Thanks to Orlando Ricardo Menes’ translation of My Heart Flooded with Water : Selected Poems by Alfonsina Starni, Argentine’s most important female poet, an English reader has a chance to get acquainted with some of the most original and beautiful poems written in the two decades of 1919-1938.
Storni preceded her call by a generation; a lonely voice fighting for basic freedoms and equalities that men had mostly taken for granted. It’s out of Storni’s tragic social and personal equation, out of a struggling single mother, actress and teacher facing life’s incredible odds that her pain and love emerge as art. To miss out on a testimony so beautiful, so sublime and tragic that it rivals the best of Greek tragedies is to walk by one’s own life…
Credit should be given to Orlando Ricardo Menes’ for his thoughtful selection and solid translation. He includes many important poems, such as “Injustice”, “From the Poor Outskirts”, “Ancestral Weight” and “The Word”; he brackets the volume with two breathtaking poems written at the threshold of death: “To Horacio Quiroga” (written after Alfonsina’s lover’s apparent suicide) and “I’m Going to Sleep” (a poem preceding her own demise).
As with any translation, the bilingual readers will have the best of two worlds for no matter how splendid a translation might be, it seldom approaches the original; to render one’s world in another language is often sought after but seldom achieved. To the translator’s credit, Menes made a good run and by producing a very decent work, transferred most of Storni’s sublime world into the stubborn English language.
~Leszek Chudzinski
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