Elsa Cross Interviewed by Ramón García
ELSA CROSS (Mexico City 1946) is one of Mexico’s most prominent poets. A prolific poet and scholar, she has published over twenty-five books of poetry. Many of her books have been translated and published abroad. Among her numerous national and international awards are the National Prize of Arts and Literature (2016), and the International Prize Alfonso Reyes (2023), in Mexico, and the Roger Caillois Prize (Paris, 2010), the Poestate Prize (Lugano, 2015). Cross holds a PhD from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she is a professor of the Philosophy of Religion. She has also published many books of essays and translations of poetry from English and French.
The book from which the three poems are taken is titled Nepantla (2019), a Náhuatl word which designates an intermediary space, a liminal space between two levels of reality. Cross’s book, dedicated to Argentinian poet Juan Gelman and North American poet and translator John Oliver Simon, contains an epigraph from the Náhuatl Dictionary which defines nepantla as “in between, the state of being in-between.”
RG: You are a highly recognized poet in Mexico and Latin America; and you are equally a respected scholar in the fields of religion, mythology and literary studies. Does your scholarly work complement your poetry practice (your writing of poetry) or is it something distinct or separate from your work as a poet?
EC: For me, both tasks have always been very close to each other, because both of them come from a common source of interests, and I’ve found they have many points of confluence, although their expression may be so different. Many times, the content of some of my classes or articles have nourished some of my poems, and also the opposite.
RG: You’ve spoken about Pound as a significant influence. Are there other North American poets that you have been drawn to?
EC: I like many American poets, but none other has left as deep impression on my work. Not even Eliot. I don’t know why the poets that really had an influence on my writing were some of those I read when I was very young, during my years of learning. Some of my first readings were fragments from the Iliad, as well as Dante and Goethe. And besides them, I’ve felt very close to poems by Rilke, Cavafis, Elytis, Ungaretti, Neruda, García Lorca, and Mexican poets like Ramón Lopez Velarde and Octavio Paz. Later on, I’ve read a lot of poets, but only a handful have truly resonated with me.
RG: You belong to a very accomplished generation of Mexican poets. Do you think there are some qualities that make your generation of Mexican poets distinct from the generation that preceded it and the generation (s) that followed it?
EC: It’s difficult to give any judgement on that subject. I feel that, in Mexico, poets of the preceding generations opened a path for us, but mine was a generation that experienced a profound break with the status quo. We lived through the ’68 movement, which was incredibly tragic for students in Mexico, and which was part of a total crisis of values. Each of us emerged from the void this left us, as best we could. To me, the best poet of my generation was David Huerta.
RG: Your mentor was Octavio Paz. Is there something you learned from him that you still practice or that has remained with you?
EC: I don’t think Octavio Paz was ever a mentor to anyone. He wouldn’t have even the time for it. My mentor was Juan José Arreola, since I attended his literary workshop, when I was very young, and it was there that I decided to write –as a life task. What I learned in that workshop has become part of my writing. Yet, I learned a lot, and still do, from Octavio Paz -–not things that I have to practice, but knowledge.
RG: It’s my sense that Paz is a contentious or controversial figure in Mexico today. Am I correct in my assessment? In the US and in the rest of the world his reputation has not diminished or been questioned. Is the current reevaluation of Paz a generational divide?
EC: Octavio Paz was almost always a controversial figure. Not so much today, he died 27 years ago, and I feel he is not very present now, although his work is still completely relevant, and will always have a great significance for Mexican literature and culture. I have missed him; I have missed his lucidity. I wonder what he would say about public life in Mexico today –among other things.
RG: I know that you attended a writers conference in Tijuana in 2019, on the occasion of the city’s 130th anniversary. Mexico has historically been very centralized in terms of cultural production. It has been the case that almost all art and culture in Mexico has originated in Mexico City. Do you think this is changing?
EC: Centralization has been a problem, but for a long time now, there are international book fairs and literary events almost everywhere in the country, as well as publishing houses, literary reviews, conferences, writers meetings, etc. And many of the good writers and artists of today —and of yesterday—have come from the provinces. I hope “culture” doesn’t go to waste during this present government, which doesn’t seem to understand —as the preceding government failed to do so also—that culture goes far beyond folk dances and typical handcrafts. They appear to believe “culture” is for the elite, alien to ordinary people. The result is that Mexico has descended now to one of the lowest levels of education.
RG: I learned your full name by doing a google search on you, and since I’m nosy I asked you about the Anzaldúa in your name. It turns out that you are related to the celebrated Chicana poet, Gloria Anzaldúa. It seems to me that the one thing you both have in common (it might be the only thing), is that as a poet Anzaldúa was also interested in mysticism. She says in Borderlands: La Frontera that she is “a Marxist, with mystic leanings.” How are you related to her?
EC: I don’t know Gloria Anzaldúa; I know about her work, although I haven’t read it. We must be related somehow, quite distantly now, since what I know about this name (which is my mother’s family name) is that two Anzaldúa brothers, Manuel and Fernando, arrived in Mexico from the Basque region in Spain, by the end of the 18th century, when Texas was still part of Mexico, and their families grew on what later became the two sides of the border. And they grew a lot, since the name is now quite extended.
RG: The poems I’ve translated here come from your book Nepantla; they revisit the pre-Columbian myths and symbols of an earlier book of yours Jaguar (1991). The poems have an ecstatic or mystical undercurrent that is present in some of your other books, Canto Malabar, for example. Can you tell me a bit more about this book and how you place it in your work as a whole?
EC: Jaguar came as a result of extensive travels I made in Mexico in the middle and late 80s, and before it, Canto Malabar was written during a two years residence in India, where I was almost in a constant contemplative state. Nepantla I have no idea where it came from. I started writing it in Paris, and finished it in Rome, some years later. I can’t relate it to anything, or at least any experience of mine. It’s an enigma to me, as some of my other books are too. Yet, I feel the poems bear consistency and inner force. Through all the book there is this play among two things, but the main emphasis is on being between life and death.
RG: To conclude, can you tell us what are you currently working on?
EC: I’m trying to finish all the books I’ve started, since years ago – poetry, essay, translations, and a book of short stories for children. This year will appear a very large book of poems, whose title is Tu otro nombre (Your other name), and I’m about to finish also a quite extensive anthology of Indian mystical poetry (from India), which contains 31 poets (eight of them are women). I’m translating from English and French, since I don’t know any of the Indian languages –and there are eight or nine of them in this anthology. I hope I’ll have enough time to finish it all. Next year I’ll turn 80.
Poems from Nepantla, translated by Ramón García
In the tree’s height
birds simulate yellow leaves
Creatures
enter and exit life
in blind dazzlement
self-stunned
without mistrusting what
takes one’s breath away
blocking its return
What remains
are their feathers
dispersed upon the earth
or their cartilage
sparkling on the water
Or at twilight
the waterlilies shut
and submerge
forever
Between what appears
and dissipates
life tumbles
and its instants
dance like leaves
free to die
joyous
in their flight
and in their fall
on the earth where they shortly disintegrate
becoming a fever of ants
aswarm
And its dream rises
in new branches
or remains bared
in its silence
Which flower or which bark
which root perfumes the air
upon crossing that space
like a threshold unto another world?
Scattered trees
in a trace of mountain
grow from sprigs of the cut off tree
sacred tree
speaking tree—
and its magic upon discovering
if the moon inclines its calf horns
like a good omen
Thoughts veer so rapidly
that they seem motionless
Occult harmonies—
serpents and their music
their inaudible trilling
