Contributors: Eliana Hernández-Pachón & Robin Myers
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The Brush
Author Eliana Hernández-Pachón and translator Robin Myers talk with editor Helen Hill about Hernández-Pachón’s The Brush
Circumference Magazine:
How does the form of this poem relate to the narrative? Did it feel important to present the Massacre of El Salado as a three-part narrative poem, or did you consider other styles?
Eliana:
I wanted to retell this story, which is very well-known in Colombia, and it seemed
to me that if I was going to tell it anew, then I would need a new form. I was interested in
maintaining the story as such, which is why the book follows a three-part narrative form.
But there are things that poetry can do better: working with ellipses, for instance, and
evoking what can’t be named. I think the book travels both among genres and among styles
—sometimes the voice is more lyrical, sometimes more bureaucratic—because it’s also an
essay (in the sense of a rehearsal, an undertaking): an attempt to find language that renders
an account of horror and trauma without revictimization. In the end, the best form was the
one in which all of my efforts were still visible.
Circumference Magazine:
When the Brush has a chance to speak, it seems to see itself from a distance. What went into your choice to give the Brush this omniscience?
Eliana:
Maybe since the human characters had such a profound relationship with the story
(some, like the witnesses, can’t bring themselves to describe what they saw), I wanted the
Brush to be a more distant kind of character. I wanted it to witness the massacre, too, but
from a less immediate and more compassionate place. Human temporalities aren’t the same
as nature’s, which I see as living at a different frequency. The conflict in Colombia, as with
many other wars, has been a struggle over land, and over what Westerners call “natural
resources.” I wanted this land to be present, and I wanted its presence to be felt everywhere.
Circumference Magazine:
Why does the Brush speak in verse, while the Witnesses and the Investigators speak in something closer to prose?
Eliana:
I love this question, and I think it’s because poetry has done a lot to codify how we
(in the West, I want to emphasize again) understand nature. When I thought about what a
plant-voice would be like, a voice rooted to the earth, I concluded that it would have to be a
voice that didn’t suggest something “natural,” but something artificial, in the sense of
involving artifice. I felt that it could be cryptic and even baroque, which nature also is.
Circumference Magazine:
This poem is full of symbolism: the rain, the animals, the wooden box, to name a few. Which symbols stood out to you as important to include when you set out to write the poem? Do any of these symbols have a particular significance—to the people of Colombia or to you?
Eliana:
Two generations back, my family lived in the company of plants and animals, as
did many other families in Colombia who eventually migrated to the city from rural areas.
Many of the images of the book are drawn from my own memories of how my
grandparents lived, while I imagine that other images seeped in subconsciously. I didn’t
necessarily set out to include these specific elements; they were just there. For the voice of the Brush, I did research the flora of Montes de María, where the massacre took place—a very different region than where my grandparents used to live.
Circumference Magazine:
In Spanish, the title of the book is La Mata, and in English it becomes The Brush. Do you think this change alters the way the poem will be read?
Robin:
The title in Spanish is both open-ended and evocative in a very specific way, and I
fretted for a long time about how to render it in English. “Mata” refers to the vegetation in a
forest: scrub, thickets, plants in general. But it also echoes the verb “matar,” to kill. As a
title, La Mata makes the land a protagonist in a concise, matter-of-fact way, while also
containing a darker resonance that felt equally important to honor in English. But how? I
ended up going for “brush,” which felt compact and also expansive as a descriptor. And it
takes a different tack than the original in its second, more allusive meaning: it implies the
act of brushing away, hiding from view. I see the title in English as intentionally more
ironic than in Spanish, because the Brush comes to symbolize something that can’t be
hidden, something that resists, endures, multiplies, keeps living its life. So yes, I do think
the change alters the way the poem will be read. And I think this sort of decision (which is
always only that: a decision that could have been otherwise) is an example of how a
translation can think with the original text even as it chooses to do something new, or bring
something latent to the fore.
Circumference Magazine:
Do you have anything you’d like to share about the translation process or your impression of how this poem might change in English translation?
Robin:
I read La Mata for the first time almost exactly four years ago. While I came up
with a first draft of the translation fairly quickly, I feel like it’s taken all this time for the
different registers in the book to settle into themselves. Pablo and Ester (the couple who
narrate the first section), the Witness, the Investigators, the Brush: they’re all part of a
polyphony, and each has its own tone, texture, prosody. From the get-go, I think I felt most
comfortable with the Brush’s voice, which is lusher and more lyrical than the others. And
in retrospect, Pablo and Ester, who are rendered in deceptively spare language and in the
third person, unlike the others, took me the longest to hone.
Eliana herself has been wonderfully attentive and collaborative in reading revisions and
considering alternatives with me. And because every translation is a kind of polyphony,
too, I want to thank the editors of the magazines who first published excerpts of the book—
Firmament, Berlin Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Copper Nickel—for their
thoughtful comments that found their way into the finished text, as well as our incredible
editors at Archipelago Books.
An excerpt from The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers
The Investigators point out:
The bullet traced a parabolic path that may be described as
follows: a line is born from a man’s outstretched hand and
forms a curve, rises to its zenith, and then contracts, arcs
downward, can be heard among other bullets: tra-ca-ta-ca-
TA. The air’s resistance slows its flight. Even so, the bullet
entered through the right side.
Witnesses state that women in rocking chairs had com-
plained about the weather, remarking on the stillness of the
air.
* * *
The Brush says:
Beneath the sun’s great squall,
charred black insects rest,
and children bury ducks so that they’ll sprout and grow:
the leaves are newly dry,
the buds,
their coloring decayed.
It’s common knowledge that if salt should burgeon
from the ground and form
two sandy hollows,
two stones
should mark the way.
But if nobody knows how to contain the salt
or make it bloom again inside the graves,
the facts will crystallize
like an irruption, accidental,
extraordinary,
and not the detonation
of a long-brewed plan.
When the moment came, it felt like a wasp
boring into the spine from within,
then the flash,
then nothing.
* * *
The Investigators point out:
Subsequently, the men checked all their hands and shoul-
ders, searching for marks that might betray having carried
tents, having touched weapons, having brushed against the
woods as evidence. They searched for signs, like the ab-
sence of hair on the calves due to the constant use of boots,
like blisters on the feet from walking. They fenced them
in around the hills, and blinded by the boiling blood, they
charged—it must be emphasized—at them, supported by
no evidence at all.
Eliana Hernández-Pachón is a writer and educator born in Bogotá, Colombia. The Brush received the Colombia National Poetry Prize in 2020, making Hernández-Pachón the youngest poet to ever receive this honor. She is part of Como un lugar, a poetry collective that runs an independent press in Buenos Aires and organizes a literary festival in NYC. She lives in Brooklyn.
Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Her latest translations include A Whale Is a Country by Isabel Zapata (Fonograf Editions, 2024), What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M. (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada (Deep Vellum, 2023), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter, 2023), and Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books, 2022).
Robin Myers’s translation of the above excerpted poems will appear in a forthcoming book of Eliana Hernández Pachón’s poems, The Brush, to be published by Archipelago Books in April 2024. The original Spanish version was published by Laguna Libros.
