Eartheater

by Dolores Reyes

Dedication In memory of Melina Romero and Araceli Ramos. For the victims of femicide, for its survivors.

I knelt down among the plants, parted the massive leaves, and put the bottle next to the others for company. There were plenty of blue ones. No blue was the same and no earth tasted alike. No child, sibling, mother, or friend was missed like another.

Something has been lost in this translation. Or rather, it was never there to begin with. English is not gendered in the same way as Spanish. On top of which, there is no English-language equivalent of the hyperlocal variant of Spanish in which Eartheater was originally written: early twenty-first-century Argentinian Spanish from the outskirts of Buenos Aires. There is in fact no English-speaking Argentina, much less an English-speaking outskirts of an English-speaking place called Buenos Aires (“Good Airs”?). On the surface of things, this task—convincing you, the reader, that the work you have in your hands could have, in an alternate universe, been written in English by an English-speaking woman named Dolores Reyes (“Pains Kings”?)—may seem impossible. But the aim of literary translation is to convince you to suspend your disbelief, at least just long enough to make the impossible feel eminently plausible.