20. The Choice

Nasín cando as prantas nasen,

no mes das froles nasín,

nunha alborada mainiña,

nunha alborada de abril.

Por eso me chaman Rosa,

mais a do triste sorrir,

con espiñas para todos,

sin ningunha para ti.

Desque te quixen, ingrato,

todo acabóu para min,

que eras ti para min todo,

miña groria e meu vivir.

¿De qué, pois, te queixas, Mauro?

¿De qué, pois, te queixas, di,

cando sabes que morrera

por te contemplar felís?

Duro cravo me encravaches

con ese teu maldesir,

con ese teu pedir tolo

que non sei qué quer de min,

pois dinche canto dar puden

avariciosa de ti.

O meu corasón che mando

cunha chave para o abrir.

Nin eu teño mais que darche,

nin ti máis que me pedir.

I was born when the plants are born again,

I was born in the month of flowers,

on an April dawn.

That’s why they call me Rosa,

But I’m the one with the sad smile,

thorny toward everyone else,

but not prickly at all for you.

Ever since I began to love you, heartless thing,

it all went wrong for me,

because you were my world,

my whole joy, my existence.

So what are you complaining about, Mauro?

So what are you complaining about, tell me?

when you know I’d give my life

to see you happy?

You drove a hard nail in me

with those harsh words,

with all your demands,

and I don’t know what more you want from me,

since I gave you every last drop,

I was so thirsty, desperate to have all of you.

I’m sending you my entire heart

with a key so you can open it.

Just know I haven’t anything left to give you,

and you can’t ask me for a drop more.

[translation: K.M.]

Rosalía was looking over one of the poems she was going to send to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, to her correspondents in the States. As always, she wondered if they would truly understand it, and wasn’t sure how much she needed to explain. Understand, but not on a linguistic level. On the real, deeper level that didn’t necessarily mean a typical type of sentimentalism, rather a controlled, rational type of meaning that was not led by a ‘woman’s feelings of the heart’. She was not one of those women nor one of those writers. Here she was confessing something she felt, yes, but not for a male lover, not really. Maybe she’d had no choice regarding her emotions, but they were so much more than herself (Rosa) and Mauro, a name that is given to a man.

Except that her intention really wasn’t that at all, and it really wasn’t as simple as it seemed in the verses she’d written.

“I had no choice,” she thought to herself, rather unhappily. “How else could I publish about the things I’m thinking? I had to include the ideas in a poem, disguise them. Otherwise I’d be censured. I chose Mauro for a possible lover’s name and some people immediately thought it was my husband I was referring to, because his name is Manuel. Only it’s also immediately obvious, or should be, that the name Mauro is not a stand-in for Manuel. This relationship is not that of a husband and wife. It’s painful, one-sided, ungrateful on his part. No explanation is in the lines I’ve written because that would make everything too simple. Do my American readers need to know anything more? Can they figure out the part that is left unsaid?”

Then Rosalía pondered a bit more:

“Maybe it doesn’t matter if they think I wrote this poem originally because of the man I met and married, wrote it to him because I was unhappy. That’s too literal, but does it matter? Now with time having passed between when the lines first were composed, I understand better what my real intention was. Should I tell the American women or cross my fingers and hope they’ll eventually get it?”

——————

Lavinia was reading from Rosalía’s diary, the one she’d stumbled onto in the faiado [attic] of a friend’s house. She read it over and over, wondering if the author would reveal the truth in the next pages. Wondering if she’d finally decided what she’d alluded to - that things and the poem, many poems in fact, often aren’t what they seem. Lavinia didn’t know if she was about to become the only other person in the world who really knew the meaning, didn’t know if she had the right to keep reading the journal and perhaps find out…

She left the diary on her desk and went to the kitchen where she poured herself a small amount of albariño wine into a shimmering cobalt blue glass, considering that this action transformed wine into water, in an odd reversal of the water-into-wine miracle in the Bible. Inside the blue walls, the pale gold albariño lost its lustre and looked like skywater. Lavinia had to use that glass because it was the only one she had that even remotely resembled a wineglass. The other three in the set of four had been sacrificed, not by her but by a cat that had jumped onto the kitchen counter and slid the whole set of four onto the hard tiles below. Only this one was still whole. Had the act been intentional?

Lavinia, while not a literary critic, was becoming more adept at reading both fiction and poetry. She began to consider what Rosalía might have been thinking before searching to find the confession by her. Perhaps she was hoping for a dialogue or understanding of the poem and its creator to be revealed in the next pages of the diary? Was this anticipation a remnant of a now dormant academic career that had once led her, she thought, to over-analyze things? Maybe even to control them as opposed to being told? Was that why she chose to form her own interpretations first, to be the author of her own reading of “Nasín cando as prantas nasen”? After making up her own mind as to what the Galician writer intended for the now-famous lines, she would look to see if Rosalía had actually revealed her thoughts. Not until then.

