The Light of Desire

Recipient of the Letras de Oro Prize and the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor for Lifetime Achievement, Agosín is a human rights activist, author, and professor at Wellesley College. While writing this long poem over a period of four years, she sat in a room overlooking the wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The result, resonant with the Song of Songs, chronicles the speaker's rhapsodic falling in love from youth to middle age. The first two of six parts fulfill the narrative but are stagnant and repetitive, with a nuanced, striated perception arising only with aging: "The body allowed itself to be loved for a night/.../ Masked by an even more ancient night/ Like the nights of Jerusalem/ Stone and quartz nights/ Open, bright,/ Clairvoyant bodies." Agosín's chronicle of love is as languorous as it is abstract, and the bodies of the lovers thin into the landscape of Jerusalem: "You have inhabited my steadfast back/ You have made prints, roads, cracks/...// And I go by way of your waist as if I were balanced on an orange tree/ Here in Galilee, love is flowering in the season of the almond trees." What finally emerges is an archetypical cartography of sacred and erotic love that gathers meaning from impermanence and memory. Carslon's translation is perceptive and sound, although at times when Agosín creates a variegated meaning with the language, Carslon flattens it, favoring a lyrical translation. Recommended for libraries and bookstores with a strong Judaic or poetry collection.—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Palo Alto, CA