Empire of Dreams
Also by Giannina Braschi:
Yo-Yo Boing!
United States of Banana
Empire of Dreams
Giannina Braschi
A new translation by Tess O’Dwyer
Text copyright © 2011 by Giannina Braschi
Translation copyright © 2011 by Amazon Content Services
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi was first published in 1988 by Editorial Anthropos in Barcelona, Spain, as El imperio de los sueños. It was first published in English by Yale University Press in 1994. New translation by Tess O’Dwyer first published in English in 2011 by AmazonCrossing.
Translated from the Spanish by Tess O’Dwyer.
Published by AmazonCrossing
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-61109-065-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011904663
Empire of Dreams
I. Assault on Time
II. Profane Comedy
Dedication and Warning
1. Book of Clowns and Buffoons
2. Poems of the World; or, The Book of Wisdom
3. Pastoral; or, The Inquisition of Memories
4. Song of Nothingness
III. The Intimate Diary of Solitude
1. Death of Poetry
The Adventures of Mariquita Samper
Life and Works of Berta Singerman
The Things That Happen to Men in New York!
The Queen of Beauty, Charm, and Coquetry
Gossip
Portrait of Giannina Braschi
Mariquita Samper’s Childhood
The Raise
Manifesto on Poetic Eggs
2. Rosaries at Dawn
The Building of the Waves of the Sea
Mariquita Samper’s Financial Statement
Requiem for Solitude
The Movement of the Waves of the Sea
About the Author
About the Translator
Translator’s Note
The only way to know precisely what an author means is to become the author. The translator becomes the author the way an actor becomes the character. Memorizing the lines in Spanish and reciting the words as if they were my own, I traded in my voice for the dramatic voices of the lyric “I” whose adventures and emotional states vary from book to book in Empire of Dreams. Swapping names, ages, nationalities, and genders, Giannina Braschi’s characters are a cast of actors playing the roles of other characters. As a translator, I tried out for every part.
In Book of Clowns and Buffoons, I played the fortune-teller who predicted the past, the magician who torched his audience, the drunkard who cried in a room full of bottles, and the little lead soldier who marched against the smoke of the city. In Pastoral; or, The Inquisition of Memories, I was Shepherd Giannina, who led a revolution in New York City. It was chaos. Cows and sheep were grazing the sidewalks as shepherds took over St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Empire State Building. I nearly lost my voice screaming through a loudspeaker, “Now we do whatever we please. Whatever we please. Whatever we damn well please!” The roles grew more complex as I made my way through The Intimate Diary of Solitude. There I played the writer Giannina Braschi, who played the writer Mariquita Samper, who played the writer Berta Singerman and an array of other characters. With red-dyed hair, surgically implanted freckles, and a gold tooth, I especially enjoyed the role of the fairy drag queen. But the most gratifying moment was when I shot the Narrator of the Latin American Boom, who kept rewriting my diary. He was such a nuisance. Always telling me what to think, what to do, what to write! Once he was out of the way, my thoughts flowed freely onto the pages. By the end of Empire of Dreams, I had lived so many lives that I no longer felt I was a character. I was all of them and, therefore, the author herself. I fancied myself annoyed that Giannina Braschi had translated Empire of Dreams into Spanish before I had the opportunity to write it in English. I thought of all my transformations. Were they in vain? I became the actor who became the character who became the author. Now what was I to become? The translator. And how was I to do it? With the respect that great literature deserves: faithfully.
Translating as close to the literal edge as the flow of the prose allowed, whenever possible I used word-for-word replacements, which rolled into rhythms of their own, inciting brilliant images and luscious sounds. More often than not, however, the poems demanded thought-to-thought correspondences, as the Spanish is proverbial and idiomatic. Because each poem builds on another, as does each book, word choice depended on a context larger than individual poems (especially when translating recurring images and phrases). As for the transliteration of Giannina’s non-words, it was simply a matter of ear. For instance, the wheel of fortune in Song of Nothingness was “chis-chassing” when it should have been “click-clacking.”
