Mama Grande

Notes

Don’t we all want a mama grande leading our wagon through the fields?

This is a poem which celebrates women’s often uncelebrated power. It elevates the titular matriarchal figure; wryly comments on women’s unpaid labour, which is contrasted with the men who laze around; and explores the power of the female gaze, focusing on both the mama grande’s tiny-eyed omniscience and the girl looking out of the wagon.

When translating, we opted to keep a few phrases in Spanish. We went for ‘mama grande’ rather than ‘big’ or ‘grand mama’, situating her as a type of figure in Nicaragua, not one person. We also kept ‘piñuela’ in the original, as it disrupted the tone too much to translate it as a dwarf pineapple (bromelia karata). And we enjoyed ‘patrona and matrona’ too much to translate it: it’s easily understandable to mean ‘patron and matron’, and we couldn’t replicate in English that clever mutation of the masculine ‘patron’ (which comes from the Latin for ‘father’) into a feminine ‘patrona’.

The poem’s shifting tenses also help us to connect with this tradition. Carola Brantome opens with ‘in those days’, as if a mama grande herself is telling us this shared history; here, she uses the past imperfect (signifying actions that are habitual or last a long time) and gerund forms (‘-ing’). But near the poem’s end, the poet brings us back to now through present tenses and short, end-stopped lines: ‘They make coffee. / The dog jumps, happy. / The girl laughs.’ This is not only a tale of the past, but a way of life that continues into the present, just like the wagons themselves travelling along the road, down the page and into the future. It was a joy to translate.

Helen Bowell, Poet Facilitator