A Whale Is A Country by Isabel Zapata trans. Robin Myers | March 12, 2024 | Fonograf Editions
Pages 132 | ISBN: 9798987589007 | $17.95
Mexican writer, translator, and editor Isabel Zapata’s genre-blending collection of poems, A Whale Is A Country, upends anthropocentric imaginings of life on Earth by combining prose, photographs, and lineated verse. By doing so, Zapata challenges boundaries between “the role we think we play on this planet and the role that climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction demand we take up,” as she says in the prologue to A Whale Is A Country.
Upon reading Zapata’s book, I was reminded immediately of Animals Strike Curious Poses, a book of essays by Elena Passarello. In the latter, Pasarello creates a wide-ranging bestiary that documents the lives of individual animals across history, from a mammoth locked in ice for 40,000 years to Cecil the lion, murdered by an American dentist in 2015. Like Passarello, Zapata seeks to question “our bonds with animals and the beliefs that uphold them.” Unlike Passarello’s strictly essayistic approach, Zapata combines elements of fiction, verse, and non-fiction prose into her collection. The result is a dazzling enactment of extrospection on a global scale.
Echoing Pasarello, Zapata memorializes distinct creatures in a series of poems composed of attentive and compassionate lyrics. These include a remembrance of the first rhinoceros to visit Europe since the days of the Roman Empire, depicted in a 1515 woodcut by German artist Albrecht Dürer, which Zapata describes as “a gray knight sheathed in overlapping plates and hammered scales or warts / a giant with a saddle and an extra horn on its back, just in case.” Another entry in this series reintroduces readers of Koko the gorilla, a kindly primate whose complicated legacy of sign language acquisition is defined as much by Koko’s surprising acts of linguistic creativity (“In Koko’s view, a zebra is a “white tiger”), as it is by amusing reminders of animal nature: “Koko regularly washes herself with a sponge she then attempts to eat.”
Other poems in this series are more somber. “Phantom Limb” commemorates Benjamin, the last thylacine, a marsupial gone extinct in the 20th century, described poetically as “a zebra-wolf, / a dingo with an oversized head, / a demon, a hyena with lion claws.” “For Laika,” elegizes a stray mongrel dog captured by Soviet authorities and launched into space on a suicide mission. Zapata’s poetic treatment captures the casual cold war cruelty that saw an innocent animal abandoned to orbit, alone, overheated, and afraid: “Never before had a sarcophagus traveled so intrepidly through space.”
While the aforementioned poems highlight unique instances of zoological brilliance and exploitation, A Whale Is A Country is most powerful when Zapata zooms out to juxtapose the unexpectedly parallel plights of humans and animals. “In Puget Sound” twists together the tragic story of Richard Russell, an airport employee who stole and crashed an aircraft while looking for a grieving whale mother that had been brought to national attention in the news media. The poem concludes with haunting finality:
Since anything can happen in a poem,
let’s imagine that Russell saw,
from the peak of his pirouette,
the body of the mother orca with her child,
a two-toned beam flashing across the ocean.
And that, before their paths divided,
they formed, together, three glints of light and shadow
moving on at last,
as we all move,
unknowingly, at every moment,
toward our destruction.
But Zapata is no pessimist. As in death, animals and humans are bound in life. In “Luciferin,” Zapata’s teenage speaker considers several instantiations of bioluminescence:
Constellations of fungi grow in Japanese forests.
Some snails become green light bulbs to scare off their enemies.
There is a kind of shrimp that vomits dazzling chemicals.
At one point, the speaker and her friends dive into the ocean and find themselves surrounded by
dinoflagellates, whip-whirling fire plants (from their phylum, “Pyrrhophyta”) that illuminate the sea at night:
All of a sudden, it was Christmas in the ocean, and we
were five small bulbs smearing our bodies with nocturnal light.
Bright Jell-O floating in a brilliant jumble.
It’s such a life-affirming moment: a group of teens poised on the precipice of impending adulthood, surrounded by vibrant, almost alien lifeforms. It’s one of the most memorable moments in A Whale Is A Country, one that animates a careful optimism for the planet’s future.
The entirety of Zapata’s book is brought to vivid life by Robin Myers’ adept adaptation into English. On rare occasion, Myers’ translation sacrifices the concise economy of Spanish (“A los doce días, uno revivió”) for pedestrian, prosaic English: “And twelve days later, one came back to life.” But more often, the English produces more acoustically pleasing results, as when a line about an undying tardigrade (“que un oso de agua sea indestructible”) trades in the clunky terminal pentasyllable for plosive alliteration: “that a water bear would be unbreakable.” Indeed, Myers perfectly transforms so many of Zapata’s otherwise inimitable phrasings. A favorite of mine, “worms are rendered earth by earth” (“a las lombrices la tierra se les vuelve tierra”), encapsulates perfectly the planetary scope of Zapata’s poetic vision, while keeping an eye on the most minuscule subterranean minutiae.
Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (UAPress, 2024). Poems and book reviews have appeared online and in print, most recently at Freeman's, The Georgia Review, and Booklist. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.