Modernismo. At the time, this prosody was rapidly becoming passé, yet Bernal used it with great dexterity. The macaronic rhymes and the insertion of popular dichos (sayings) make for a rich impasto, but the main aesthetic shock comes from Bernal’s use of Mexican slang. The result is a thrilling clash of popular and lofty literary registers, English, and words that would eventually become part of the border’s argot, Caló.
Several difficult decisions had to be made in order to provide an English version of Palos de ciego that would best guide the reader through Bernal’s rollicking depiction of the borderlands. If I were to recreate the prosody exactly, the poems would sound like doggerel. Employing the meter of the English ballad would produce an anachronistic cultural mishmash. I flirted with the idea of using Blues-like structures for some of the poems. Out of despair, I even contemplated resorting to prose-block paragraphs for absolute fidelity to the text…
After deliberation, I decided that the best way to recreate this book as oral poetry was to echo the Caló, the slang, and the overall exuberant and spunky tone of the original, abandoning rhyme. Wherever possible, I relied on alliteration for comical effects, and I inserted contemporary American slang when appropriate. The art of “poesía para declamar” hasn’t passed from the school halls and bars of Latin America; I worked to create poems that were fun to read aloud while remaining acceptably accurate. I aimed for line breaks and line lengths that were a compromise between Bernal’s original Spanish and the contemporary America poetic mode, post-William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, et al. My priority was to preserve the popular speech. Indeed, words like “bichi” (Northern Mexican Spanish for “naked,” derived from the English word “beach”) pepper the text, as do idioms — for example, the collection’s title. “Dar palos de ciego” (literally, “to thrash with the stick of a blind man”) implies to struggle vainly, clutching at straws, but also alludes to the blind man’s cane and to Míster Blind, who appears as one of the characters. Many thanks to Boris Dralyuk, who suggested A Stab in the Dark as a reasonable transformation of the Spanish title into English. I then incorporated this titular motif into the poems wherever there is mention of blindness, canes, and the thrashing of canes.
This English version includes the entire text except for one delightful short poem titled “Eche usted nombre de frutas,” which relies entirely on puns. It lists fruits, many of which don’t have a proper name in English, and are known by loan words such as “mamey.” The Spanish text speaks for itself in the second half of the book.
It’s important to note the publication year of Bernal’s collection: 1923. A year prior, César Vallejo published his masterpiece Trilce and forever changed the Spanish poetic mode, with his pioneering use of white space, his radical new line breaks, and his neologisms. The Creacionismo of Vicente Huidobro was making a buzz in the literary world, and the avant-garde poet Kyn Taniya was taking off with his Aeroplane. All of those works were more transformative for Spanish literature at large, but A Stab in the Dark was the first collection of poetry to reflect the border, the Mexican north, the reality of Mexicanos in Los Angeles, and the nascence of Chicano culture, all in a Spanish that is uniquely Bernal’s.
I first discovered Bernal’s poetry on the bookshelves of my wife, the cachanilla detective fiction writer Nylsa Martínez — mostly in Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz’s anthologies and essays on Baja California literature. I owe her many thanks for helping me understand the more difficult passages, as I made my stabs in the dark. Thanks also to the poet and critic Martín Camps, who helped me on other passages, and for his years of friendship. Thanks to Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz for providing us access to the works of Facundo Bernal, as well as for his enthusiasm with regards to the project. And very deep gratitude to Boris Dralyuk, for thinking of me when planning this project.
As always, my guide in translation is Paul Blackburn, whose Poem of the Cid has been my beacon for many years. I will lift his words for this book: Please enjoy it, and remember, read it aloud.
Anthony Seidman
San Fernando Valley
2018
“For the Raza, for the Homeland,
and for Art”
Yxta Maya Murray
With his grouchy, thrumming poems, Facundo Bernal reminds us that “assimilation” is a myth. Writing in the 1920s while living between Los Angeles and Mexicali, the Sonoran-born Bernal complains relentlessly, and often hilariously, about how bad it is “here” and how great it is “back home.” In so doing, he records the early days of a century-long Latinx resistance and adaptation to the exhausting, grotesque, and often boring dynamics of colonialism.
L.A., the land of film stars and millionaires, is violent, he bemoans in “The Crime Wave.” For Bernal, the city is no new Xanadu that offers a fresh start from the traumas of the 1910 Revolution. Its distracting scenic beauty only masks horrible dangers: while the city has “parks brimming with lush lakesides” and “is covered/ by a cloak of fog/ as white as a bull’s eye,” it is also teeming with Charles Manson-like villains avant la lettre: “and now the victim’s a lady/ shot dead by some punks/ for no clear motive,/ but according/ to their statement,/ they were instructed by Spirit X/ or perhaps the Devil himself.”
Bernal struggles to understand how the Latinos who have moved to L.A. in the hopes of a better life can not only stand it in this strange city, but adapt its mores to their own. In “Pochos” (the name of this poem, of course, referring to the old insult to Anglo-acting Mexican-Americans), he “focus[es] on/ those from back home/ who land here, observe things,/ and never imitate what’s good,/ but only what’s terrible.” “What’s terrible’” is affecting the “gringo” habits of gum-chewing and tobacco-spitting, not to mention a man’s parading his half-dressed Chicana girlfriend around town: her “angelic face/ (and I use that adjective in quotes)/ has been buried beneath/ makeup and rouge; her skirt/ allows me to glimpse/ the exact position of her garters,/ which move farther and farther,/ like ‘seabirds (sorry to wax/ poetic!) in steady flight.’”
In “Raking up the Past,” Bernal continues this screed by “dedicat[ing] a few ‘stabs’/ to the people of my Raza/ who leave Mexico, and when they’ve/ barely set foot in Yankee-landia,/ forget their Spanish/ and disown their Homeland.” The most alarming of these Raza are the women “who wear extra-short skirts,/ and dance the ‘Hula-Hula,’” only to then “express themselves/ in the language of Byron,/ because they no hablan ‘Spanish.’”
As this recitation demonstrates, Bernal often exorcises his angry nostalgia on misbehaving women, who buy into a deracinated U.S. culture that is agog with technology and parlous to love and family. In “The Radio,” he offers the tale of a wayward wife who would rather listen to her favorite singer than cook her husband dinner: “‘Woman,/ it’s already eight o’clock,/ and I haven’t had a bite to eat / …/ and instead of cooking me/ some supper — dammit! —/ you’re listening to gossip,/ to music and jingles!” “Quiet!” the wife hisses. “Don’t make noise,/ Lázaro is singing…”
But even within Bernal’s colorful complaints about distaff cultural disobedience, he also sketches portraits of Mexican-American women who aren’t so much assimilating to the decadence of U.S. society as busting out on their own. If they’re not wearing visible garters, dancing the hula, or dreaming in their kitchens, he explains mock-seriously in “A Sermon,” then they are “swimming in public places,/ where modesty is shipwrecked/ while sin sails forth.”
Actually, Bernal insinuates, he’d like to dip a toe into that pool himself — except that it’s deadly dull in the U.S., with its false piety, typified by laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Though the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s blue law in 1858, repressive customs hung on into the 1920s. As Bernal laments
