Sara Bùho’s first collection of poetry isn’t your typical love story. It isn’t your typical tale of heartbreak, either. The Colombian poet evolves from abject to resentful to proud as she works through her breakup in “Ataraxia of the Heart”.
Ataraxia is a Greek philosophical term for a state of tranquility, used to describe a soldier’s calm before battle. The phrase describes Bùho’s cathartic process of steeling herself against the vulnerability of an ugly breakup. Bùho applies her biting tone to the lofty emotions and mundane practicalities of the split. She ultimately defines love as something created for and by oneself, albeit with another person as its object.
Her poetry career began on the internet, where she often accompanies her poems with photography. Bùho, Owl in Spanish, is a pseudonym. She describes her poetry as, “…an almost aggressive way of expressing myself. Expressing and recycling feelings.”
Here’s a shot at translating one of her poems from the collection.
Give Me a Title and Tell It to Me
The next time
before catching our fingers
we’ll take care of destroying the door;
but it won’t be you
and obviously it won’t be me
It’s what’s left;
and if you still doubt it,
try to speak of us
but in the past;
as if we had become something
If it stings, don’t call me;
surely I already left running
in self-defense
Not giving a name to a chair
it’s no less a chair
and you’ve tried to do the same with a feeling;
I don’t know whether to call it ingenuity or cowardice
I’ve spent nights repeating to myself, “I told you”,
and it’s not for you,
it’s for me;
I’ll be frank:
I have a heart so broken
when I dance it sounds like crystals
It’s not your fault,
you didn’t break it:
you arrived with the intensity of an enormous sea,
like a storm in the middle of a desert,
and with every wave you eroded the edges
of every shard
Already the crystal does not hurt
but I’ve returned to be desert and thirst
Because when staying is trying the luck
of one that leaves their letters on the roof,
I’ll stay with myself and my circumstances
