Las manos
POESÍA
de Alaíde Foppa
Las manos
débiles, inciertas,
parecen
vanos objetos
para el brillo de los anillos,
sólo las llena
lo perdido,
se tienden al árbol
que no alcanzan,
pero me dan el agua
de la mañana,
y hasta el rosado
retoño de mis uñas
llega el latido.
The Hands
POETRY
by Alaíde Foppa
My weak
and tentative
hands, my
vain props
for the glitter of rings:
Only what’s lost
fills them.
They stretch toward a tree
they don’t reach.
But they give me water
in the morning, and
ferry my heartbeat
to the pink
buds of my nails.
(translated from the Spanish by Dana Delibovi)
Alaíde Foppa was a poet and translator born in 1914 in Barcelona, Spain. She was educated in the humanities in Belgium, France, and Italy. In the 1940s, Foppa immigrated to Guatemala, where she married and had five children. Following a CIA-backed coup in 1954, Foppa and her family fled Guatemala for Mexico. There, she taught at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Foppa published four volumes of poetry in her lifetime. One of these, an illustrated version of To Honor My Body (Elogio de mi cuerpo), was published by Litoarte in 1970 and included the original Spanish text of “The Hands.” Foppa disappeared and was presumed murdered by a Guatemalan death squad in 1980.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her translations of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Francesca Gargallo have appeared in the Apple Valley Review, Ezra Translations, and Witty Partition. In 2021, Delibovi’s poems and essays have been published in After the Art, The Forum, and Riverside Quarterly. She is a first-year MFA student in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.
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