The Complex Simplicity of Translation

Sketched by trans feminist scholar Emma Heaney as “the great modern poet of fidelity and treason,” Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a poet, activist, scholar, and translator from Borikén—or what is colonially known as the unincorporated American Empire territory of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The poetry of Dr Roque, in the words of Isabel C Gómez in Translating Home in the Global South (2024), speaks of “climate change as written into the body, alongside the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and gender conformity.”

In this interview, I conversed with Dr Roque on his own body of work as a transdecolonial poet and critic; his reclaiming of the buchipluma as a culture-specific gendered identity; and the ecological geopolitics involved in his self-translations across languages (Spanish and English) and landscapes (Philadelphia and Puerto Rico).

— Alton Melvar M Dapanas, July 2024

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Alton Melvar M Dapanas: The neologism buchipluma, in Puerto Rican Spanish, connotes negative markers: untrustworthy, flaky, irrelevant, exaggerating, even included in a diccionario de insultos. But in a prior interview, you confessed to identifying as a buchipluma—a coinage that for you takes on a new meaning as a nonbinary feathered butch. Is this your way of recovering not only the said word but also language and how language names genders? And how does buchipluma differ from the Anglo-American ontologies of gender identities and expression? 

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera: We have many terms for betrayals of varying scale in the Puerto Rican dialect of Spanish. Without implying language is a direct product of culture, I think it’s safe to say we have a long history of betrayals because colonialism has been such a constant in Puerto Rican history that it works insidiously, through spies, agents, two-faced politicians, battles for authenticity, protectionist politics that sometimes betray what they aim to protect, all the dirty, messy complexities of surviving in a colony.  I love “pichear” because it is a small betrayal, when you pretend you didn’t hear something or when you intentionally ignore the bait. “Buchipluma” happens when someone “pichea” enough that it’s chronic. I also love this about us: that we understand that a quantitative difference can become qualitative and that someone who does something over and over has become addicted to flight. 

Buchipluma was used more by my grandmother and my mother’s generations, but it always felt generative. Someone is untrustworthy because you know you can’t count on them, they are buchipluma. My gender itself has always felt like that to me. The minute I think it is solid, it melts into air or shapeshifts. I wanted to flip and reclaim the space of indecision as one that shouldn’t always be rejected. Sometimes, in response to the imperative to perform a legible gender, a person refuses to become a fixed form, refuses to be named. There can be a beauty to that that gets subsumed under the notion of betrayal.

I also use it in contexts where trans people are often treated as treasonous. We betray our assigned genders, we betray our culture, we betray our obligations to the great Puerto Rican family, and yet we have always been here, so who is betraying whom? I like the idea that we are tricksters, even if is initially something we have been assigned against our will, because one has to be a trickster to survive colonialism. My poetics is rooted in this last notion, in its varying iterations: the trickster, el pícaro, clowning…

Someone is untrustworthy because you know you can’t count on them, they are buchipluma. My gender itself has always felt like that to me. The minute I think it is solid, it melts into air or shapeshifts. I wanted to flip and reclaim the space of indecision as one that shouldn’t always be rejected.

Being trans is not a monolith. My gender is not separate from the ways it came to exist for me in Puerto Rico and as a Puerto Rican in Philadelphia. It’s hard to articulate concisely, but my sense of my gender differs from Anglo-American gender identities and expressions. The epic trans poem I just finished writing, Algarabía, is the closest I have come to being able to describe the shiftiness of gender in my life.

I also think my work across time, if read carefully, is a mapping of my transition, which is wild! I love that I can look back at where I was with regards to my gender and see it shimmering as both becoming and being.

Dapanas: You have rendered the poems of Sotero Rivera Avilés, Irizelma Robles, and Ada Limon across Spanish and English. But most of your works of translation come from your own oeuvre, using the knot metaphor in limning your process. On self-translation, you penned: “Translating my own poetry has been a way of healing my relationship with a bilingual self who struggled intensely to learn standardized dialects of both languages.” More liberty to reinvent and revise aside, what sets apart the praxis of self-translation from translating text written by others? And where does untranslation or (k)not-translation (the refusal to translate) come in? 

