Pepe

when his niece asks / tell me about Chía, the answer is always just: it’s a long story / but I think what you’re telling me, is that language is an inadequate grieving

Pepe

uncle, today I spoke with your neurologist
and I translated what he said for you

levodopa twice per day, carbidopa thrice
folded paper instructions with dosages

but I do not translate the neurologist’s indifference
when he says that the medication will likely have no effect

that burden I keep tucked between my ears, beneath my tongue
translation is empathy, but I am uneasy about these choices

your jaw is clenched shut, the disease has killed your language   
  but this is a third death, after a war-torn childhood

I think about what that means, war-torn
why not war-shattered, mirror multiplied
  war-sunk to the bottom of an ocean 
  war-broken and planted in the earth
  war-drenched in our red velvet-lined insides

but no. for you, I think of it as war-silenced:
a man with no childhood kills his memories and when his niece asks

tell me about Chía, the answer is always just: it’s a long story
but I think what you’re telling me, is that language is an inadequate grieving

the body a vessel, a poem, a collection of deaths
here, you are using language against itself—choosing to kill it back, with a heavy tongue

made heavier by Parkinson’s, synapses frozen since those emerald-mine sierra mornings
  but this is a third death, after immigration / to an implication nation

in the taxi, the radio is playing 96.3fm: beautiful music for a crazy world
there is a system where the Ontario government pays directly for the taxi and neurologist

because the Canadian welcome is that of an apology; a smile haunted by burden
translation is empathy, but it is also complicity / uncle, can we refuse this ‘kindness’?

I read the wikipedia page for Parkinson’s:  
  a long-term degenerative disorder with inherited and environmental factors
I read the wikipedia page for Las Violencias:
  entre 113,000 y 300,000 muertos, una quinta parte de la población

and you, holding a few emeralds that survived in your frozen hands and articulating
my name, an iterative process: gracias d-d-d-d-do-do-do-dor-dor-dori-dorit-dorita

  45 years in Toronto and still no Inglish.

*

Editor’s note: “Language is an inadequate grieving” and yet it’s all we have. This is the paradox at the core of Dora Prieto’s “Pepe.” Grief is a problem for translation, Prieto implies, especially so when one straddles the threshold of multiple worlds and languages (when one inhabits the threshold rather than simply moving across it). We do not place an embargo on emotion, though. The acts of translating between Spanish and English, between the poetic and the domestic, between the past and the present—these are ways, however minor or fleeting, of making claim to the world. The speaker of Prieto’s poem carves open space for an ailing family member without “Inglish.” In so doing, he is afforded a lyric subjectivity. It is a gesture whose love is so enormous I feel changed having borne witness to it.

— Billy-Ray Belcourt, poetry editor