100 Refutations: Day 29

Written by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Translated from the Spanish by Lina M. Ferreira C.-V.

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April, 2018

A Longing for Vengeance

Powerful apparition of hurricanes,
violent, like this grief that shakes me!
Come, rile me up!
Come, with your breath stoke like a flame my mind!

Let lightning hiss and with a clamor crack,
while—like dry leaf, like wilted flower—
the gust of your breath, the oak fells.
Broken and castoff, into the roaring river!

From this soul that invokes and follows you,
envying, as she does, the vastness of your devastation,
sowing on every side, strange confusions.

Come…to the twisted pain that devours her,
unleash your cruelty,
and dry the tears that coward weeps!

Bios

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) was a well-known author and playwright who lived nearly half of her life in her native Cuba and the other half in Spain. Her first novel, Sab, was an antislavery novel that predates Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin by a decade. Because of its abolitionist and feminist content, Sab was banned in Cuba until 1914, 73 years after it was first published.

Lina M. Ferreira C.-V.

Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. earned MFAs in creative nonfiction writing and literary translation from The University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous Press and Don’t Come Back from Mad River Books, as well as editor, with Sarah Viren, of the forthcoming anthology Essaying the Americas. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation work has been featured in journals including Bellingham Review, Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers, and The Sunday Rumpus, among others. She won Best of the Net and Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices Award, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus, Ohio to Richmond, Virginia, where she works as an assistant professor for Virginia Commonwealth University. Visit www.linawritesessays.com.

English translation copyright (c) Lina M. Ferreira C.-V., 2018.