Salas Rivera: I revisit this question constantly because they are different practices, but I was enacting them before I theorized them. The thing with translating oneself is that you have total clarity about what you are willing to bend, how much, and where you can make up for it, but when translating another poet, there is no way to know any of that because even if the poet is alive, even if they have a sense of these things, they can’t always articulate them. Some poets are incredible, but can’t explain their choices, which is understandable but makes translating them harder. 

I think this is the main difference. Since I can’t know exactly how much a poet was willing to change, my translations of others are more conservative, and I stick closer to the script. I’d rather be overly cautious than disrespectful. My self-translations, on the other hand, feel more like completely different texts at times. They are linked, but freer, more playful. There is more metatranslation work. I poke fun at translation. I make decisions and don’t always care to explain or justify them.

When I self-translate, if I am honest, is when I feel most whole as a person and a poet. I honor my complex history as both diasporic and embedded in the archipelago. Many Puerto Ricans here only speak Spanish, so I am not claiming this is anything but my particular history, though I am certainly not the only Puerto Rican who has to navigate both languages. English was imposed in Puerto Rico, unsuccessfully. Violent linguist assimilation into English was imposed in the U.S., often successfully, but even so, in the diaspora we made English ours, different, like the tricksters we are.

My self-translations, on the other hand, feel more like completely different texts at times. They are linked, but freer, more playful. There is more metatranslation work. I poke fun at translation. I make decisions and don’t always care to explain or justify them.

I don’t think translation should only be about access, though I think a translation can be a necessary bridge, especially for Puerto Ricans for whom Spanish is more difficult. Still, translation should not be a form of tourism. There is a very U.S.-based obsession with everything being commodifiable and simplified, and an avoidance of obscurity that runs counter to Glissant’s notion of opacity. I believe the simplest thing has complexity, and the most complex of things has a certain simplicity. Language works on many levels. Sometimes it forms knots, other times it is smooth and flat as sanded wood. 

Dapanas: In Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Restless Dead: Necrowriting & Disappropriation (trans. Robin Myers, 2020), you have been named along with Vanessa Angélica Villareal as writers “whose bilingual energy and scope places them in far closer proximity to ongoing deliberations throughout Latin America.” You once disclosed that the act of reading poems only in Spanish during live poetry readings, especially among non-Hispanophone audiences, is a political act. Could you speak further about the racist and classist structures that are built-in within the urban middle-class and white-dominated publishing of Anglophone North America? 

Salas Rivera: There are so many! In Puerto Rico, for example, all presses are independent. We have created literature in our language, our Spanish, despite having few resources and despite colonialism. I like Rivera Garza’s comparison, although I should note the only thing that makes my work have any weight in the U.S. relates directly to our colonial status. I made a conscious intervention in U.S. poetry. It was planned and executed. Whether or not it always worked is another question, but I knew what I was doing when I began to translate myself. My home is Puerto Rico and I write Puerto Rican poetry, so Latin America isn’t something I’m proximate to, but rather Latin America and the Caribbean are my home. Puerto Rico often doesn’t get counted as Latin America because colonial narratives, including Latin American colonial narratives, play into the notion that we are “part” of the U.S., but we are no more “part” of the U.S. than we were “part” of Spain. We are Puerto Rico. We have our own thing.

Puerto Rico has its own urban, white, middle-class, and very specific set of problems, but all of these are worlds away from the U.S., despite constant colonial intervention. It is difficult to explain how colonialism is in every single thing we experience, and yet so much of our existence has resisted that very colonialism and survived despite it.

Dapanas: Given all that, how can we work towards an anti-imperialist and decolonial publishing industry particularly in poetry and literary translation? 

Salas Rivera: Ufff. Well, I think the United States owes its colonies reparations. It doesn’t owe us freedom because freedom isn’t owed. We have a right to freedom. In a practical sense, presses, institutions and funders should remove all English-only requirements, give decisional power to Puerto Ricans, listen instead of control, give funding without restrictions, and sometimes just shut up. I also have no illusions this will happen because it would mean radically changing how they have done things for a very long time, so my attitude is to remember that we are in a colonial power relationship that is unequal and to remember that reform is only strategic and not an end goal. 

