Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
Ntozake Shange, Wild Beauty:New and Selected Poems (37INK/Atria, 255 pp., 2017)
For six years Ntozake Shange couldn’t write a poem. Physically write a poem, that is. Shange explains: “In 2004, I had a stroke and forgot how to read, how to use my mouth, and how to use my hands.” After years of physical rehabilitation and speech therapy she regained enough ability to write a few poems for children’s books. Then, in 2011 she lost control of all her limbs: “I was wheelchair bound and unable to feed myself or walk…I could not write.” After six years of living in such a state, one evening she felt a poem floating around in her head. “I tried to write it but the pencil hurt my fingers and my hands slipped off the iPad. The only thing left was the computer. But my fingers had not been strong enough to press the keys. I tried anyway. And a poem came out. This was my miracle.”
A miracle, indeed. Or as she writes:
A word is a miracle
just letters that somehow wind up
clumsy fingers/ with meaning
my life was inarticulate
no one knew what I meant
I cd capture no beauty or wistful memory
a word on a blank page, though
that is triumphant
infinite illusion/ hard core fact…
And while her newest collection Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems contains fewer than a dozen of the poems written since her recovery, it is clear that her poetic gifts have not been diminished. Strident, poignant, passionate and honest, Shange gives voice to a multiplicity of Black voices directly addressing the contours of life that includes more than a modicum of pain, anguish, and anger. But there is joy and hope, too.
Shange writes in a distinctly African-American voice, highlighted by phonetic spellings, ungrammatical constructions, slang, and street-hip phrasing. What an ear she has! What an ability she has to hear what people are saying and then churn it, turn it so that poetry emerges in a series of lyrical bursts:
i sit here drinkin memories
entertain ghosts/ longin for arms
no longer warm/ too enchanted
to tend the pulse pushin me on
to go off from you/ my dead and loved ones
Shange has been a force since her 1975 choreo-poem for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf hit Broadway like a thunderbolt. Since then more than a dozen books of poetry, prose and plays have emerged. In this volume, she reprints a good number of poems from her earlier collections including several from for colored girls. Often, the result of such an extended selected body of work results in a feeling of shapelessness. But Wild Beauty is formed, whole. While it’s obvious that her selections were made with care, it is also the case that there has been a consistency in her expression for more than 40 years.
But she has also done something quite different in this book: it is bilingual in facing English and Spanish pages. It was Shange’s desire to have the book appear in two languages as she wanted to speak to and for the African diaspora throughout the Americas. It was a brilliant decision.
The translations by the Puerto Rican poet Alejandro Álvarez Nieves are marvelous. Capturing Shange’s African-American English in Caribbean Spanish was a formidable task but Álvarez Nieves was clearly up for the challenge. He made a number of exceedingly wise translation choices. First, he decided that there was no reason in Spanish to follow Shange’s extensive phonetic spellings as words are generally written in Spanish the way they sound to the ear. But he did successfully recreate a few hallmarks of Shange’s informal spelling in which she compresses the –ing ending of many words into –in’. To reflect this stylistic device and also not violate the Spanish ear, he chose to shorten words ending in Spanish in –ado, -ada and –dad to –á, ao, or –dá. Nada (nothing) and para (for) become ná and pa. Forms of todo, todos, toda, todas are modified to tó, tós, toa, toas. These not only echo Shange’s terminal changes but are also common pronunciations in the Caribbean.
Álvarez Nieves also manages to recreate quite convincingly Shange’s metric and rhythms through astute phrasing. He also captures the emotional drive and distinct tones present in every poem. The result is a double collection of fierce, brave, tender and moving poems in two languages.
For six years Ntozake Shange couldn’t write a poem. Physically write a poem, that is. Shange explains: “In 2004, I had a stroke and forgot how to read, how to use my mouth, and how to use my hands.” After years of physical rehabilitation and speech therapy she regained enough ability to write a few poems for children’s books. Then, in 2011 she lost control of all her limbs: “I was wheelchair bound and unable to feed myself or walk…I could not write.” After six years of living in such a state, one evening she felt a poem floating around in her head. “I tried to write it but the pencil hurt my fingers and my hands slipped off the iPad. The only thing left was the computer. But my fingers had not been strong enough to press the keys. I tried anyway. And a poem came out. This was my miracle.”
A miracle, indeed. Or as she writes:
A word is a miracle
just letters that somehow wind up
clumsy fingers/ with meaning
my life was inarticulate
no one knew what I meant
I cd capture no beauty or wistful memory
a word on a blank page, though
that is triumphant
infinite illusion/ hard core fact…
And while her newest collection Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems contains fewer than a dozen of the poems written since her recovery, it is clear that her poetic gifts have not been diminished. Strident, poignant, passionate and honest, Shange gives voice to a multiplicity of Black voices directly addressing the contours of life that includes more than a modicum of pain, anguish, and anger. But there is joy and hope, too.
Shange writes in a distinctly African-American voice, highlighted by phonetic spellings, ungrammatical constructions, slang, and street-hip phrasing. What an ear she has! What an ability she has to hear what people are saying and then churn it, turn it so that poetry emerges in a series of lyrical bursts:
i sit here drinkin memories
entertain ghosts/ longin for arms
no longer warm/ too enchanted
to tend the pulse pushin me on
to go off from you/ my dead and loved ones
Shange has been a force since her 1975 choreo-poem for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf hit Broadway like a thunderbolt. Since then more than a dozen books of poetry, prose and plays have emerged. In this volume, she reprints a good number of poems from her earlier collections including several from for colored girls. Often, the result of such an extended selected body of work results in a feeling of shapelessness. But Wild Beauty is formed, whole. While it’s obvious that her selections were made with care, it is also the case that there has been a consistency in her expression for more than 40 years.
But she has also done something quite different in this book: it is bilingual in facing English and Spanish pages. It was Shange’s desire to have the book appear in two languages as she wanted to speak to and for the African diaspora throughout the Americas. It was a brilliant decision.
The translations by the Puerto Rican poet Alejandro Álvarez Nieves are marvelous. Capturing Shange’s African-American English in Caribbean Spanish was a formidable task but Álvarez Nieves was clearly up for the challenge. He made a number of exceedingly wise translation choices. First, he decided that there was no reason in Spanish to follow Shange’s extensive phonetic spellings as words are generally written in Spanish the way they sound to the ear. But he did successfully recreate a few hallmarks of Shange’s informal spelling in which she compresses the –ing ending of many words into –in’. To reflect this stylistic device and also not violate the Spanish ear, he chose to shorten words ending in Spanish in –ado, -ada and –dad to –á, ao, or –dá. Nada (nothing) and para (for) become ná and pa. Forms of todo, todos, toda, todas are modified to tó, tós, toa, toas. These not only echo Shange’s terminal changes but are also common pronunciations in the Caribbean.
Álvarez Nieves also manages to recreate quite convincingly Shange’s metric and rhythms through astute phrasing. He also captures the emotional drive and distinct tones present in every poem. The result is a double collection of fierce, brave, tender and moving poems in two languages.