E3W Literature | University of Texas

Noni Benegas
Burning Cartography
Trans. Noël Valis
Host Publications, 2007
99 pages
$12

Reviewed by Connie Steel

Burning Cartography begins with a prose poem about a mapmaker “who delicately included the travelers themselves in the routes that she traced.” Throughout this poetry collection, Noni Benegas writes as poet-cartographer, mapping an ambling route through the literary, the artistic and the literal. Benegas, an Argentinean expatriate who has lived in Spain since 1977, writes about the in-between times and spaces, those areas of human experience that defy borders and boundaries by occurring along them. At a bilingual reading of her work at the University of Texas at Austin in fall 2007, Benegas spoke of her unusual role as an exile poet celebrating not a lost homeland but rather the joy of the journey, and of a concept of home as being continually in transition.

Benegas’s poems resonate with occasional notes of melancholy, recalling lost times and persons. At these moments, Benegas uses rich, multi-sensual imagery. In a poem called “Gardens” she writes:
Gardens of tears
the touch of dense magnolias
and the passage of
this perfumed rain
inside eyelids.
This collection features Benegas’s poems in the original Spanish alongside English translations by Noël Valis of Yale. This collection would be a challenge for any translator as it consists of a stylistically diverse selection of Benegas’s prize-winning work, including pieces from Argonática (1984), which won the Platero Prize; La balsa de la Medusa (1987), awarded the Miguel Hernández Prize; and Fragmentos de un diario desconocido (2004), recipient of the Esquío Poetry Prize. Valis rises to the occasion by clearly conveying not only the complicated and often subtle meaning of the work but also three distinct poetic forms: prose paragraphs, free verse and highly experimental sound poems.

If one were to offer a criticism of Benegas it would simply be that she is a scholar’s poet. In her experimentation with form and sound, such as in the following unnamed piece from Fragmentos de un diario desconocido, she writes:
mamá elidida
mamá reñida
mamá torcida
mamá fuera
Benegas’s uses of “mamá” echo Salvador Dali’s use of “ma mere” in “The Enigma of Desire.” Just as Dali defies the laws of gravity and nature in his paintings, Benegas defies the laws of grammar and natural conversation in Fragmentos. The artist and the poet both create original compositions, which exceed and transcend the symbolic constructions of their respective parts. Dali’s is not the only presence felt in Benegas’s work. Indeed, allusions to prior writers and artists manifest as milestones throughout the collection. Géricault, Velázquez, Gertrude Stein, Borges, Frida Kahlo, Henry James, Rembrandt and Brahms all appear as her travelers, sometimes juxtaposed, blurring the boundaries of time, distance and culture.

Burning Cartography is not, however, a collection of esoterica—there is at least one poem, “Interruptions,” which marks a literal, real-life encounter on a train. The woman met is described as “the sacred icon of an old Hollywood actress / old age stamped in her features.” According to Benegas, the stranger on the train was Luce Irigaray—a scholarly muse for a scholarly poet.

Benegas’s choice to publish this collection with side by side English translation creates the potential to expand her readership beyond Spain. Her poems about borders and journeys are timely for an American audience struggling with issues of immigration. The collection could also serve in the classroom for advanced students of Spanish, to accompany works in an art history class, or to spark conversations about current events. Finally, this slim volume of rich images is perfect for anyone who wants to spend a few stolen moments in a world where the airport attendant announces that the next flight boarding is “Moon, gate two.”