"Our Readers"

by Nick Lawrence

At a poetry translation workshop in Havana in 2001, Cuban poet Omar Pirez and I translated one of my poems together and came up pretty much with a line-by-line version. The poem was called "Our Readers," which he translated as "Nuestros lectores." He significantly did not choose "Nuestro pzblico," which for me was appropriate for the poem - it wasn't really a publicly addressed poem.

Since we were at a large poetry festival, I attended a series of readings by several different generations of Cuban poets. I was interested in the way issues of address got mediated by the assumptions implicit or explicit about audience among those varying generations.

For example, critic and poet Roberto Fernandez Retamar had as his implied audience for a lengthy talk on poetry and language the widest possible sort of literarily inclined audience - an audience that I think mirrors the kind that he addresses in his poems. Many of those older poets use an address which involves a kind of spelling out of recognized truths, or truths that are at least identifiable through a common culture. I think there's a kind of social romanticism that attends the early waves of revolutionary rhetoric.

With the younger poets, the ones who most interested me, in their 20s or 30s, there wasn't that assumption at all. They took it in very different directions. I think Carlos Aguilera addresses an audience of peers across languages and mostly scattered elsewhere, whereas Omar was working more within the Spanish and Cuban cultural traditions. His poems were subtly referencing dance forms: mambo, salsa, and so on. They weren't "Mambo! Salsa!" - they weren't publicly addressed in that way.