Toledo, Eugenia: Trazas de mapas, trazas de sangre / Map Traces, Blood Traces

Description

Translated by Carolyne Wright. Mayapple Press (paperback, 2017)

Publisher Marketing: Translated from the Spanish in a bilingual edition by Carolyne Wright. In 2008, Seattle-based poet Eugenia Toledo revisited her native Chile to reconnect with places and people from her past. With poet and translator Carolyne Wright, Toledo traveled the length of the country–from Santiago to La Serena in the North and to her native Temuco in the South; from the Valle de Elqui in the foothills of the Andes, to the Pacific coast towns of Santo Domingo and the legendary Isla Negra. Toledo and Wright gave readings and workshops, visited literary sites (Pablo Neruda’s houses in Santiago and Isla Negra; Gabriela Mistral’s homes, schools, and memorial in Vicuna and Monte Grande; Jorge Teillier’s childhood home in Lautaro, exhibitions of art and poetry by Violeta Parra; and exhibitions of poetry by Mapuche writers), and met with Chilean poets and writers in Santiago, Temuco, Valdivia, and Lautaro.

Toledo’s reconnections with family members and long-lost friends were profound and wrenching. There were fellow university students and teachers who had been exiled for years after the 1973 military coup, and others imprisoned and tortured during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. Some colleagues bore sad news of other friends killed or disappeared during the worst days of the dictatorship

Above all, the visit was a poet’s journey of return to Chile, to the land of her origins. Throughout the journey, Toledo was writing–notes, dreams, memories, and poems. “Stimulated by this visit,” Toledo wrote, “I embraced the adventure, giving structure to TRAZAS DE MAPA, TRAZAS DE SANGRE / MAP TRACES, BLOOD TRACES in a journey of thoughts, people, times, and geographies.” These “errant memories” finally meet and interact with present realities, confront and exorcize the map of the poet’s life, and interweave the events of her present with those of her past, in the locales in which those past realities took place. These poems form a “cruise of words, a train of closeness” that trace and transmit the “magic yet very real contours of the land, water, and air” of her beloved country.