Likewise, horns were “cras-crassing” when they should have been “bee-bopping,” while dogs were “buff-buffing,” and they should have been “wuff-wuffing.” Witnessing my symbiotic relationship to her text, Giannina invited me to edit the Spanish manuscripts, which she believed she had “overcorrected.” We collaborated. She reviewed drafts of the translation to encourage “musicality and intensity,” and I reviewed drafts of the originals to rid the poems of self-censuring. Together we reinstated lines and poems and rearranged the sequence of the Spanish edition. We widened the circumference of inclusion in this translation. It contains poems that have not been published elsewhere. For the most part, our collaboration was harmonious; that is not to say that there was no contention over interpretation. Sometimes an egg is an egg is an egg. Other times, an egg is a ball is a day. I could not always distinguish one egg from another. She, of course, always could. At a poetry reading years ago, we read a selection from Poems of the World which included a mutual favorite beginning with the line “Eggs are months and days too…” I had always enjoyed its affirmation of plurality, its false logic, and its musicality. The eggs were so clearly a female symbol of creation that the slang connotation of huevos (testicles/balls) did not occur to me. When Giannina read her “Huevos,” the audience broke into laughter and applause in the middle of the reading. A woman next to me shook her head in disapproval, muttering, “!Qué sucio!” (Smut!) If I were not so curious, I would have skipped the poem to save myself some embarrassment. Instead, I read with all the confidence I could feign. Afterwards, the woman who had muttered, “!Qué sucio!” thanked me, saying, “Yours was sweeter.” Failure confirmed. Humiliated, I blamed Giannina: “Why did you let me lay eggs when they were supposed to be balls? You should have told me huevos means ‘balls.’” Annoyed, she replied, “Do you mean that your ‘eggs’ doesn’t mean my ‘balls’?” Then, in the heat of the moment, she taught me a few more slang expressions. Poner un huevo literally means “to lay an egg.” Figuratively it means “to make a mistake.” Rendering an idiom literally is just as fatal an egg as taking one too many liberties. I believe I have acted responsibly with my translator’s and poetic licenses, which have allowed me to save what must always be saved across language boundaries, sometimes at the expense of abandoning slang and puns: the spirit of the poetry, its rhythm and run. Not only does a translation have to sound like the original, it must be an original. That I learned from José Vázquez-Amaral, who introduced me to this work.
I met Amaral in the autumn of 1985 when he was professor emeritus at Rutgers University and I was an undergraduate student. He was from the Spanish Depa
rtment, and I was from the English Department. Aside from the New Brunswick campus, our common ground was a love for modernism. Amaral had introduced Ezra Pound to the Spanish-speaking world with his translations, Cantares completos (I-CXX) and El arte de la poesía. I visited the retired man of letters expecting to spend the afternoon hearing stories about Pound and Joyce. What I heard was this: “I’ve struck another world treasure.” Amaral said this as he handed me several spiral notebooks and a stack of pages torn from yellow legal pads. “After twenty-two years of [translating] The Cantos, I thought I had fulfilled my aspirations. Then I read this.” He pointed to those yellow pages. The handwriting was like none I had ever seen. “So angular, so determined. Hieroglyphics,” I thought. “Pound and Eliot brought us the twentieth century. This poet carries us into the twenty-first century,” Amaral told me. “Who is he?” I asked. He smiled. “Giannina. Giannina Braschi.” Amaral had drafted an English version of Empire of Dreams and asked me to join him in revising it. He was confident that some poems “took off and soared in draft one,” while the rest were grounded, “flapping, frustrated.” There were plenty of obstacles to overcome. As the original was a work in progress, nearly half of his drafts did not correspond to the final manuscript. Most of what did correspond were inspiring sketches of his ideas to come. In 1986, when his health was failing, he bestowed upon me Giannina’s yellow pages and his spiral notebooks. “Take over,” he told me. “Let Giannina scream, and kick, and punch, and cry. Let her laugh. She is always laughing. And know that she thinks. She is always thinking.”
I. Assault on Time
And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies.
—Shakespeare, King Lear, act 5, scene 3
Behind the word is silence. Behind what sounds is the door. There is a back and a fold hiding in everything. And what was approaching fell and stopped far away in proximity. An expression falls asleep and rises. And what was over there returns. It’s a way to put the world back in its place. And something comes back when it should remain remembering.
But if I ring the bell, water jumps and a river falls out of the water again. And the body rises and shakes. And the rock wakes and says I sing. And a hand turns into a kerchief. And twilight and wind are companions. And this twilight appears amid lightning. Outside there is a bird and a branch and a tree and that lightning. Above all, there is noon without form. And suddenly everything acquires movement. Two travelers meet and their shoes dance. And breeze and morning clash. And the seagull runs and the rabbit flies. And runs and runs, and the current ran. Behind what runs is life. Behind that silence is the door.
Hello. Since you came back late I forgot that I’d written you a line, but I remembered that the line from the book had picked up a paper you sent me so that I’d jot down a memory for the book. You’ve forgotten the commas again. No, I haven’t. They forgot to end memory with a period. I remembered memory when I could no longer write to her. But then I was afraid to insist. She hasn’t come back yet. If she doesn’t come back, I’ll have to erase page five. Memory was on the guest list. But I forgot her telephone number. Then I walked to eighth avenue of page three and suddenly met forgetfulness. I crossed the avenue on page ten and saw the horizon of page three and erased the night. Now I’m on the day of page five. Forgetfulness dropped by unannounced. I wasn’t expecting to find you on the way. I thought you would stop by on page thirty. But you’re early. I’m sitting to the left of this book. We talk.
