The Dirty Text / El Texto Sucio by Soleida Ríos

The Dirty Text by Soleida Ríos, translated by Barbara Jamison and Olivia Lott

Image description: The cover of the English language side of The Dirty Text by Soleida Ríos. The title is written in a large size in the center in a white/beige stencil font, with the name of the translators in black in the bottom left corner. The cover image appears to be a grainy zoomed in color photograph of a person’s eye and eye brow, with a bit of forehead and cheek.

What is a dirty text? The adjective is suggestively multiple in its definitions. First, dirty as in literal dirt. Here I think of Bhanu Kapil casting her manuscript out into her garden, to allow it to defer, decompose, ferment. Moving next through the porous border between physical and spiritual gives dirty as unclean or imund. Cixous’s reading (translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers) of Clarice Lispector (from The Passion According to G.H.; passage translated by Cixous herself, I think) is relevant here:

Cixous and Lispector:

Now what about what is called in French l’immonde, in Brazilian imundo, and in the English the unclean? This is what Clarice says:

I was knowing that the Bible’s impure animals are forbidden because the imund is the root. For there are things created that have never made themselves beautiful, and have stayed just as they were when created, and only they continue to be the entirely complete root, they are not to be eaten. The fruit of good and evil, the eating of living matter, would expel me from the paradise of adornment and require me to walk forever through the desert with a shepherd’s staff. Many have been those who have walked in the desert with a staff.

To build a possible soul, a soul whose head will not devour its own tail, the law commands that one uses only what is patently alive. And the law commands that whoever partakes of the imund, must do so without knowing; for, he who partakes of the imund knowing that it is imund, must also come to know that the imund is not imund. Is that it?

She quotes the Bible:

And everything that crawls on the ground and has wings shall be imund, and shall not be eaten.

I opened my mouth in fright to ask for help. Why? Because I did not want to become imund like the cockroach. What ideal held me from the sensing of an idea? Why should I not make myself imund? Exactly as I was revealing my whole self, what was I afraid of? Being imund? With what?

Being imund with joy.

That is my theme for today: to be ‘imund,’ to be unclean with joy. Immonde, that is, out of the mundus (the world). The monde, the world, that is so-called clean. The world that is on the good side of the law, that is ‘proper,’ the world of order. The moment you cross the line the law has drawn by wording, verb(aliz)ing, you are supposed to be out of the world. You no longer belong to the world.

And of course, there is also dirty in the sense of smut, pornography. Here I think of Kathy Acker, whose texts are often unflinchingly perverse and appropriative (a dirty move if you still believe in originality and the single author). The notion of a dirty text also invites speculation into its opposite, a clean text: monologic, coherent, bowdlerized, with every imperfection—or innovation—smoothed out of it.

In deference to my ongoing commitment to write about where my books come from: The Dirty Text / El Texto Sucio arrived in a package of Kenning Books sent to me by Patrick Durgin, who I’m helping to promote the forthcoming Festivals of Patience, the new book of Rimbaud translations by Brian Kim Stefans, and Coronavirus Haiku, an anthology of poems from the Workers Writers School, edited by Mark Nowak, which form an archive of responses to, among other things, the intersecting crises of capitalism and the pandemic.

To be clear, Patrick didn’t ask me to do anything with (e.g. blog about) the other books he sent, but I like several of the authors, and Kenning’s editorial perspective, so I’m reading my way through a catalog in a way I haven’t done since a few friends and I made a pilgrimage to see the Waldrops and departed, each with a grocery bag full of Burning Deck titles (reader, it was a good day). I guess in pointing to the proximity of monetary exchange to this encounter could also be said to be an acknowledgment that my choice to try to make my living, as well as my life, from literature is one that involves ambiguous (dirty) entanglements. Cards on the table, I am skeptical that that it is as possible, or as admirable, as some think it is to be a disinterested reader—even for those who’ve chosen a more partitioned path. Although neither do I wish to be misunderstood as amoral realpolitikal schemer—I’m just suspicious of purity! Well, now that that’s (un)settled…

I learned from Kristin Dykstra’s afterword that The Dirty Text was first published in Spanish in 1999, and from Ríos’s bio that this is her first book to appear in English (Jamison and Lott’s translation was published in 2018). As I read, Ríos’s The Dirty Text brought to my mind the literal dreams, or the dream-like relationships to architectural and social space produced by works like Ayane Kawata’s Time of Sky and Castles in the Air, translated by Sawako Nakayasu, Renee Gladman’s Ravickian quartet, Syd Staiti’s The Undying Present, and Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun.