It is my experience that most literary organizations in the United States know nothing about Puerto Rican literature, act in ways that are wildly disrespectful and predatory, don’t care about our country or our language and are blissful in not knowing anything outside the U.S. 

I believe the simplest thing has complexity, and the most complex of things has a certain simplicity. Language works on many levels. Sometimes it forms knots, other times it is smooth and flat as sanded wood.

I remember an issue I was invited to take part in after María (did they care before or were they just swooping in to take advantage of our trauma?). After I sent my work in, I found out they were not going to publish my poem in Spanish (my language) because supposedly there was no room to print it. The editors unilaterally chose to erase my poem in my language because they assumed an English-only readership. I questioned their decision and discovered there was no room for change. I withdrew my work and received an apology from one of the editors, but remember running into the person who made the executive decision years later and being confronted with hostility. ¡El colmo! Not only did they disrespect my people, my language, and our literature, but they felt offended when I spoke out. This is linguistic colonialism. Just publish us in the language we speak and write in. Listen to our needs. This is the kind of constant violence we have had to deal with. A colonial violence. In the last few years I have lost all interest in propriety. My position is: change your practices and policies.

Meanwhile, as I am answering this the electricity has gone out for the third? fourth? time this week because the Junta imposed power company LUMA does not work. When it goes out and comes back like that it damages equipment. I’ve lost a refrigerator, a washing machine, more than one computer, countless poems and documents, and other equipment. I am lucky. The blackouts have led to deaths in many cases, but where are the special issues? I suppose our trauma is of no interest if it can’t be cleanly linked to liberal hatred of a Republican candidate. Meanwhile, in the colony, we live with rising living costs, are being displaced by settler colonialists, can’t find housing, all thanks to a colonial law passed and approved by both parties.

Most, but certainly not all presses, magazines, and institutions have been like this. I make an effort to work with people who are different in their approach, are willing to listen, and in turn have taught me a great deal which has been useful to my own practice. All this to say, there are things that can be unlearned, but that takes work a lot of people are unwilling to do.

Dapanas: Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué alludes to your poetry as one of his influences in writing his 2022 poetry collection Madness. In Cruel Fiction (2018), Wendy Trevino wrote a poem “Trampa De Dedos / Finger Trap” which was an homage to you: “forget / this is another becoming / you turn in.” 

Salas Rivera: Community is always a complicated term because I think of communities often as I think of political movements. There are communities that have existed and resisted for a long time and others that are of the moment. Right now, I feel in community with all the people fighting for a free Palestine. I feel in community with other trans people whose vision is collective freedom. I feel in community with many poets, especially here, and with those who chose generosity and solidarity over selfishness. My communities are very imperfect. There are communities I participate in inconsistently. I love Puerto Rico, but many cis Puerto Ricans hate trans people, not because they are Puerto Rican, but because they are cis and are blaming us for everything that is happening instead of seeing the ways in which we are all being affected. I have had to heal my heartbreak from witnessing my own dehumanization en mi tierra. Community is complicated, but I still believe it is the only way forward.

This is linguistic colonialism. Just publish us in the language we speak and write in. Listen to our needs. This is the kind of constant violence we have had to deal with. A colonial violence. In the last few years I have lost all interest in propriety. My position is: change your practices and policies.

Dapanas: Scholars have catalogued you with other writers like Ana Lydia Vega, Vanessa Angélica Villareal, Rosario Ferré, Ana-Maurine Lara, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Elicura Chihuailaf, Rolando Hinojosa, Rafael Acevedo, and Carina del Valle Schorske. Still others name you with Daniel Alarcón and Valeria Luiselli—writers rewriting bilingualism itself. Canonically, in The Routledge Handbook of Latinx Life Writing (2024), you’re lined up with Oliver Baez Bendorf, micha cardenas, and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza as trans Latinx writers “expressing their lives in an open and unrestrained way.” Some critics would portray your translation practice as ‘cuir (queer) eco-translation’ and your poetry as ‘transdecolonial’—or quoting Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel in the radical trans anthology We Want It All (2020), the enmeshing of “ecological and anti-capitalist poetics, keenly attuned to the uneven simultaneity of environmental crisis.” What do you think about these labels of canon-making that come with the critical attention towards your poetry?

