In the forty-eight pages that comprise her slim and tender poetry collection Red Seed: Poems for Luno, Tutunakú poet and translator Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez honors the women that came before her, the creation myths that inform her people’s sense of themselves and of the world, and the creativity of the Tutunakú language. One leaves these poems, which have been beautifully translated from the Spanish by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos, with the sense that there is much left to learn and see; there is, at the heart of Red Seed, the sense of a life being lived and of a poet invested in narrating her own consciousness.
In different interviews and readings, Lucas Juárez has often emphasized her desire not to mythologize her own culture and cosmology through her poetry. In other words, she is interested in narrating the world and her experiences as a Tutunakú woman to make sense of herself, as opposed to trying to turn her poetry into an ethnographic study of a culture and a language that remain deeply underserved in Mexico. What we learn in reading Red Seed, then, is not an essential truth about the history of the Tutunakú people but the specificity of Lucas Juárez’s experience coming of age and into womanhood among her family and community.
Red Seed explores the transition from girlhood into womanhood and the poetic voice’s sexual awakening by drawing from Tutunakú cosmology and the figure of Papa’, translated into Spanish and English as Luno. As Call and DeVos explain in their Translators’ Note, the Tutunakú myth says that Papa’/Luno “bestows the gift of womanhood, as regulator of the menstrual cycle; his monthly arrival is characterized as an amorous affair.” It follows, then, that Papa’ is the Tutunakú word for both ‘father’ and ‘month’. Lucas Juárez channels the sensuous and amorous aspects of the relationship between Luno and Tutunakú women in her poetry. In the opening poem of the collection, “Who Is Luno?”, the poetic voice describes Luno as “a sigh, / the sky’s lip.” In “Dream,” Luno appears as a naked body “whose words were orchids / embroidering [the speaker’s] path.”
The depth of Lucas Juárez’s poetry stems from her close attention to the inventiveness of her own language. Tutunakú is an agglutinative language that can contain words of more than a dozen syllables. Sentences in Tutunakú can also include the first, second, and third person as well as different genders and temporalities. Since she writes in Tutunakú and then translates her own work into Spanish, Lucas Juárez has often said that she is careful to strike a balance between following the stylistic conventions of poetry, respecting the grammatical and syntactical integrity of both of the languages she employs, and making sure that she can write the way she speaks in her everyday life. The translation process is surely a challenge for Lucas Juárez herself and for Call and DeVos: one must try to be as faithful as possible to the wealth of the Tutunakú language while balancing issues of line length, sonority, and breath in Spanish and English.
On that note, Lucas Juárez has often joked that one of her college professors once told her that Tutunakú language is egocentric because it believes everything is born from its body. As she explains, Tutunakú people love with their bellies rather than with their hearts. Given that the Tutunakú language is so dependent (and determined) by physicality and embodiment, it is worth highlighting the precision and creativity of Call and DeVos’s translation, which manages to preserve the beauty of Lucas Juárez’s poetry while imbuing the English translations with a life of their own. Call and DeVos similarly embrace the loving relationship between Luno and the speaker in their translation; at times, however, their choices help enhance the eroticism behind many of Lucas Juárez’s images. Consider, for instance, the previously mentioned “Dream,” in which the poetic voice dreams of her first encounter with Luno:
I dreamt of a body behind me,
whose naked skin scattered light,
whose words were orchids
embroidering my path.
When I woke, I told my mother everything
and she said:
—Your season is here.
Luno has gazed upon your movements.
Call and DeVos’s decision to translate Lucas Juárez’s “Luno ha mirado tu caminar” as “Luno has gazed upon your movements” emphasizes the sensuous and sensual aspect of the relationship between Luno and the poetic voice. It is precisely this emphasis on the power of the erotic that also shapes the collection’s most interesting aspect: the close attention that Lucas Juárez pays to intergenerational solidarity and the heritability of knowledge. Challenging heteropatriarchal beliefs that women’s sexual intimacies should be silenced, Lucas Juárez presents the ability to seduce Luno as a key aspect of a Tutunakú woman’s coming-of-age. Throughout the collection, we observe the ways in which community elders, grandmothers, and mothers all preserve and pass down forms of erotic, bodily, and spiritual knowledge that only women can access, from an old black bean family recipe that “has never failed to summon Luno” to an elder whose role was to show young women “how to flirt with Luno / and how to trap rainbows / in the dark black of [their] cascading braids.”
Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez’s Red Seed: Poems for Luno is a collection in which Tutunakú life bears witness to Tutunakú life. Thanks to the translation by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos and the beautiful work by the editorial and design teams at Cardboard House Press, readers in the United States will now have the opportunity to read one of the most exciting and promising young poets in the Tutunakú communities and in Mexican literature more broadly.