I’m pleased to publish here my very first English translations of Spanish literature! This is a brand-new venture for me and I’m still very much a beginner. For any readers who are more fluent in Spanish than I am, please feel free to send me a line on anything that seems off.
In January 2022 I moved to the outskirts of Granada, Spain. If you know me at all it won’t surprise you that it didn’t take me long to find La Qarmita Bookstore and Café. La Qarmita is home to a lovely collection of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including a lot of new feminist work. And their events calendar is ramping back up as COVID becomes less of a threat.
It was at one of La Qarmita’s events that I heard Chloe Maria Valdivieso read from her book of verse, La Puta de Diablo (The Devil’s Whore), available on Amazon in paperback. The poems are a re-visioning of deep pain and solitary triumph in the shadows. Chloe read them in a quiet, hypnotic way that made them unforgettable. I bought the book on the spot.
Chloe’s work is in a way a book of psalms without a God, the brief entries related but distinct from each other. One of the aspects of her writing that intrigues me is its seeming simplicity, which can unexpectedly evoke the deepest feelings that are usually beyond words. She wrote much of the book as she took refuge from the pandemic on Ibiza, and the work is not mainly about her pandemic experience, but it is inevitably marked by it.
Chloe says this about herself and her writing:
Up till now I’ve stumbled through life. I have lived in several cities in Spain, I was a prostitute for seven years because I had always lived in precarity, poverty....
I suffered gender and sexual violence for a long time at the hands of my partner. And I am diagnosed with depression because of all the male violence I suffered. When I published the book, it was like revenge against everything that hurt me, not to be silent anymore, to release all the rage and pain I suffered, which I wrote about in many diary entries.
I started to become involved in feminism a few years ago. I am an abolitionist and my experience in activism, debates and assemblies made me feel safe and listened to, to talk about feminism, politics, culture, and feelings.
For more information about feminist abolitionism, read this explanation by activist Maureen Mansfield.
I’m very proud to present Chloe’s work in translation as my first. Hers is a voice that should be heard by as many people as possible. Here’s the link to Chloe’s book again. Should you live outside of Spain, do let me know and I’ll look into getting it shipped to you.
I’ll be publishing translations of several of Chloe’s poems, one by one, over the next little while.
Your mouth is like a funeral. All the time, I sense the proof of my death As well as the bleeding streets that we have survived. To write poems from a pandemic-frozen Ibiza To want not to die in crystalline waterfalls, Burned up by an internal fire. Tonight I want to swim the sea inside And quit floating in misery. Ashes of the dead in every shadow Nature confessing with every step And I hear only the screams from my guts And my lips are full of salt Kissing every healing wound. From the edge of the world I watch the endless parade of the absurd Masks of power I no longer fear you Or your blows. It took a thousand months to learn to walk again. - Written in San Josep, Ibiza
English translation of excerpt from La Puta Del Diablo by Chloe Maria Valdivieso, copyright © 2022 A. Elizabeth Brown. All rights reserved.