Cecilia Vicuña’s Deer Book – The Brooklyn Rail

Cecilia Vicuna
Deer Book
Translation by Daniel
Borzutzky
(Radius Books, 2024)

Bound by a common thread, a characteristic motif that runs through her entire work, Deer Book unfolds slowly as a visual mapping of the deer’s mythological and cosmological associations. “This book began in the borderlands,” Vicuña writes in the afterword, “when my partner, the Texas poet James O’Hern, and I visited Lower Pecos in 2004 to study the 4,000-year-old rock paintings of a ritual dance between deer and jaguar.” But, as the artist is quick to tell, the book – which combines handwritten and typed poems, drawings, photographs and quotes – has several other origins. In the mid-’80s, the decade after her exile from Chile following Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, Vicuña first encountered Flower World Variations (1984), a collection of poems by Jerome Rottenberg that translate the traditional deer dance songs of the Yaqui/Yoeme. The deer dance is rooted in Yaqui cosmologies, which imagine nine different but interconnected worlds, or “a network of mutually dependent relationships,” as Vicuña writes. In Yaqui tradition, the deer lives in one of these different worlds, the world of flowers, but can also move to other worlds. With its ability to move fluidly between these worlds, the deer, says Vicuña, is sometimes interpreted in indigenous cultures as a translator, shape-shifter, “master of transformation.” As a subject of uncertainty and sacrifice, Vicuña sees the deer as a symbol of the history of migration, of life between languages, a liminal space that the artist has often explored over the past half century.

In terms of content and form, the origins lie Deer Book goes back to an earlier volume of poetry, Saborami (Beau Geste, 1973), which was recently republished in a facsimile edition by Book Works (2024). Felipe Ehrenberg described it in the foreword as a work of “untranslation”, Saborami was among the first books to respond to the coup, a moment of “disintegrated language” in which many, including the artist, fled Chile and found themselves living between fragmented languages ​​and cultures. While the two books are unique in their subject matter and tone, there is an obvious common thread in the artist’s engagement with the fragmented reality of diasporic language, an experience of in-betweenness that she conceptually embodies in the otherworldly image of the deer.

While Deer Book is written in both Spanish and English, but the languages ​​do not always directly reflect each other. Rottenberg describes Variations as a work of “total translation,” rendering the words, repetitions, and rhythms of the original Yaqui songs into English. Similarly, Vicuña worked closely with translator Daniel Borzutzky on the English and Spanish texts, tailoring the reader’s experience of the text specifically to their understanding of one or both languages, though some underlying meanings, puns, and associations are inevitably lost in translation. Through this particular translation process, Vicuña illustrates a concept she refers to as “trá”—derived from the “translat” in “translation,” which comes from the Latin “carried across”—to describe acts of translation across cultures, languages, and, in the case of the deer, transworld migration.

The hard cover and heavy paper give Deer Book an apparent density, although the mixture of heavy and translucent pages recalls the slight uncertainty that characterizes much of the artist’s work. Aesthetically, the book refers to many aspects of SaboramiThe endpapers of Deer Book are spotty, inky blue and link to similar pages in Saboramiwhich were printed with dried, hand-dyed leaves. The yellow and red colored paper and the headband were Deer Book also makes direct reference to the color palette of Saborami. And red sheets of parchment paper (traditionally made from animal skin) underline individual sections of the later book. A yellow “map” folds out and contains handwritten notes from Vicuña’s sketchbooks. The map is a web of ideas that connects deer symbolism in different cultures with theories of translation. It forms a loose table of contents for the following, unnumbered pages.

In each section of the book, Vicuña draws metaphors between the deer and poetry as genre and form. Just as the song of the Yaqui deer lures the animal into other worlds, translation is a reciprocal act—words move between languages ​​and are brought into being through the act of crossing (the trá in translation). In some sections, she deconstructs and reassembles text through multiple iterations, referencing the repetitive nature of the deer song. One poem, “Venada palabra flor” (Deer Word Flower), for example, contains such repetitions, with “la venada” breaking down into “la ve nada / ve la nada / madre del Ser” (literally: the doe / sees nothing / nothing sees her / mother of being), which becomes a familiar refrain throughout the book. Vicuña’s readings unfold in similar ways; through songs, chants, and gossamer, high-pitched incantations that switch rapidly between Spanish, English, and Quechua, she alters pronunciation, subtly alters meaning, or even renders it unrecognizable. By breaking language down into its component parts—a register of phonemes articulated through the tradition of orality—Vicuña engages with the poetic as a hybrid form of articulation. Like the mythological deer, “a poem lives in the in-between,” Vicuña writes, “in the interval between languages.”

Back to the borderland, one of the many precarious places from which Deer Book Vicuña’s work examines the fleeting gaps and subjectivities between languages, asking what other meanings might emerge if the boundaries between languages ​​were to dissolve. In this way, Vicuña approaches language not as a translatable but a mutable speech act. Vicuña makes clear that many experiences of diaspora, displacement, and dispossession exist beyond language and articulation. But it is in this gap that Vicuña refines the ineffable, or the act of poetic disarticulation—a transgressive, translative form of language manifested in the titular animal. Her book offers a meditative ode to the deer as a transdimensional being, addressing the felt experience of transition between cultures, between translations, between other forms of transcendence that transcend permeable boundaries.