Book Review

Animal Fiero y Tierno (Fierce and Tender Animal), Ángela María Dávila Malavé’s first solo book of poetry, is twice dedicated. First is to the poet herself and asks: “‘aren’t you the loving one, who slowly seeks among the beasts the source of her lineage?’” (“‘no eres tú la amorosa que busca entre las bestias la fuente de su estirpe?’”). Second is to women important to Dávila Malavé: “for my grandmother, the foundress of tenderness; for my mother, inexhaustible lifesource” (“a mi abuela, la fundadora de la ternura; a mi madre, fuente de vida inagotable”). The dual dedications prove both illuminating and central to understanding Fierce and Tender Animal, recently translated into English by Puerto Rican poet Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. Dávila Malavé’s search is for lineage, big and small, and through her poems she explores and subverts this search by rooting it in family, place, body, identity (Boricua, pa’que tú lo sepas), and little tendernesses. The result is a swelling proclamation of intimacy and care that knows well the importance of community, of collectivity, of one’s foundresses.

Divided into four regions, the collection’s primera región considers a collective “history bruised” (“historia amoratada”). Again, the big and small are of concern here—the pinky, the toe, a broken doll. But the “grand megaeye like a turbid moon” (“un ojazo como de luna turbia”) looms large, “footnot[ing] all the dusks” (“anot[ando] al calce de todos los crepúsculos”). By attributing equal deference to both—the little and the cosmic—Dávila Malavé begins to construct a lineage comprised of the personal and the historical. Furthering this, Dávila Malavé writes later in this first region of the knowledge of “the center of [her] wise womb, / simple and profound, / like all the centered centers of the world” (“del centro de [su] vientre sabio, / simple y profundo / como todos los centros encentrados del mundo”). Here, Dávila Malavé coalesces the little and the cosmic, creating just one thing, just one centered center that is no longer concerned with bigness, but with depth. It’s on this note of coalescence that we propel forward.

My favorite poem of the collection lives in the second region. It’s something of an ode to Dávila Malavé’s mother and includes yet another dedication: “for my mother’s presence: if she had suspected this poem she would have shared my sadness” (“a la presencia de mi madre: si hubiera sospechado este poema hubiera compartido mi tristeza”). Dávila Malavé writes:

i trip on your absence

on street corners,

in some songs,

in spoons that sometimes go all bitter

tropiezo con tu ausencia

en las equinas de las calles,

en algunas canciones,

en las cucharas que a veces se me amargan

Still, this is the centered center of Dávila Malavé’s lineage. The beating quotidian, to Dávila Malavé, is where life exists and so it follows that it is, too, where loss is felt most keenly, on street corners and in spoons, in pinkies and toes. This is the big made little, the personal made cosmic. The third and fourth regions follow a similar rhythm as Dávila Malavé continues to consider her central questions of lineage, to the “alternating knives and doves” (“alternando cuchillos y palomas”). She writes of “the daily deaths” (“las muertes cotidianas”) and “the fear and the wonder of finding ourselves” (“el susto y el asombro de encontrarnos”). These things are not separate or dual or in contention—they exist together and, as Dávila Malavé convinces us throughout the collection, wonderfully comprise our lives.

Of particular enjoyment is the preservation of the graphics and drawings from the collection’s original publication (Editorial QueAce, 1977) into Salas Rivera’s translation. The collection begins with a full page image, a sprawling and spinning thing—there is something to me, as a Floridan, reminiscent of a floating body of kelp—entitled “A Blue Sun” (“Un Sol Azul”). It’s worth a good stare and ponder, as are the figures of bodies (twins, perhaps?) that break up segunda región and seem to slowly raise their hands in a dual joy and recognition of the other [“of many solitudes is a compaña founded” / (“es de muchas soledades que se funda la compaña”)]. Each poem begins with a little floral flourish even if only a few are given individual names. This, too, is a nod to what a careful collection Animal Fiero y Tierno is—everything is pursuit of “solitude exact and diluted” (“la soledad exacta y diluida”). The last of the translation’s gifts is the inclusion of images of unpublished drafts, poems excluded from the final original collection, and photos of Ángela María Dávila Malavé provided by her family.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s is the first English translation of Fierce and Tender Animal as well as the first book from the Puerto Rican Literature in Translation collection from The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) Press. It’s a blessing, truly, to come again to know Dávila Malavé’s poetry through Salas Rivera’s thoughtful translation and to bring to the English language one of Puerto Rico’s most important poets, foundress herself of many good and tender and important things.