The mystery became an incentive.

First, Lavinia looked at things like ‘Nasín’, ‘as prantas nasen’, ‘abril’, ‘Rosa’, ‘triste sorrir’. She thought about the connections these words showed. Birth, beginning, hope, yet everything tinged with unexplained discontent. Why?

‘Espiñas’, ‘ingrato’, ‘duro cravo me encravaches’, these came next, pointing to discomfort, dismay, physical pain. The cause: Mauro.

The last two lines puzzled Lavinia the most, and of those two the second, closure for the poem, puzzled her most of all:

Nin eu teño mais que darche,

nin ti máis que me pedir.

Is the relationship over, then? Has Rosa sacrificed everything? Has Mauro taken all she had, since he can’t ask for anything more? She is angry. Has he forced his will on her? Deceived her, convinced her to surrender, then left her? For another? What is it about this poem that defies what seems to be a simple interpretation? Is this about rape? That final anger…

“Rosa and Mauro,” muses Lavinia. “Rosa” is the flower and apparently coincides with Rosalía, but could it be meant to send us in the wrong direction when we should be looking at the contrast between the characters’ chromatic features? One is rose-colored or pink (rosado) and the other is dark, ‘mouro’, black. Is this meant playfully, as a poetic construct, or do the words express anger? There is a love-hate relationship, which is the worst sort two people can have. A painful love that also seems improbable. Innocence versus evil.

Was Rosalía possibly referring to love between two women? There’s no basis for that interpretation, of course, so why entertain it?

Was Rosalía instead camouflaging the fact that she had a love-hate relationship with Galicia? Is the Mauro here to be associated with the negra sombra from 1880, in the next volume of poetry, Follas Novas? The black shadow in the latter poem haunts the speaker, threatening her and resisting her. Mauro the name refers to something dark. He does seem persistent, for Rosa can’t forget him.

On the other hand, maybe the darkness signaled by Mauro not evil or lethal, but instead something unknown or forbidden by religion, custom, or political powers? Is that darkness, not as easily identified because it prohibits the gaze from entering, simply the shadow of depression or shame? Just one of those existential things philosophy would later analyze more closely and critics would insist was Rosalía’s reason for writing both poems?

What if Rosalía was ashamed of being angry at Mauro, a Mauro who has hurt her but whom she needs and has not yet been able to eliminate from her life? Has Rosalía once again used the concept of cross-dressing so that Mauro could be the male symbol of Galicia, the motherland? Mauro, the mouro or dark one, haunting her every step, hurting her yet also loved, like the negra sombra years later? Surely Rosa, in this poem by Rosalía, does not feel Mauro as a darkness caused because her mother Teresa Castro brought her into the world sinfully, the product of a liaison with a priest? Critics often liked that theory, but Lavinia wasn’t buying it.

Lavinia finally laughs at her foolish attempts to make everything right with the world of the poem. She would continue the next day. Maybe eventually she’d figure it out.

—————-

I don’t think the attempts were foolish; far-fetched, creative, but not foolish. I am the translator of the English version, as my initials probably told you. I have also edited this episode, “The Choice.” I could also throw in a couple of literary studies of the poem, but will save them for another time. I’ll also spare you some wildly different English translations, although I’ll leave a couple of links here just in case you’re interested:

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/nasin-cando-prantas-nasen-rexurdimente-i-was-born-when.html

https://archivedrosaliadecastro.neocities.org

Guess I’m most comfortable with my own version, although right now it’s just a draft. It’s how my language, English, spoke to me. Your version, should you attempt a translation, will be different. My biggest jolts were the verbs that were in jagged sequence, slicing up my efforts to situate the text in time. Go back and look; I find the tenses quite slippery, to be honest.

Maybe this is why I keep going back to the original text and time, trying to find the author. Maybe we all should keep starting at the beginning, listening to Rosalía, like we listen to various musical versions of her poetry. Maybe that’s why I’m not inclined to reject all of Lavinia’s machinations, even if she gave up trying to understand the poem. It’s really a set of verses that open up, then fold back in on themselves, tucking an unmentioned truth among the folds of feelings. Mauro the shadow fades into the background while Rosa, in the end, states how things are between them.

We ought to always return to the original creator and her creation - if we can locate them - so they remain open to us readers. Too many critics have led us astray, building a poem that doesn’t exist. Yet I have here made up my own story to add to the swirl of ideas. Until we find more pages in Rosalía’s diary, we just don’t know.

My task is done here, but only for the moment. Yours may be just beginning, and when ready to continue, I will. You see, I have no choice. Once you start reading Rosalía, you cannot stop.