Translators' Introduction to Integration of the Parents — Web Exclusive
By Keith Ekiss; Sonia P. Ticas
Eunice Odio is considered the leading Costa Rican poet of the twentieth century. Born in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 1919, she died in Mexico City in 1974. Her volumes of poetry include Los elementos terrestres, El Tránsito de fuego, and Territorio del alba y otros poemas.
Odio's "Integration of the Parents" is one poem in a sequence from her epic, El Tránsito de fuego [The Fire's Journey], a book-length creation myth first published in El Salvador in 1957.
"Integration of the Parents" imagines the moment of origin when the world was first created. There is power in origin: as with forms of energy, power transforms itself, at the moment of beginning, from potential to kinetic. Before a thing exists, its power is unrealized, an inherent possibility. Once the transformation out of the potential into the actual begins, the shape and manifestations of power become known.
El Tránsito de fuego has been described by Peggy von Mayer, the editor of Odio's complete works, as a gloss on the opening lines of the Book of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.'' Odio, whose poems often betray the temperament of a mystic, believed in the literal, cosmogonic power of language—the idea that matter was formed by the speech of the Divine. Accordingly, the things of the world—"fields of wheat," even "emptiness"—owe their creation to "the verb that matter demands." Ultimately, matter requires the power of language to exist.
However, to continue, power must replicate and become self-sustaining—language itself is not enough. Power is often implicitly, if not explicitly, sexual. In the poem, as a first gesture, the parents touch "their favorite loving organs," a recognition of their sexual, procreative powers.
Further along in the epic, the poet-hero of the story, Ion, is the word become flesh that was with God at the origin. Ion's words create many things (among them, a horse and a bird); he is, literally, the poet as maker. El Tránsito de fuego can thus be read, to paraphrase Milton, as Odio's attempt to justify the way of the poet to humanity.
Keith Ekiss is the author of Pima Road Notebook, published in 2010 by New Issues Poetry & Prose. In addition, his poems have appeared in Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency from the Santa Fe Art Institute for his work on the Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio, his translations have appeared widely. Tavern Books will publish his translation of volume I of Odio's The Fire's Journey in late 2012. Ekiss has been a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford since 2007, where he teaches courses in reading and writing poetry and other genres. Sonia P. Ticas lives in Tigard, OR, and is an assistant professor of language and Latin American literature at Linfield College.