A letter comes and visits me. Puts its legs up in the living room. Wanders about speechless. Suddenly it explodes and another shape appears. Welcome! It flees swiftly, and I see two, three, four, five, seven, five hundred letters. Suddenly I hear the word river and water runs in another river’s space. I repeat river two, three, four, five, seven, five hundred times, and cold imprisons twilight. Then this letter’s twin slope trembles. There is no return without reaching bottom. The letter is born of life. That’s where its limit began. I discover the world underneath.
Letters are not letters because they dream. Something barely traces them, like a hand. These letters are not signs of another sign. The letter’s rhythmic beat, when counting syllables, is life spelling its memories. And we stop at letters, hiding in the darkness of their syllables. And we say, I’ve lived five years in this letter. Here I forged a first syllable and a last silence. I forged enigmas and secrets too. From my letter, the way was born. And from my letter, the beginning and the current of other letters attached their syllables to the name. And I tell myself: each letter is an old memory and a silence.
No lagoon is darker or clearer or fuller of mountains or planes than the first letter of your name. I said that I was made entirely of letters, and I used to say that the horizon would turn clouds into other signs, revealing other letters. But I didn’t say that behind all those letters the horizon cuts the edge of my hand.
Everything I’m searching for is underwater. There are no flat surfaces there. I’m not searching for the oblique or what glows at night. By day I escape all insinuation, all effect and consequence. I love water, but I run away when it brings an ambiguous current. I know something about what flows, what comes, and what sometimes touches. That’s when water, turned into rock, sings. And when it reaches the mouth of the river, it knows that point is called calm. No stories or tales are told there.
I must admit that everything I see today is cloudy and round as a crystal ball. Now I feel the current advancing from never and changing into the always of your port. Port hoping to become more of a port when it plunges into my water. As if it had no other outlet than to sail through the water. And, of course, everything is a welcoming farewell.
Sit down. Think and look at me. Not at me, I’m not the one who wants to see you sitting down. Look at the truth. I don’t want to see the sea. Calm down. Give me your hand. That’s the way the sea calms down. Sleep. Now feel how the waves calm down. And tomorrow the landscape will change. Rock, water, sea. What’s the use of sitting down? Quit hinting that the gaze will close again. Rid your body of the past. Breathe. You’re sailing again, and you’re only thirty. Understand me. It’s not youth. I’m leaving. You want to go. But we stay.
Behind the word is silence, and behind that silence is forgetfulness. I didn’t understand the silence or that letter which thought that line, because I couldn’t remember the forgotten. And there, far away, the horizon. I fell silent. Silence fell and the work spoke. They spoke. I stretched out my hand. “Why didn’t you tell me I had to begin anew? Behind what sounds is the door.” And I grew sober. I raised my hand and pointed to another silence and another line. “Behind the word is silence.” I lowered my hand. And then there were doors, silences, forgetfulness, letters, lines.
I’m speaking. Speak to me. I hear you. I’m in a hurry. I need for us to make love. In a looser way. Open your arms. If you see me correct a verb, write me an accent and make me shut up. I don’t want to interrupt your quiet time. But give me a call or drop me a line. I have to ask accents their permission. Someone took my accent, wrote a comma, and left. Left me alone. Tell your word I can’t inhabit it today. It will have to be tomorrow. Listen. You have to obey the meaning of the phrase. “And what does it mean to speak?” I said to you. And I grew sober again. And you said, “Now you laugh,” without telling me you had to close your eyes when you slept. And you said, “Now sleep.” And when you called me again, I closed the door halfway. “Open up,” you said. And I shut it with a period.
The day jumped today. I’m upside down, it said to me, and I answered, help me take the ceiling down and put it in the street. Then bring the ladder over here and lay it on the floor. If this is how the world is, I said to myself, so be it. But then the phone rang, the alarm rang, the clocks all rang, and everything escaped. Even my shirt wanted to breathe. Open me, it said, and I obeyed. It’s already been two days of surprises. Yesterday I wanted to break away and I escaped. My hand was placed elsewhere. Your rebellion, you explained, is that you pick up the pieces.
Yes, everything should stay in its place.
But we have to go, we have to run. We should go back to what you warned me about. But what goes around comes around. It came round and flew. It came back in asleep and then sat down. What was asleep was shaped like a hand. Suddenly it ran to the opposite corner and escaped. Are there hands? I asked. There must have been hands if we were caught up in hellos and goodbyes. Goodbye. Pleased to meet you. But the hand came back. And everything escaped.
The day is not okay. It’s like saying that I touch the table and find it in the same place where I couldn’t find it on the day that was okay. And today is a nice day for a walk, but I’ll stay here. And it’s okay for the windows to be open so the wind comes in. And for the table to come out with me for a stroll because it wanted to learn to walk. I doubt it’ll find its way back because when we left the street wasn’t in the same place, and I think the day was annoyed with me because I told it that nothing had changed.
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