The Brooklyn Rail

Bound by a red thread, a signature motif that appears throughout her body of work, Cecilia Vicuña’s Deer Book slowly unfolds as a visual mapping of mythological and cosmological associations of the deer. “This book began in the Borderlands,” Vicuña writes in the afterword, “when my partner, the Texan poet James O’Hern and I visited Lower Pecos in 2004 to study the 4,000 year-year-old rock paintings of a deer/jaguar ritual dance.” But, as the artist quickly recounts, the book—which combines handwritten and typed poems, drawings, photographs, and citations—bears several other points of origin. In the mid-80s, the decade following her exile from Chile in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, Vicuña first encountered Flower World Variations (1984), a collection of poems by Jerome Rottenberg that translate the traditional Yaqui/Yoeme deer dance songs. The deer dance is rooted in Yaqui cosmologies, which conceive of nine distinct but interconnected worlds, or “a web of ‘mutually constitutive’ relations,” as Vicuña writes. In Yaqui tradition, the deer resides in one of these distinct worlds, the flower world, but is able to cross into others. With its ability to fluidly slip between these realms, the deer, Vicuña notes, has sometimes been interpreted as a translator, a shape shifter, “a master of trans-formation” in Indigenous cultures. A subject of precarity and sacrifice, Vicuña looks to the deer as a symbol for histories of migratory movement, of living between languages, a liminal space the artist has often probed over the past half century.

In content and form, the origins of Deer Book can be traced back to an earlier book of poetry, Saborami (Beau Geste, 1973), which was recently republished in a facsimile edition by Book Works (2024). Described as a work of “untranslation” by Felipe Ehrenberg in the foreword, Saborami was among the first books to respond to the coup, a moment of “disintegrated language” in which many, including the artist, fled Chile and lived between fragmented languages and cultures. While the two books are unique in their subject matter and tonality, there is an apparent throughline seen in the artist’s absorption with the fragmented reality of diasporic language, an experience of in-betweenness that she conceptually embodies in the otherworldly image of the deer.

While Deer Book is written in both Spanish and English, the languages do not always directly mirror one another. Rottenberg describes Variations as a work of “total translation,” one that carries the words, repetitions, and rhythms of the original Yaqui songs into English. In a similar vein, Vicuña worked closely with translator Daniel Borzutzky on both the English and Spanish texts, in which the reader’s experience of the text is specific to their understanding of one or both languages, though some underlying meanings, puns, and associations are inevitably lost in translation. Through this particular process of translation, Vicuña illustrates a concept she refers to as “trá”—extracted from the “translat” in translation, stemming from the Latin “carried across”—to describe translative acts across cultures, languages, and, in the case of the deer, trans-world migration.

The hard cover and weighty paper give Deer Book an apparent denseness, though the mixture of heavy and translucent pages recall the light precariousness that characterizes much of the artist’s work. Aesthetically, the book references many aspects of Saborami. The endpapers of Deer Book are a mottled, inky blue, referencing similar pages in Saborami, which were printed with dried, hand-dyed leaves. The yellow and red colored paper and headband incorporated into Deer Book also makes direct reference to the color palette of Saborami. And red sheets of vellum paper (traditionally prepared with animal skin) punctuate distinct sections of the later book. A yellow “map” folds out of with handwritten notes reproduced from Vicuña’s sketchbooks. A web of thoughts connecting deer symbology across cultures with theories on translation, the map forms a loose table of contents for the unnumbered pages that follow.

Throughout each section of the book, Vicuña draws metaphors between the deer and poetry as genre and form. In the way that the Yaqui deer song beckons the animal into other worlds, translation is a reciprocal act—words migrate across languages, spoken into being through the act of going across (the trá in translation). In some sections, she deconstructs and reassembles text through multiple iterations, referencing the repetitive nature of the deer song. One poem, “Venada palabra flor” (Deer word flower), for instance, features such repetitions, with “la venada” broken apart into “la ve nada / ve la nada / madre del Ser” (literally: the doe / sees nothing / nothing sees her / mother of Being), which becomes a familiar refrain throughout the book. Vicuña’s readings unfold in a similar manner; through songs, chants, and wispy, high-pitched incantations that shift rapidly between Spanish, English, and Quechua, she alters pronunciations, subtly changing their meaning, or even rendering them unrecognizable. In breaking down language into its constituent parts—a registry of phonemes articulated through the tradition of orality—Vicuña engages the poetic as a hybrid form of articulation. Like the mythological deer, “A poem lives in the in-between,” writes Vicuña, “the interval between languages.”

Returning to the borderland, one of the many precarious spaces from which Deer Book emerged, Vicuña’s work examines the transitory gaps and subjectivities between languages, questioning what other meanings could arise if the borderland between languages were to become unfixed. In this way, Vicuña approaches language not as a translatable, but a transmutable speech act. What Vicuña makes clear, is that many experiences of diaspora, displacement, and dispossession exist beyond language and articulation. But in this gap, Vicuña hones the inarticulable, or the act of poetic disarticulation—a transgressive, translative forms of language manifested in the titular animal. Her book offers a meditative ode to the deer as a transdimensional being, speaking to the felt experience of transitioning between cultures, between translations, between other forms of transness that carry across porous boundaries.