Salas Rivera: To be fair all of those particular labels are interesting and sound about right to me. Others, I don’t like as much. I like reading I am living in an unrestrained way, even if it feels restrained in many ways. For example, I feel very restrained when I try to find a bathroom in an airport or when I have to go to the women’s or men’s bathrooms and deal with stares and aggression. Still, it is true, I defend my poetry as a place for freedom rehearsal, a place where I can say the things I don’t say in that restroom. I know that isn’t enough, but it is empowering. I studied comparative literature, so I don’t dislike theorization. It can be generative and help one rethink the work. Others often see things in my writing I don’t.

If I am fully honest, I never thought that many people would read me. In the past six years my work has received so much attention and at first I didn’t know what to do with that. Many times I hated it. I resented it. My work would be read out of context, as if I wasn’t in dialogue with a tradition in Puerto Rico. 

I also loved it. I’m a poet. I want my poetry to be read. It’s one of the few things I have ever felt that strongly about. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as strongly about anything as I do about poetry. Now, I’m just really grateful, especially when younger trans people reach out and say my work has been important to them.

Dapanas: When we speak of the scholarship surrounding Boricua/Puerto Rican Literature, who are the Global Majority, Latinx, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican scholars, writers, artists, and thinkers whose works shaped your philosophy, creative-critical writings, and ethos? In what ways have they been influential to you?

Salas Rivera: I always struggle with these questions because there are many and lists always seem like an impossible task. I will mention a few who come to mind immediately: Villano Antillano (musician), José Esteban Muñoz (theorist), Ángela María Dávila (poet), Samuel Delany (science fiction writer and thinker), Manuel Ramos Otero (writer), Yolanda Rivera Castillo (poet, linguist, and my mother), Frantz Fanon (thinker and freedom fighter), César Vallejo (poet)… Each of these writers and thinkers has been foundational in some way to my work. Villana has expanded what is possible for trans people and artists in Puerto Rico. Muñoz showed me what critical work on queerness could do and gave me “disidentification,” a concept that changed my own thinking. Dávila taught me how to write poetry, how simplicity could be complex, and how a book is a world. Delany helped give me critical framing for understanding writing, queerness, class, and race, and he is just an extraordinary thinker. Ramos Otero, as both a writer and an icon, showed me the possibilities and limitations of being a queer Puerto Rican, the expansiveness and limitations of literature. My mother has guided me through life, poetry, and politics since I was very young. Fanon gave me a language for understanding how colonization operates. Vallejo remains one of the most important poets. He has taught many of us how to write.

I defend my poetry as a place for freedom rehearsal, a place where I can say the things I don’t say in that restroom. I know that isn’t enough, but it is empowering.

Dapanas: What’s the literary scene in Borikén/Puerto Rico these days like? Are there queer, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and trans Boricua poets and writers, modern or from antiquity, whom you wish to be read more globally or even translated further?

Salas Rivera: Ahh, that is the question! Trans poets have historically being excluded from Puerto Rican literature and literary circles. There is a growing number of trans poets who are reading, sharing, and trying to publish their work, but very few trans run presses. I only know of Editorial Casa Cuna and a DIY press run by üatibirí. There is a recent anthology of trans poets I co-edited, La piel del arrecife (La Impresora, 2023).

We mostly need support to publish our work on our terms, without cisgender writers imposing their ideas of what poetry should be. We need consistent mentorship and resources. Some of the poets I think are doing the most interesting work are Alex Sastre-Rivera, Alejandra Rosa, üatibirí, liev, fransuá, Ketsia Ramos, Jean Alberto Rodríguez-Torres, María José (AV María), K. Daniel Díaz, and Myr Olivares.

Dapanas: If you were to teach a course on contemporary Boricua literature, what books and works would you wish to include as key texts? At the risk of handing a syllabus on a silver platter at the expense of your academic/creative labour, can you name some writers that you would be inclined to incorporating to this imaginary syllabus?

