is queer, which means foreign, drawing from the complex legacies of American imperialism and the overthrow of the Chilean democracy under Allende. Unlike the authoritarian state under Pinochet, which establishes the rigid role of the mother as a nurturing agent of the state, the feminist speaker in Catalina’s poetry collection often defies such state-prescribed expectations.”
The effect of non-titles, especially with a 10-poem chapbook, avoids dilution and each poem holds more resonance and power due to this shortened, direct approach. There is purpose to writing about home (Chile) in one’s original tongue and the English translation requires that we understand the passion of Spanish even if the reader doesn’t comprehend every word of it. This is more of the symbiotic relationship between translator and writer:
your ghosts were born, the tell me
in the Pleiades
and that the radiance’s very burst
a sojourn on Venus (3)
Tiffany Troy’s translation honors the original Spanish language and tries not to lose it in translation, there are words deliberately left, ways of expressing oneself that are not how they would commonly be expressed in English. If you didn’t know Vergara was a Spanish-language writer, you’d know by reading her in English and that’s exactly what you want:
if your ghost came from
another planet, unknown
esses tell me (3)
Too often, translator’s voices become the English usurper of the original and the author is relegated to being ‘in translation’ rather than the original intention of their words being heard. At the same time, translators are often not credited for the hard work they do, in pulling two languages into a shared union. For example, in poem 4, where Vergara says: “your silhouette; waves shrouding us / as diamonds pronounce your evidently psychedelic voice, bringing / my only memory always of dear life / or (lack of) light.” If a native English speaker wrote this, they’d be told it didn’t adhere to the usual linguistic word-sequencing familiar in English. When we consider it in translation, the tense shift and word sequencing make a lot more sense. Even those non-Spanish speakers can still gain the ‘difference’ like a perfume, in the way the words wrap around and embrace each other, “you / sand / you / sun caressing my / face / forcing us to squint / as to each other we cry out” (8) and we know instinctively this universe isn’t spoken first in English:
in the sounds of the sewing machine, i listen for
what you’re saying
about me (2)
For a long time, translators avoided anything less than ‘sounding like a native English speaker’ was embarrassing the writer’s credentials. The advent of globalism has erased the idea there is only one way of speaking English or any language ‘correctly’ and have embraced the ‘accent’ of a person’s original language, in their adopted language. Just as with Indian writers, or African, the colloquialism isn’t the sum of it, but the actual composition of the lines and the structure of linguistic thinking on the page. When we understand this, the whole piece breathes differently:
meteorites
between your silence and this
your eyes
show me enormous waves
of fire (8)
The eighth poem is especially rich in imagery, allegory and surrealist love language. As a lesbian I’m biased, but I suspect most poetry-readers will feel the same potent passion I did, as this poem softly steps its way through pages in slow-motion, taking its time, in an unbridled, unmodern way, which I adored for its seeming simplicity and yet, so much besides:
if there is no life, then there is no memory
or war
is there anything?
you ask.
When the translator acknowledges that Diamonds & Rust is queered, they refer not only to the literal, but those legacies of what came before, how identities are subject to the overthrow and authority of statehood; that we cannot understand something without acknowledging that, any more than we can comprehend a language, without reference:
“that some time from now
i will stop rotely
pronouncing” (8)
The deeply feminist, poignancy of Diamonds & Rust, is lasting, effecting and intensely creative with deep activist roots and a nod to science and all the wonder of everything alive. It can be read on multiple levels, or not understood at all, for its oblique and blatant references, both referring to the times in Chilean history when people were silenced, and then during resistance, spoke out, defying such censor. The choice becomes the readers, to surrender or to lose meaning. Both are an answer of sorts.
at the center of this ocean of shadows (10).
__________
Candice Louisa Daquin is an editor and trauma-therapist. Daquin is Senior Editor with Indie Blu(e) Publishing, Editor with Raw Earth Ink and Queer Ink and editor with Life and Legends, Writers Resist and Tint Journal.
