Foremost among the writers whose work has showed me the most about intimacy and pace is Francisco Aragón. You cannot read a Francisco Aragón poem in a rush. As someone raised on slam, hip-hop, and the beats—you know, on a verse known to Howl—I needed a writer like Aragón to teach me how to slow down and really pay attention to a moment.
In After Rubén, Aragón braids his careful reflections with lo-fi remixes of Rubén Darío poems. I say, lo-fi, because Aragón’s English translations of Darío poems don’t try to preserve the rhyme and rhythm that make the poems magical in Spanish, but rather frequently breaks up stanzas and even lines to make you linger on each phrase. This gives the poems an intimate, relaxed lo-fi quality. Aragón’s “Symphony in Gray,” for example, begins:
Like glass
the color of mercury
it mirrors the sky’s
sheet of zinc, the pale gray
a burnish splotched
Whereas the original poem begins with the noun “el mar,” letting you know that Darío is describing the sea, here we do not get an explicit hint of the sea, until the fifth stanza, where “leaden waves crest / collapse—seeming / to groan near the docks.” In the translation, we are too close to the object to see the whole; note the short lines, really breaking each image down piece by piece. The effect is to create an almost hyper-real version of the original, which in this case compliments the intent of the original: to draw the reader through hypnotic shades of gray.
The collection generously includes the Spanish versions of Darío’s work in the back of the book, allowing word nerds to flip between the English and Spanish versions and savor the different nuances between form and diction, as well as a non-fiction essay discussing his relationship to Darío’s work. In the essay, Aragón explains how his mother and father had, despite their limited education, memorized Darío poems from their schooling in Central America, which they cherished and passed down to Aragón. This collection is Aragón’s way of preserving Darío’s work for another generation of Latinx writers and re-introducing him to the English canon. While I have known about Darío from my forays into Spanish literature, I deeply appreciate Aragón’s ability to take his dramatic, virtuosic voice and make it seem down-to-earth and plainspoken. Aragón has offered me a completely new window into his work.
Aragón’s own work doesn’t play second fiddle to Darío’s in this collection, either. Rather, Aragón carefully sets Darío up as a queer Central American elder and by the end of the collection, the relationship between them feels spiritual. Darío and Aragón strengthen one another in this collection. Whereas Aragón mines aspects of Darío’s life, line, and legend to speak to the present, he also uses his own openness about his queerness to open up this once silenced aspect of Darío’s life and work. In “Winter Hours”/”De Invierno,” Aragón transforms an image of Carolina into an image of Amado, and in “I Pursue a Shape”/”Yo Persigo Una Forma…”, Aragón transforms an image of Venus de Milo into an image of the David. Darío was closeted during his lifetime. As Aragón writes in an essay in Glow of Our Sweat, he himself was once shy about his sexual orientation, but has moved towards highlighting and being open about his queerness as a way of denouncing homophobia. These on-and-off-the-page moves on Aragón’s part are acts of inter-generational healing, creating a path for future queer artists of color to authentically present themselves to the world and define themselves on their own terms.
Lets put it another way: In my favorite poem in the collection, “Nicaragua in a Voice,” Aragón writes,
More than the poems
—the fruits that sang
their juices; dolls, feverish,
dreaming of nights,
city streets—for me it was
the idle chat between the poems:
cordial, intimate almost…
like a river’s murmur
as if a place—León,
Granada—could speak,
whistle inhabit
a timbre… as if, closing
my eyes, I had it again
once more within reach:
his voice—my father
unwell, won’t speak.
In After Rubén, Aragón finds a way to retrace many voices that were once crushed, once silenced, whether they belong to his father or one of the greatest Latin American poets in millennia. And that is a reward worth “more than the poems.”