Salas Rivera: It isn’t so imaginary! I often teach literature courses and center Puerto Rico poets. I’ll include some names I’ve already taught or plan to teach this year: 

Xavier Valcárcel, El deber del pan (La Impresora, 2014)
Hakeem Torres, Días en la Tierra (Pulpo, 2024)
Oliver Baez Bendorf, Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024)
Willie Perdomo, The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Random House, 2019)
Nicole Delgado, Periodo Especial (La Impresora y Ediciones Aguadulce, 2019)
José Raúl “Gallego” González, Dulce Santurce y Holy Puerta de Tierra (Self-published, 2021)
Vanessa Droz, Animal Mirado (Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2024)
Efe Rosario, También mueren los lugares donde fuimos felices (Pulpo, 2022)
Mara Pastor, Trans. María José Giménez, Deuda Natal (University of Arizona Press, 2021)
Sabrina Ramos Ruben, Charco hondo (Ediciones Alayubia, 2018)
Rubén Ramos Colón, Wéilsong (La Impresora, 2013)
Francisco Félix, Esta isla (Ediciones Alayubia, 2019)
Roberto Net Carlo, Loop (LaCriba, 2021)
Hermes Ayala, Despojo (Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol), 2021 (poetry album)
Gamelyn F. Oduardo Sierra, La hipoteca (La Impresora, 2019)
Angel Díaz, Escala Richter (Silla Vacía Editorial, 2024)

There are many more, but these are a few. You can also check out this reading, which I think of as a personal anthology: El bello no ser de nuestros cuerpos/Our Bodies’ Beautiful Not Being: a Reading. 

Dapanas: You have forthcoming projects: a collaboration with the Ecuadorian press Recodo.sx which is an homage to Boricua syncretism, and a new book from Graywolf Press next year, Algarabía. Could you tell us more about these?

Salas Rivera: I started working on what would become la bella crisis in 2015. It started with huequitos, a project where I tried writing about desire, bodies and sex in a new way, using our dialect, its playfulness. I was inspired by Severo Sarduy, Nestor Perlongher, and Bad Bunny. It changed and grew as a project over almost a decade. Now, I am working with Recodo and a Puerto Rican press on the publication of two editions. It is a book only in Spanish, although I have translated a few poems here and there in translation. The term bellacrisis could very roughly be translated as “a state of horniness that has reached a critical point.” When you separate the word, it means “the beautiful crisis.” It is a queer exploration of the painful, complex, sublime, and cruel ways in which we desire, fuck, play, and live in Puerto Rico. Some of the poems from the collection were recently published in Claridad.

I began Algarabía a few years ago. It is the hardest book I’ve ever written and I am so incredibly proud of it. Not only have I been obsessing over it these last few years, but I have spent months writing and rewriting it with the support of Graywolf editors Carmen Giménez Smith and Brittany Torres Rivera.

It is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf. An inhabitant of Algarabía, a colony of Earth in a parallel universe, Cenex struggles to find a name, a body, and a stable home. The song of Cenex weaves, and, at times, clashes texts by cis Puerto Rican writers on trans figures with disidentificatory fragments from historical texts, legal documents, and other extraliterary sources. Cenex leads us through his early childhood hospitalization, his years as an experimental subject, a brief stay in suburbia, twisted meanderings, a merry band of chosen queers, and not-so-far-off lands. Speculative fiction, the real maravilloso, and satire come together in this epic that laughs at its survival, with sharp, unserious rage. 

Stylistically, I explore metaphor, figurative language, experimentation within the framework of more traditional epic poetry. Some aspects are closer to concrete poetry. Some characters speak in sonnets. There is a chorus throughout and a great deal of world-building. It will be a dual-language flipbook totaling somewhere near 400 pages.

I also rethink the epic. The text opens with an invocation of the Muse, yes, but also with a disavowal of the heroic, a questioning of how origins are narrated. What does it mean to write an epic poem when trans people have so often been written out of the nation and when nation and colony go hand in hand? Algarabía also coincides my own journey as I began taking HRT after returning to Puerto Rico. 

As usual, I have collaborated with Puerto Rican artists. I commissioned the cover art and interior art from Natalia Bosques Chico. The map of the labyrinth was made by architects Cruz García and Nathalie Frankowski (WAI Think Tank). The interior design aspects and cover are being created by Luis Vázquez O’Neill.

I am so wildly excited it will be in the world in September 2025.