by Guillermo Rebollo Gil

The 1977 bilingual edition of famed Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri’s work, Obituario Puertorriqueño, published by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan, was meant to offer island readers the definitive versions of his most important poems to date. In the prologue,  translator Alfredo Matilla laments how previous publications, including the author’s first full length collection, Puerto Rican Obituary (1973), contained ‘altered’ or ‘corrected’ or ‘preliminary’ or ‘incomplete’ drafts of his poems. Unfortunately, Obituario is riddled with typos, at least in the original English pieces. The Spanish translations, on the other hand, are fine.

Matilla was a university professor and writer. He was also the father of a high school classmate of mine, who brought a copy of Obituario to home room, some twenty years removed from its initial publication, the week we were discussing Puerto Rican migration to the US. In the prologue, Matilla looks to introduce Pietri to Spanish-speaking audiences, calling attention to how roughly a third of Puerto Rico is composed of English-speakers. He highlights the importance of Pietri’s poetic output to potential island readers by stating that Pietri’s work is the “most coherent and precise” codification of the process of Americanization that Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican culture were experimenting due to mass migration to the US. Today, more Puerto Ricans live in the US than on the archipelago. Yet, Obituario remains the only bilingual edition of Pietri’s poems published in Puerto Rico.¹ The book contains only five poems. It is also out of print. 

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Pietri’s most famous poem, hands down, is “Puerto Rican Obituary,” which serves as a brilliant, gut-wrenching denouncement of Puerto Rican life and death in the empire. But many island readers, I’ve found, are overly fond of “Tata,” which opens Obituario, and reads in full as follows:

Mi abuela

has been

in this dept store

called america

for the past twenty-five years

She is eighty-five years old

and does not speak

a word of english

That is intelligence (4)

Islanders, I would venture to say, like it because it can be read as a defense of the Spanish language as integral to Puerto Rican identity. It should be noted that at the time of Obituario’s publication—and many would rightly argue that still today—Puerto Ricans in the diaspora are treated with suspicion and/or derision by their island counterparts, who consider them less-than-authentic members of the Puerto Rican nation. By this logic, Tata is a heroic character insofar as she did not let herself become corrupted by American culture. It is as if the poem were saying that this is the only form of intelligence. As if the poem were not intelligent also: the speaker’s recognition of his elder’s political agency signals respect, admiration and most of all, complicity. The grandmother resists the empire by refusing to speak its language, while the grandson resists by documenting the elderly woman’s radical stubbornness, in English. Notice also the only words capitalized in the text: Mi (my), She, and That. They sketch out a cartography of what matters to the speaker: the fact that I belong to her, that she is who she is, the special sort of intelligence she has. Read this way, the poem is my favorite too. 

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In 1971, Pietri performed at Casa Puerto Rico, a cultural center in New York. A vinyl recording of the performance was put out by Coquí Records under the title “¡Aquí se habla español! y otros poemas de protesta…y chistes” (“Spanish is spoken here! And other protest poems…and jokes”). In the bilingual track listing, “Puerto Rican Obituary” is rendered in Spanish as “Sentida nota de duelo” (“my heartfelt condolence”) and “The Broken English Dream” as “El sueño newyorquino” (“the new yorker dream”). The translations thus function as an erasure of sorts: Puerto Rican obituary is no longer about the haunting specificities of Puerto Rican life and death in New York, and the broken English dream now belongs to anybody in the city, regardless of how they come to inhabit, imagine, and suffer there. The actual poems, of course, subvert this. From “The Broken English Dream”:

Lápiz: Pencil

Pluma: Pen

Cocina: Kitchen

Gallina: Hen

Everyone who learns this

Will receive a high school equivalency diploma

A lifetime supply of employment agencies

A different bill collector for every day of the week

The right to vote for the executioner of your choice (24)

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Pedro Pietri is the reason I started reading and caring about poetry some twenty plus years ago. Well, Pietri and Matilla. And Matilla’s son as well, who let me borrow his signed copy of Obituario, which is the first poetry book I held thinking, This is poetry.

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Today in Puerto Rico, concerns remain about how many of us are leaving for the states. But there is the added, more pressing concern of who is arriving (crypto bros and such) to buy up the land and take up space here. I was wondering what sitting with Pietri’s poems—sitting with their intelligence—might make possible as it pertains to radical thought in our contemporary moment. For example, what would the grandmother’s stubbornness look like in this context? How would a grandchild go about recognizing and honoring and mirroring said stubbornness today? 

So I picked up my copy of Obituario, which I had never returned to my friend. And I put the Casa Puerto Rico album on the record player. And the first thing I thought was, Pedro Pietri is funny. Was funny. Typo, sorry.

Guillermo Rebollo Gil (San Juan, 1979) is a writer, sociologist, translator, and attorney. His publications include poetry in Fence, Poetry Northwest, Second Factory and Whale Road Review; literary criticism in Cleveland Review of Books and Annulet; scholarly articles in the Journal of Autoethnography and Liminalities. He serves as an editor at The Autoethnographer and associate CNF editor at JMWW.  In 2023, his translation of Cindy Jiménez Vera’s poem “El fin de los tiempos” was selected for inclusion in the Best of the Net Anthology. In 2020, the Spanish publisher Ediciones Liliputienses published a selection of his poetry under the title Informe de Logros: poemas 2000-2019. He is the author of Writing Puerto Rico: Our Decolonial Moment (2018) and Whiteness in Puerto Rico: Translation at a Loss (2023).

1. A second, revised and expanded edition was published in 2003 by Isla Negra Editores. It is out of print as well. ↩︎