The Dirty Text asked to be read first; probably because, as I’ve discovered in writing the first paragraph of this blog entry, I am a partisan of dirt. The portal into the text is Olivia Lott’s “Co-Translator’s Note,” in which she narrates her divergence from the ‘typical’ translator’s introduction, in which the translator represents herself as, “impassioned discoverer of the work, stubborn proponent of its publication, expert mediator between author and reader.” Lott, on the other hand, was approached by Daniel Borzutsky as a candidate to revise the first draft of a translation produced by Jamison for publication (since Barbara Jamison died before being able to complete the project). Hence, as Lott puts it, “To a certain extent, I was translating both author and translator.” As such, “The Dirty Text,” for Lott, “is just as much about giving Jamison’s translation an ‘afterlife’ as it is about affording Ríos’s work one.” Lott ends by gesturing towards the conversations she thinks (and I agree) we ought to be having about translation and collaboration.

Still with me? Thank you, for following me through a thousand words of playing in the dirty—and dragging my favorite authors into the mud with me! Onward to the Text, itself! The Dirty Text is made up of relatively short (a few pages each, on average) discrete sections, demarcated with a title at the beginning and the date at the end. To my mind, titling is literary (as opposed to a diary not meant for the public). That the entries are dated gives them the quality of a (dream) journal. Brought by Lott into the vestibule, how to enter into Ríos’s entries?

The section “YES, THIS WATER” is labeled, “(For tourists only),” and since, unlike Soleida Ríos, I am not Cuban (although I’d like to think we’re both denizens of the uncountry of dreams), I’ll start here. The passage, written in the first person singular, helpfully begins, “The setting is the Cuban Heritage Foundation, but not La Casona in the Plaza Vieja.” Is the narrator Soleida? Or the woman called Soledad who seems to be her textual avatar. In either case, she is at this Foundation, where objects and (objectified) women are on display for the enjoyment of the visitors. Although it should be stressed that neither this piece, nor the collection as a whole, seems intended as an object lesson. Criticism of dream-writing means reading the nocturnal in the light of day, but its challenge is to scrutinize dream-logic without overwriting it.

Where is the water? First, “One of the women bathes in a fountain, pretends that she’s bathing to be looked at, like the objects and furniture, by the ones who come to gaze at something. The bathing woman stands up, naked. The water is invisible.” The clarity and transparency of the water as a medium for the gaze of the spectators seems to disclose everything—everything, that is, except that this is a performance of exhibitionism. The other water, the “this water” of the title, is in the narrator’s purse, not contained in a bottle but presumably sloshing loose. One of the viewers, a man, naturally, dips his fingers into her water, hailing her and in so doing forcing her out of the margin and into being if not part of the performance, then part of the evening’s entertainment.

This man, “reaches his hand in my purse, which must’ve been left open, and says, ‘yes, this water,’ as if to say that the water in my purse isn’t part of the performance.” The self-awareness of this gesture makes the entitlement that much worse. “He wets the woman’s face, his wife. He wets the woman’s face as if it might be good for her.” Here, in a flick of the fingers, a parodic baptism, and a triangulation of sexual energy.

“She accepts it, it’s clear it doesn’t make her uneasy, she sees no danger, because she begins to tell about a day when she was truly shaken…” Reading this I become a woman watching a woman watching another woman absorb her husband’s gesture. What was it that left her so much more shaken than in this moment? She describes her husband going “for a swim in what looked like an oasis, a stunning site flush with color.” And why shouldn’t he have? I reflect back on the beginning of the piece, “for tourists only,” when I read these next lines, “He swam under the water, face down, he was too trusting, she says, just enjoying himself… and that meant real great danger, it would come to mean great danger.”

Does this woman genuinely fear for her husband’s safety? I don’t want to overstate my case, but I feel like there is something here. Maybe this couple are tourists, and she perceives this sense of entitlement to the land itself as not only an extension of the entitlement he feels towards other women, but somehow an intensification of it. The narrator (Soleida? Soledad?) writes:

I couldn’t know what this danger was, but I remember, instead, the landscape. I see the first man here and I see him far away, swimming in clear water. I saw cliffs, too, and I saw the blue of the sky. It wasn’t because of the woman telling the story. I could recall the landscape because I knew it too.

Not, “I didn’t know,” but, “I couldn’t know.” Why is this information inaccessible to the narrator? At the risk of oversimplification, the narrator and her interlocutor are both women, but the narrator is not a tourist, and thus isn’t susceptible to the colonial-erotic abandon of the husband or the fraught complicity of the wife in said abandon. Nor is the narrator the intended audience for the performance being staged by the Cuban Heritage Foundation. Her connection to the landscape being described is, as much as possible, direct and unmediated. 

“I could recall the landscape because I knew it.” In Spanish, “Yo recordaba ese paisaje porque también lo conocía.” I’m a relative novice at Spanish, so I’m not sure whether conocer, as one of the verbs meaning ‘to know,’ also carries the connotation of what we describe idiomatically in English as knowing someone, ‘in the biblical sense,’ but the connotation leaps out at me in the English translation because of the current of libidinal energy rippling through this short text. From which it follows that the narrator had known this landscape in the same way the man had, albeit with different implications.

I’m cutting myself off for now, but “YES, THIS WATER” is just one small dip into this rich generative text, and I look forward to returning to The Dirty Text and spending some time more of its constituent texts in the near future.