¿qué agua nos retiene la respiración? what water holds our breath?

Original by Nilufar Karimi
Visually translated by Ana Villalpando

Nilufar Karimi is the author of Nuclear Deal (Noemi Press, 2021) and Notes on Digging (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2022).

Ana Villalpando es una todóloga de Tijuana. Actualmente estudia un Doctorado en Literatura en Español en la Universidad de California, San Diego.

Translator’s Note: In 2019 Nilufar watched a lecture by the poet Fatemeh Ekhtesari given in Oslo after Ekhtesari and Mehdi Mousavi, also a poet, crossed a lake to cross the border into Kurdistan, Iraq on their way to escape political imprisonment. Nilufar then wrote a poem about how water can be both an obscuring and protective force, that it can both take and hold our breath. Years later, she shared the poem with Ana, who was also thinking about land and the body through what she calls tipo-topográficos in her poetry collection. Ana’s work helped her see the poem as a conversation with the water. 

When translating the poem as a cyanotype, Ana asked Nilufar: If you were standing above the water looking in, what do you think is the most important question to ask? When you see someone sinking underwater, what would you ask if you only have one question as they are sinking?

Nilufar said she would ask herself: what water holds our breath? because it asks not only how, but who holds your breath, it asks you to live by engaging with the water, by learning from it.