Literature Is Good: Roxana Crisólogo's "Esta masa triste y gris de arena"
translated by Dr. Kim Jensen and Judith Santopietro
Occasionally, a member of the Boulevard staff wishes to celebrate particular aspects of a piece we’ve published and share their reflections with our readers, in hopes of giving some insight into our editorial considerations when selecting new work. We are calling this feature “Literature Is Good.”
by Dana Delibovi, Reader
Sometimes, the poetry of place is any place and no place. In this poem, Roxana Crisólogo shines her light on the sorrow of earth’s places. Voluptuous landscapes give way to the detritus of the “anuncio,” the advertisement. Tourists sully ancient sites. Localities become just “one more asterisk on the map.” The society we have created drains the lifeblood of places. We slaughter meaning, until every spot in the planet is anywhere and nowhere.
In both the Spanish original and its very deft translation by Kim Jensen and Judith Santopietro, Crisólogo’s poem captures this inestimable loss of meaning in our world today. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han (b. 1959) describes this in his treatise Undinge, “Non-Things.” As we migrate into digital space, we abandon physical places and objects. This is not a benign move, but the end of stability, knowledge, stillness, and home. The poet feels this tragedy acutely. She suffocates. Her voice is hoarse as the lines begin. By the end, her tone disintegrates—“rasping, burning, aflame.”
To vacate specific places and to relinquish specific objects are physical acts with psychic consequences. Location, geography, artifact, and biology shape human culture. Without them, we are Crisólogo’s voyeurs on tour-bus, who “search for the lost city in lost hats.” We have little but “safari-colored hardship” on our hunt for the empty calories of fast food. Our experience is a void; we wouldn’t break a sweat for any part of this mutilated, dusty culture.
Bleak and grieving, “This sad grey lump of sand,” encapsulates why literature is good. Not beautiful, not elegant, not wry—even though the poem has all these qualities. It’s good because it tells the truth, because it expresses the moral good of honesty. In a world of no-place and no-thing, true words may point the way back home.