Music Notebook by Mariela Dreyfus translated by Gabriel Amor | Cardboard House Press | November 2023 | ISBN: 978-1-945720-30-7
One of my favorite lines from Peruvian poeta Mariela Dreyfus’s bilingual Music Notebook—the author’s first book published in English in the United States—is a deceptively straightforward metaphor:
The past is a white well against a white background.
Taken from “Rosemary and Bougainvillea,” a lengthier poem that documents the speaker’s mental health struggles as a young person (“I am 17 years old and I am locked up in a sanitarium”), the English translation above loses the soothing, long “o” sounds from the Spanish original (“El ayer es un pozo blanco sobre un fondo blanco”), but retains the striking simplicity of that monochrome image: a human-made excavation vital for survival juxtaposed against a blanked-out backdrop. It’s elliptical, rather than explicit; it points to the rich potential of memory and history, but withholds any detail to make tangible whatever lurks beneath the surface, deep within the well of the past. It’s a startlingly direct way to paint the trauma of institutionalization: white as the sanitarium’s walls, white as nightgowns, a whiteness that washes out everything around it.
Besides its potency as a stand-alone metaphor, the image’s blanched brickwork contrasts against other poems in the book, which spin through every color of the rainbow like pinwheels, as evidenced by the explosive hues of “A Wheel, A Color, A Step”:
only at dusk does the horizon
draw back its shades like
veils and I can see we can
see the children a radiant red
amid the sky the sierra rose
and yellows the extinguished rays
and the still green line dividing
the dry ichu grass from my humid desire
to create peals of laughter the garden
or home from my childhood where i play
pretending to be a snake charmer or
word charmer electric traveler captain
of ships made of lights and stars
These running, proselike lines are emblematic of most poems in Music Notebook, in which Dreyfus breathlessly deploys clause after clause cleansed of internal punctuation (the only commas in the book belong to titles and epigraphs). The resultant, seamless sequence blurs time and space: the children at dusk become the speaker’s home from childhood becomes an intergalactic craft. The effect is a bewildering whirlwind that blends memory and sensory experience, one that threatens to exasperate readers in need of a breather. But it also rewards anyone willing to dive more deeply into the allusions and references Dreyfus embeds into her text.
As one example, “A Wheel, A Color, A Step” bears a dedication to Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1905-1936), a Peruvian poet known for his radical leftist ideology, avant-garde poetics, and the publication of one wildly inventive collection, 5 Metros de Poemas, the pages of which physically unfold like an accordion. Indeed, throughout Music Notebook, Dreyfus demonstrates a deep engagement with poets and writers from her home country, such as Juan Parra del Riego (1894-1925), César Moro (1903-1956), and Roger Santiváñez (b. 1956), all of whom receive shout-outs in Music Notebook, but the lattermost played an especially important role in shaping Dreyfus’s aesthetic trajectory. In late summer of 1982, Santiváñez and Dreyfus founded El Movimiento Kloaka, an artists’ collective that defined the Limeño cultural underground of the 1980s.
The most obvious nod to this history appears in an opening quote that introduces Dreyfus’s book and identifies the origin of her title: “This is my music notebook.” Santiváñez includes the same language as a dedication to his chapbook, Symbol (1991), the lyrics of which are characterized as “opaque, intensely hermetic, reconcentrated on itself, extreme, uninhabitable” by Germán Labrador Méndez in “The language of the Kloaka” (trans. Judah Rubin). If the same can be said of Music Notebook, it’s also true that Dreyfus tempers the cloistered hermeticism by offering fleeting glimpses into the speaker’s halting, reluctant vulnerability, as is the case with the stunning, packed stanza that closes an untitled poem that begins, “This is the malaise”:
and so in what language should i babble my love
when evening falls and any moment now
the nurse who inhabits my poems will arrive or
perhaps a fireman in red or a policeman in blue
a woman in a green dress with a long steel-tipped
needle that will wake you or put you to sleep
because my embrace has not been enough and in truth
i would tear my fingers from the keyboard i would renounce
this vocation of wordsmithing with my body to give
you another body before the screen’s light goes out
and night falls.
Characters and their corresponding color codes populate the poem, until Dreyfus interjects an abrupt turn with the poignant interruption of, “in truth.” In a generous note, translator Amor explains how reading poems aloud with Dreyfus informed his own artistic choices when rendering the poet’s work into English, such as his decision to use “wordsmithing,” a term that “does not exist in Spanish, in lieu of, say, “this craft of building words” (este oficio de construir palabras).” Amor goes on to say that it was actually that source poem that “compelled [him] to translate Cuaderno músico when [he] first heard Mariela read it at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center in 2014.” Surely, the publication of Music Notebook marks the trailhead of new paths into 20th and 21st century Peruvian poetry for U.S. readers. With luck, sooner than later we’ll see more of Dreyfus’s existing poetry titles translated into English for US-based readers.
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.