A Review of Fiat Lux

by | Apr 23, 2023

A Review of Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo (McAllen, Texas: FlowerSong Press, 2022)

Paula Abramo’s Fiat Lux is a new bilingual edition of one of the most interesting poetry collections in contemporary Mexico. Abramo is part of a generation that shares “a compulsive and generalized interest” in poetry from elsewhere in Latin America according to Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre. The book was originally published in Spanish in Mexico in 2012 and in Argentina in 2020, translated into English by Dick Cluster. Fabre notes in La Edad de Oro (UNAM, 2012) that Fiat Lux is a break from the Mexican poetic tradition that conceives the poem “as a suspended moment of illumination, outside of history and the calendar, inscribed into eternity” (14). Abramo’s generation wants to move in the opposite direction:

. . . incorporating the poem’s context in the poem itself. This attitude implies that poetry is not outside, or above the rest of the world. They want to see poetry as a language that relates to time and place in which it is created. More than writing as form of testimony or a protest, they see the poem as something they stamp a date on it. (Fabre 13)

 Firmly rooted in place and time, Fiat Lux delves into the past of Abramo’s own family, basing characters and situations on Abramo’s family stories and on her grandfather’s letters, written during exile from Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Abramos left Italy in the early 20th century and made their mark on Brazilian culture and politics. Paula revisits three generations of her family in Europe and the Americas. Loosely placed in chronological order, the stories are introduced with a unifying motif: lyrical reflections on the act of lighting a match (his great-grandmother worked in a match factory) and the biblical “let there be light” or fiat lux (the name of the most famous matchbox brand in Brazil). These sections in italics endow the book with a remarkable sense of cohesion.

The fascinating characters give the lyricism in Fiat Lux a strong narrative component. There is Paula’s grandfather, Fúlvio Abramo (1909-1993), who led the Frente Única Antifascista [FUA] in street confrontations with fascists in the 1930s. Jailed by the Vargas regime in 1935, Fúlvio fled to Bolivia, where he lived for ten years teaching at the agricultural and veterinary schools in Santa Cruz de la Sierra until 1945, when Vargas fell and Fúlvio  returned to Brazil. Other remarkable characters are Fúlvio’s parents, a couple that combined Vincenzo Abramo’s cultural and artistic interests with Yole Scarmagnan’s family’s militant tradition — her father, Bortolo Scarmagnan, a veteran of anarchist causes, also makes a striking appearance. Towards the end of Fiat Lux, Paula also reimagines the moment Marcelo Abramo Lauff (her father) escaped the encroaching military regime in Brazil and fled to Mexico, where she was born.

There are numerous prose sources for the story of the famous family, but none of them can replace Fiat Lux because Paula provides a solid poetic structure that enhances its narrative quality and its lyricism strongly grounded in life. It is significant that Fiat Lux interrupts its narrative flow just as Marcelo Abramo goes to Mexico. In the age of the selfie and of autofiction, Fiat Lux remains at once deeply personal and immune to self-centered egotism or confessional exhibitionism. There is no trace of self-indulgence in a book that repeats Fúlvio’s motto: “no mires hacia dentro,” wonderfully translated by as “Don’t navel-gaze.” The characters are politically engaged working-class people fighting against dismal working conditions, exploitation, and brutal repressions with an ethos that infuses the poetic voice with vitality and gives Fiat Lux a impressive sense of urgency. The dead are brought to life without nostalgia or even melancholy; they are back on the pages of Fiat Lux to celebrate the will to keep fighting.

 Fiat Lux also creates a multilingual space: the original in Spanish contains several words, expressions and passages in Portuguese, Italian, Greek, and Latin. I am glad that this is a bilingual edition, but this multilingualism poses, of course, a great challenge for any translator. Dick Cluster faces the task at hand and, in my opinion, does a good job. The most complicated hurdle was to decide when to render in English passages in languages other than Spanish or to leave them untranslated in italics, as they appear in the original.

In several moments Cluster opts to translate into English the untranslated Latin in the original. There is good ground to support this decision, since Latin is much less legible for readers of English than readers of Spanish. This is not a consistent decision throughout the book. For example, in “In Memory of Stefania Lauff, Match Factory Girl” (23-28), Cluster renders in English several quotes from Genesis in Latin, but not all of them. While lines such as “Dixitque deus” are translated as “For God said” (keeping the italics but erasing any trace of the Latin in the original), half of a stanza in the poem is translated while the other half is kept in Latin. The source text reads:

In principio creavit deus caelum

at terram.

Terra autem

erat

inanis. (23-4)

while the translation reads:

In principio creavit deus caelum

at terram.

And the earth

was

void. (26-7)

The same inconsistency can be found in the Portuguese passages: some of them are left in Portuguese, others are translated into English. One example suffices. A stanza entirely written in Portuguese—arguably taken from an advertising piece from the actual matchbox factory that once dominated the market in Brazil, even though there are no italics or quotation marks in the original—is rendered partially in Portuguese, but mostly in English:

Produtos tradicionais da Companhia Fiat Lux,

safety matches,há mais de vinte anos fabricando

and distributing

matches

throughout Brazil. 

These inconsistencies are not important, especially in a bilingual edition. Most importantly they do not affect the excellence of the translation. Cluster does what really matters: he manages to capture Abramo’s warm and exacting poetic voice, a voice that retains its objectivity and carefully examines the surface of things in poignant description, exploring the potential of both vernacular and erudite words and expressions, and avoiding the conventions of an “elevated” poetic diction and the feel of an experiment for the experiment’s sake.

Paulo Da Luz Moreira is an Associate Professor of Portuguese at the University of Oklahoma. He has published more than twenty articles on Brazilian, Mexican, U.S., and Latin American literature, cinema, and culture. He has published two books, Localismo Modernista: Faulkner, Guimarães Rosa e Rulfo (Editora UFMG, 2012) and Literary and Cultural Relations Between Brazil and Mexico: Deep Undercurrents (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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