Poems From the Collection “Cardiopatías” by Oriette D’Angelo Translated by Lupita Eyde-Tucker

About Cardiopatías

The poems in this manuscript are from Oriette D’Angelo’s collection Cardiopatías which I’ve been translating from the Spanish since 2018. The poems in Cardiopatías (Heart Diseases) were written between the years of 2011 and 2014— a time of great upheaval in Venezuela. When Oriette D’Angelo was 21 years old she began to explore the body and the city as two overlapping topics in her poetry. D’Angelo experienced firsthand the slow devastation of her country under the government of Hugo Chávez, who lead the country to a condition of hunger, poverty, unemployment, and violence. In her poems, D’Angelo likens these conditions to a disease that permeates everything. At the time, D’Angelo was a law student while also writing poetry. Cardiopatías explores how it is to live under a repressive government which dictates how people have to live, and it explores how the body needs to survive under that repression. After working on the manuscript for two years, she sent the book to the Emerging Writers Prize granted by Monte Avila Editores, winning first place, which led to the publication of the book. The original is now out of print and the rights reverted back to D’Angelo since 2019.

Besides being a work of political examination, the poems in Cardiopatías themselves are lyrical, vivid with imagery, and the use of form helps the reader understand the myriad ways that the city, the country, and the speaker, are diseased. The city— which in this case is Caracas— is a blocked bloodstream, which is assumed to be a disease, an ailment. It also explores the concept of disease as exile from the body. It’s a book that starts from the idea that each body is political and tries to save itself, even if that means cutting off a limb, or tissue, and feeling the absence of that part of the body forever. According to D’Angelo, “This book was born from the need to name the pain and the disease from the outside, assuming that the weight of our context affects our bodies.”

However, this book is not just a book of political poetry. The poems each paint individual pictures from different standpoints of coping with and fighting against disease. Some poems deal with cancer and chemotherapy, others with heart disease and heart attacks. Other poems deal with emergency rooms, car accidents, bone breakage, and neglect. Woven into the work as a whole, the poems present a tapestry of pain, mixed with hope, and an abiding will to survive despite the odds.

ORIETTE D’ANGELO (Author) (Caracas, 1990) is a PhD candidate in Spanish Literature at the University of Iowa and the editor of both the literary magazine Digo.palabra.txt and the research and broadcasting project #PoetasVenezolanas. She has an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from the University of Iowa, and an MA in digital communication and media arts from DePaul University. She is the author of two collections of poetry and two chapbooks, and she edited an anthology of young Venezuelan poets called Amanecimos Sobre la Palabra (Team Poetero Ediciones, 2017). Her poems have appeared in anthologies in Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, and Ecuador. Her website is http://www.oriettedangelo.com.

LUPITA EYDE-TUCKER (Translator) (New Jersey, 1971) writes and translates poetry in English and Spanish. She’s the winner of the 2021 Unbound Emerging Poet Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Women’s Voices for Change, Yemassee, Raleigh Review, Rattle, [PANK], Night Heron Barks, McNeese Review, and Jet Fuel Review. Lupita is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Florida, and has recently received support from Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, New York Summer Writers Institute, and was awarded a resident fellowship by Vermont Studio Center in 2022. Read more of her poems and translations here: www.NotEnoughPoetry.com

25 October 2022